Re: What's the point?
They pointed out pretty clearly the benefits - basically 'growing' a robot appendage far more effective and far far cheaper than anything we can make.
As far as cruelty, how is this different than than thousands/millions of fruit flies which are farmed specifically to be used in tests? For that matter, we are being told that locusts or other creepy crawlies are a great alternative to meat and that means billions of the things will be grown and killed. Nobody is going to individually euthanize them.
If it were a million spiders being killed to extract some some of chemical, nobody would care. But show us a single spider on video and the fact we're reanimating its corpse we suddenly get up in arms (the spider doesn't care what we do with its corpse).
Many of us routinely kill spiders or wasps we see in our houses and we don't analyse the ethics. Somewhat hypocritical to lambast the scientists doing it for an actual purpose.