Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who challenged Donald Trump for the GOP presidential nomination, won Senate confirmation today to join Trump’s Cabinet as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Carson and his older brother were raised in 1950’s Detroit by a single mother who had married at age 13, had a third grade education and could not read, and who suffered from severe depression and had attempted suicide.  Despite all of the reasons he should have failed, Ben Carson turned to the Christian faith, and endured repeated failures and near-failures, to complete college at Yale University, medical school at the University of Michigan, and to eventually become a world renowned pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.  He became a best-selling author and public speaker.  In 1994, Carson and his wife started the Carson Scholars Fund, which awards scholarships to students in grades 4–11 for “academic excellence and humanitarian qualities.”

Critics on the left have openly questioned whether Carson has the necessary qualifications for the job managing one of the federal government’s most complex departments.

Perhaps their doubts are sincere – after all, he is just a compassionate and generous black man inspired by a deep personal faith, raised in a broken family, who climbed out of inner city poverty, and against all of the odds achieved greatness and respect over a lifetime of service to humanity in the most challenging medical specialty within the noblest of professions.

What could he possibly have to offer to the struggling inner city families of America?

A Bay Area-based startup called Memphis Meats has figured out how to make a real meatball in the lab using beef cells, no livestock required.

As if it wasn’t weird enough that a guy from India, up in northern California, would grow beef muscle in a petri dish –  the business is named “Memphis Meats.”  Riiiight….

The lab-grown meat process goes something like this, according to CEO Uma Valeti.  Find ultra-high quality cows and pigs. Take meat cells from a pork shoulder or other cut of meat. Find the cells capable of self-renewal and cultivate them in a sterile environment. The cells are harvested early for tender cuts of meat, and harvested later for textured cuts.

No one making lab-grown meat, including Memphis Meats, has gotten around the fact that they need to use fetal bovine serum, which comes from unborn calves, to start the cell culture process. That means lab-grown meat, as of now, still requires the use of real animals. But Valeti told the Wall Street Journal that he’ll be able to replace the serum with “something plant-based” in the near future.

(A paid spokesperson, obviously)

“Mama mia! That’s a spicy ball of fetal bovine serum!”