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[MUSIC PLAYING]
I'm here to talk about fundamentally rethinking how
we grow some of our most basic agricultural products like
meat and leather.
Now, why is this an important problem?
Well, it's an important problem because how we obtain
our food has always been a cornerstone of how we live.
If you go back more than 10,000 years ago, our
ancestors, when population was a lot smaller--
we only had in the low millions,
people on the planet--
they were hunters and gatherers.
They had to go to where the food was.
And meat was very, very scarce.
It was only available after a successful hunt.
And it was distributed strictly based on status.
It was not until the invention of agriculture and the
domestication of animals that we finally were able to have
permanent human settlements.
And this greater food security and this abundance of calories
allowed us to free up time, time that we could use to
develop trades, to create knowledge, pursue art,
science, and lay the cornerstones of modern
civilization.
Now, fast forward it to today.
There have been tremendous advances in conventional
agriculture and the distribution channels
surrounding that that have enabled very, very high value,
high nutrition items to be abundant and convenient.
So for example, meat, in most developed countries, it is
widely available.
It is affordable.
It comes in very convenient form factors.
You can grab it on the go.
You can take it with you as you drive.
And you can eat it at work.
And this has supported not only the Industrial
Revolution, not only urbanization, but it has also
supported a tremendous growth in population over the last
couple hundred years.
I love meat.
I'm a meat eater.
And it was not until a few years ago that I really
started thinking about where it comes from it, and its true
cost, and its true limitations.
And let me tell you why some of the numbers are really
puzzling to me.
Take a simple hamburger.
To make a quarter pound hamburger requires nearly
seven pounds of grain, of feed stock to produce that.
And to irrigate that feed stock and to have the animal
drink requires nearly 600 gallons of water just for that
quarter pound hamburger.
And that's the equivalent of showering for six weeks.
So you can either have a hamburger or you can shower
for a month and a half.
To grow that feed stock and to allow a grazing land for that
animal requires about 75 square feet of land.
And the energy that's required in growing the feed stock and
transportation of the feed stock and of the animal is
over 1,000 BTUs, which is about the equivalent of
charging your smartphone 30 times.
And perhaps most shockingly, the amount of greenhouse gases
that are released throughout this entire process are about
13 pounds of CO2 equivalent, in the
form of CO2 and methane.
And that is the equivalent of driving a car 25 miles.
So take those numbers and multiply them by 1,000, and
this gives you an impression of what the footprint is of a
typical consumer per year.
Because the average American eats over 220
pounds of meat per year.
And if you look globally, today, we have
seven billion people.
And these seven billion people are supported today by 60
billion land animals.
It's more than ever before in our history.
And over the next 30, 40 years, the global population
is growing to nine billion.
And there's a greater wealth effect, primarily in emerging
markets, that's driving greater and greater
consumption of meat.
So diets are shifting more to a Western diet.
And so the demand for meat is expected to nearly double,
which means that the demand for land animals is going to
increase to be about 100 billion.
So the problem here is that we're already hitting
planetary resource limits.
Today, one third of all available ice-free land is
used for livestock.
It's used for grazing and growing
feed crops for livestock.
We're running out of land.
8% of the global water supply is used for
the livestock industry.
And by some estimates, 18% of greenhouse gases are
attributed to the livestock industry.
Some estimates actually place this higher, up to 50%.
But either way you look at it, this livestock industry is the
leading contributor to greenhouse gases, ahead of any
other sector, which means that we could get everything else
right in terms of carbon abatement for transportation,
for energy.
We could be entirely clean in those sectors.
And if we don't do anything about this, the effects here
will more than offset gains there.
And then add to this issues around food security, around
disease risk as we concentrate our herds.
There's every year issues of outbreak, of foot and mouth
disease, E. coli, et cetera.
And then the intensity of chemical use-- chemicals,
antibiotics, pesticides, to say nothing, of course, of
animal welfare issues.
Now, if we don't watch out, some of the worst nightmare
images from science fiction could become our
environmental reality.
But the big idea is what if we could fundamentally rethink
how we make animal products, if we could grow meat and
leather in ways that don't require raising, slaughtering,
and transporting animals?
And if we can do that, it would require much less land,
much less water, energy, and of course, it
wouldn't harm animals.
Now, I'm going to tell you why this seemingly crazy idea is
timely, why it is actually now technologically possible, and
why it is actually not so crazy.
This idea actually has a long history.
Going back as far as the 1930s, Churchill himself wrote
that if you think about it, the way we raise
our animals is absurd.
There should be a better way to do it if we grow only the
parts that we need without having to actually raise,
slaughter, and transport animals.
And Churchill was way ahead of his time.
But since then, there have been developments in
biotechnology that have been very fundamental.
There's been innovations in cell culture.
There's been, over the last two decades, really big
innovations in a field called regenerative medicine and
tissue engineering.
And the first company that I co-founded, Organovo,
pioneered a form of tissue engineering known as
bioprinting where our goal, essentially, is to digitize
how we grow tissue.
And at the root of bioprinting, what we do is we
take cell aggregates that are composed of tens of thousands
of cells, and we organize them.
We deposit them in layers and patterns
that then fuse together.
So the cells actually start to behave exactly as they would
in nature, where the processes of embryonic development take
over and the cell aggregates fuse together and
cells can sort out.
And you're able to take these cell aggregates, and they can
fuse together in pretty sophisticated ways.
So you have an example, basically, of cell aggregates
fusing together to form a sheet in the upper right hand.
And in more complex structures, you can actually
create things like branching vasculature, where you have
cell aggregates that we've deposited that can fuse
together to form a blood vessel, which is a multi-layer
blood vessel composed of different types of cells.
So we started to think of ourselves, well, gosh, if we
can make with Organovo tissues that are to a very high
medical, pharmaceutical grade that pharmaceutical companies
are using for drug testing and drug development, that we're
developing to meet therapeutic applications, to make textile
and food-grade tissue is actually an easier problem.
It's an engineering problem.
The science has been significantly derisked.
If we can, in medical applications, make living
tissues that are functional--
if you think about leather and meat,
they're no longer living.
And they don't have to serve a biological function.
And we also don't need to worry about issues of immune
compatibility.
So, applied to meat, this is how our approach would work at
a high level.
You take the most perfect donor animal that lives a very
happy life.
And you take a biopsy of its muscle, of its fat for making
meat, of its skin for the purposes of making leather.
And you isolate the cells you need.
So in the case of skin, it's fibroblast.
In the case of muscle, it's muscle cells, it's adipocytes,
endothelial cells, et cetera.
You isolate these cells and you proliferate them in tissue
culture medium.
So you go from millions of cells that you have from the
biopsy to billions of cells.
And then you deposit them in a three dimensional pattern in
ways that they fuse together in two dimensions, and then in
three dimensions, according to the processes that I told you
about, bioprinting, a form of biofabrication.
And then we can actually, in the case of meat, perfectly
marble it and get the right kind of fat in there.
And then we grind it up in its first version, creating ground
up meat products like pates, and sausages, and deli
products, with the right kind of nutritional content, better
kind of fat, et cetera.
And we've actually tried and tasted our own cooking.
So two years ago at TEDMED, our scientific founder and
chief scientific officer, my father, Gabor Forgacs,
actually unveiled a little pork chop that we had made
without killing a pig.
And he cooked it and ate it on stage.
And I've also sampled our cooking last year.
And we're both alive and well.
And now we're working with some of the leading chefs in
the US to perfect this into a delicious a food item, to get
the mouth feel, the texture, and the flavor right.
And in the case of leather, I should say I have a sample of
leather here that I'd like to show you if you'd like to see.
So, one of the other advantages of this is it
enables us a degree of openness and transparency that
has not really been possible in the food industry.
It's unlikely that you'll gain easy access
to a slaughter house.
And if you do see an animal get killed and processed, it
is unlikely that you're going to maintain your appetite and
then want to go eat meat right afterwards, whereas by
contrast, the facilities that we would develop could be
located in or near urban centers.
So it would significantly shorten the supply chain.
And they would operate like microbreweries, where the
public could come in and visit and actually see how the
sausage gets made and then sample the products right
afterwards.
Let's talk about cost for a moment.
So, over the last 40 years, the price of beef and pork
have gone up five times.
And if you project this forward for the next 40 years,
because of the factors we've talked about, growing
population, growing wealth effect, and demand for meat,
prices are going to go up non-linearly.
And add to this the fact that these negative externalities,
these negative environment externalities eventually will
have to be priced in.
And there's always pressure on government subsidies for these
industries.
So if you look at these potential factors, prices are
inevitably going to go up for these materials, for beef,
pork, and chicken.
Overlay that with the cost of cultured meat.
Today, it's pretty expensive.
In our lab, it costs thousands of dollars to make a pound.
But we're not operating at industrial scale.
We're operating at a very, very small proof of concept
scale right now.
And we have specific ways that we forecast being able to
reduce the price--
optimizing our cells, optimizing our medium, and
being able to develop the processes and the hardware,
the automation that allows us to really scale production.
That allows us to get from thousands of dollars a pound
to hundreds of dollars a pound and then below.
And at that point, until you become cost competitive with
beef, we are going to be a premium product.
We're going to focus on high value applications, for
example, in leather in the fashion industry.
And as we get better and better at producing this in
volume and scaling this, we're going to become cost
competitive with expensive kinds of meats and then
eventually, with more commodity
grade kinds of meats.
So the long- term at-scale cost pictures are also
supported by these aggregate facts.
A study out of Europe shows that cultured meat production
would ultimately require 99% less land.
It would require 96% less water.
It would release 96% fewer greenhouse gases and require
about half as much energy.
So these steady state impacts really support a long-term
cost perspective.
So if we can get this technology right and if we can
mainstream it, then it supports a different positive
vision from science fiction, one where we can locally grow
on-demand, cruelty free, sustainably, abundant amounts
of meat and leather in a way that can protect and preserve
our future on this planet and potentially beyond.
Thank you very much.
[MUSIC PLAYING]