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[Enlighten your brain]
[Mark Post – Meet the new meat]
(Applause)
The introduction by Bert [Meijer] was actually,
in many ways, wonderful, because I'm going to take you back
for a much simpler question – Whether we can make meat in the laboratory.
You will immediately say, "Yuck."
And that's the response of many people. Well, I'll try to convince you
that it's actually required to do so
if Bert has not already done that job for me.
Here are all sorts of imaginary names:
Frankenburger, Lab Chops, Petri‑Pork,
but in fact it's really required to start working on this principle.
Because now we use pigs and cows, and they are very inefficient
in converting edible vegetable proteins into edible animal proteins.
We all eat meat, and we continue to eat meat.
In fact, the World Health Organization has estimated that by 2050,
the meat consumption will have doubled.
That's primarily from other nations.
Right now, we're already using 70% of our arable lands
for meat production through livestock.
So you can do the math very easily: that's not sustainable.
The other reason why we want to get rid of the livestock
is that it is environmentally very cumbersome:
cows produce 39% of the methane, one of the greenhouse gases,
and together the livestock produces about 40% of all our greenhouse gases.
Which has sort of led to the expression
that a meat‑eater with a bicycle
is actually much more environmentally unfriendly
than a vegetarian with a Hummer. (Laughter) (Applause)
There's another reason, a number of other reasons
why you want to get rid of the livestock.
That's because we all know, that it's –
that the bio‑industry is sort of animal-unfriendly:
these are these calves that have no space, have no sunlight, because their flesh
needs to be white, because we export it to Italy and they want white veal.
And the fourth reason is that there are zoonoses –
we all know that, hearing this earlier.
You have Q fever, that's one good example,
and it's a result of intense herding in the bio‑industry.
The concept is actually very simple.
We don't make life, we already use life –
a cell, a stem cell, from the muscle of an animal.
You have many stem cells, and also we have many stem cells in our muscle.
You can actually take them out of a muscle
and you can grow meat from it in the laboratory.
These cells, since they are stem cells,
dedicated to become muscle, nothing else, they proliferate.
So, from one cell, right now, we can make a million, and sometimes a billion.
And those cells in the lab, more or less by themselves,
start to become a skeletal muscle tissue, which is the basis for meat.
So it's actually a very, very simple concept.
Here, you see that cell growing out of a muscle fiber,
and right now it can undergo 20 doublings.
So, we can make – and actually this work is also done
at the University in Eindhoven – we can make strips of muscle.
Can you repeat that one? We can make strips of muscle out of this,
and we can actually, it starts to move.
And we can electrically stimulate it,
and it starts to move even more vigorously.
Of course, that's at some point required.
We start with these very simple strips of scaffold:
Wim van Hanegem called it 'Heugaveld-tapijt' (Heugafelt carpet).
We grow skeletal muscle on those strips, so that you get a 3D structure.
And of course, this doesn't come for free.
You need to add sugars, and proteins, and fatty acids.
But the thing is, you can play with it.
You can make it much more efficient than a cow or a pig can do.
So we can increase the efficiency of this process,
and that's where our gain actually is.
And we potentially also could tweak
the feeding of these cells in a way that it becomes a more healthy product.
Or we can use algae soup, as Bert has pointed out.
The sun, together with some nitrogen and CO2
– we take CO2 out of the air – through a process called photosynthesis
produces sugars and eventual proteins.
We can make a mix of that and give it to the skeletal muscle.
We also need to condition that meat to make it more firm,
so it stretches, we stretch our muscles, that's healthy,
and it beefs up the muscle, and we can also electrically zap it
to produce strength. It's called the gym in the laboratory.
We have other tissues than skeletal muscle, we can also make those.
We can make bones, no problem.
And eventually we will envision, this is an artist's rendition, of course,
that we have a production of meat around these center bones,
and a circulating system around it.
This would be the entire factory, with an algae pool,
and a cell culture system,
and all these units where these are being produced.
We did some life‑cycle analyses, and it shows that we can –
with all sorts of assumptions – that we can reduce land, water and energy consumption
and this is what it eventually would look like
and of course, it also relieves our conscience when we eat meat.
Finally, there are a number of challenges which I will go through.
It's not ready yet, but finally, the problem will be,
what is the remaining role of the domestic animals?
I'm sure you can agree with me
that this is a much better state of being than on a barbecue.
Thank you very much. (Laugter)
(Applause)