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making chicken in there a lab-grown chicken nugget chicken grown in a lab why are people making it climate change is better for the environment and the environment lab meat is not going to save the planet or the animals so then why has three billion dollars been invested into lab meat startups well to understand the full picture well first have to take a look at the science of why scaling lab meat is Not Practical at all and why no one will be able to afford it third why it could be worse for the environment and finally whether the public and investors are being misled by unrealistically optimistic stories this meat it's incredibly unsustainable but we figured out a way to solve it and
we're gonna have to do it if we want to continue living on this planet so either we accept this or we all become vegetarian it's better for the world at first I was really optimistic about the lab meat it made so much sense growing just a steak instead of a whole cow seemed to be way more efficient but then I started looking into it and it made less and less sense to Jake sells from a cow or chicken and grow them quickly they need to be put in a very expensive custom-made bioreactor filled with a specially formulated liquid made with purified water growth factors purified amino acids glucose and salts a cow just needs rainwater and grass the facility and the bioreactor need to be totally
sterile because a tiny amount of bacteria a virus could ruin the whole batch wasting tons of money a cow has an immune system so it can just lay in the dirty grass outside a huge challenge to Growing cells quickly inside of a bioreactor is developing ways to efficiently deliver oxygen and nutrients to each cell while removing waste products like ammonia lactate and CO2 the cow on the other hand handles all this really easily with lungs blood vessels and its liver there's a lot more to this picture but the point is it's very expensive to try and do what a cow chicken or Pig does in a Singapore restaurant there's a recent addition to the menu this is chicken but not as we know it the lab Meat Company it just was
actually selling lab-grown chicken nuggets straight to consumers in Singapore but those cost upwards of fifty dollars each to make for that same price about 1 500 nuggets could be made from conventional chicken meat the most common justification for lab meat is that we need it to prevent conventional meat from destroying the planet and what is the problem that we try to solve by cultivated meat so that we have a planet to inhabit President Biden signed an executive order this year requiring federal agencies to support cultivating alternative food sources Ezra Klein founder of the huge popular news media company Vox wrote an article arguing that we need Government funding into
plant-based protein and lab meat to save the planet from climate change and we need government support to get there but you're getting all these people like pushing the government to fund this uh as soon as you show me it's better for the environment and there's like positive impacts let's fund it's fine but I do not see that on the other hand Dr Derek Reisner points out in his PhD dissertation that despite all the hype and investment that has already been poured into lab mate a detailed assessment of whether lab meat is actually better for the environment has not been properly done we're gonna need all hands on deck to make these the global meat industry one report commissioned by the good food Institute
GFI a non-profit which heavily promotes and supports the lab meat space admitted that would cost 450 million dollars to make a facility producing a mere 22 million pounds of lab meat a year that does sound like a lot but if this stake represents the 100 billion pounds of normal meat that the US makes a year this represents 22 million pounds a mere 0.022 percent of U.S meat production and 450 million is the extra optimistic price tag another analysis but the cost of such a facility closer to 5 billion what that would mean is that even if we assume that lab meat has zero emissions if we wanted to reduce Global emissions by 1 20th of one percent we would first need to invest at least a trillion
dollars just into the facilities for lab meat this is Dr Paul wood an ex-bio Pharma consultant and board member of cellular agriculture Australia a sustainability credentials will have to be earned they can't just be assumed I understand the energy intensities I mean you're running a whole lot of tanks at 37 degrees they produce a lot of then radiant heat so they actually have to air condition your rooms if you're not using completely renewable energy you won't be more sustainable it sounds too good to be true because it is too good to be true in 2021 Joe fassler published a bombshell article in the counter that laid out the specific technical details illustrating why lab meat is very likely
a pipe dream there are multiple breakthroughs that are needed vast advances that would be worthy of Nobel prizes multiple Nobel Prize sizes one of the many experts faster consulted with was David Humbert a chemical engineer who wrote the most detailed analysis of scaling lab meat yet even in the most generous best case hypothetical scenario humbered considered where various economies of scale are included and all kinds of technological scientific breakthroughs are assumed to have happened he projected that lab meat in the future would still be very unlikely to cost under 11 dollars per pound to produce with markup that would easily be over 22 dollars a pound at the supermarket that's over four times the price of normal ground beef
humbered honestly was being nice in his work that's I've talked to Dave I've talked to Dave Humber he was trying to make it work and he's not going to do things that aren't factual in vox's Netflix documentary they said that most of meat says it cut production cost to just ten dollars a burger But I contacted that company and they said they didn't get down to ten dollars a burger they said that ten dollars a burger was simply a Target set in 2019. so why is it so damn expensive again the problem is not growing a bunch of lab meat it's growing it for cheap so that people will actually buy it's not as simple as scaling up your equipment it has to do with biological limits for example humans exist when you
can't have a 10 foot tall human you can have a really big animal but you can't have a really big animal with a really fast metabolic rate you can grow cells outside of an animal in a large bioreactor but you can't do it efficiently if you want to grow just the beef we eat cheaply and efficiently you need the rest of that cow two huge problems limiting efficient cell growth in a bioreactor are getting enough oxygen and nutrients to this cells and transporting CO2 and waste products away from the cells first mammals complex vascular system is responsible for delivering oxygen and nutrients to all of their cells it's arranged in an intricate fractal pattern such that all 100 trillion cells are within a mere 500
microns of a small capillary with lab meat the cells are just dumped in a liquid that has the nutrients they need and the mixture is just stirred around to help expose all the cells to those nutrients oxygen is delivered to the cells by blowing bubbles into the tank this nutrient liquid they use in bioreactors is only able to carry an amount of oxygen that is 45 times less than what real blood can carry by the way this nutrient liquid is currently so expensive and resource intensive that Dr Derek reisner's analysis suggests that lab meat may have a much higher environmental impact than normal meat it's not good for the environment which I don't think it is it's not economically viable which
my own research is like I don't know how you guys are going to make this economically viable the pharmaceutical industry has been using tons and tons of bioreactors to make all sorts of products for decades now globally about 23 percent of all drugs are made in bioreactors if we're going to start using bioreactors for meat we are going to need a ton of them Pretend This represents a global meat demand this is half of one percent that is how much lab meat we would get if we had 11 to 22 times the entire pharmaceutical industry's current stainless steel bioreactor capacity just for growing lab meat how many reactors you would need if you were see a really significant replacement of current meat consumption
that's one hell of a lot of stale take the type of Steel that you would need to make these tanks you got to mine all that you got to get it out of the ground you have to process it where do these tanks come from as part of normal cell metabolism CO2 and waste products like ammonia and lactate are produced by the cells it's almost like the cells are sitting in their own urine when too much of these things build up in the tank the cells don't do too well and it reduces the rate that the cells grow at some point the cell growth will slow to a halt and your cells will die from bathing in all that urine so before that happens you need to harvest your cells and start a new batch David Humbert explains in his 2021 paper that
biological limits like this are more often the issue Than Physical limits like tank size meaning you could have a 250 000 liter tank but it would be completely worthless if your cells stopped growing at only 20 000 liters because of too much CO2 or ammonia building up in the case of a cow its bloodstream would simply transfer the CO2 away from the cells to the lungs to be breathed out and ammonia and lactate would be transported to the liver to get rid of it with bioreactors there is a process called perfusion which can clear out some of the CO2 and ammonia which will improve the cell growth but that equipment is way too expensive to use for making millions of pounds of lab meat humbered because I said even though
you are growing the cells more efficiently it would cost even more driving up the cost of lab meat an extra six dollars per pound this is just one of the many problems that need to be solved to make a lab meat cheap enough for the average person to buy yeah the papers that people like the good food Institute have put out they actually have stated the cost has to come down over 1 000 fold when I was in leading Discovery in a large pharmaceutical company if I went forward and said here's our product and it's a thousand fold away that's a get out get out of the room I mean come back when you've got something real but is lab meat even meat it is a hundred percent meat because it will taste like animal
meat because that's exactly what it is the result is actual animal flesh first of all what usually comes out of these bioreactors is called cell slurry of cells right that's what's coming out of a bioreactor it's it's not the most appetizing uh thing I call her product little Lisa's patented animal slurry a spoonful of slurry will cure what else yeah most future lab meat products will be blended with other non-meat ingredients and formed into homogenize things like burger patties nuggets sausages meatballs and hot dogs we're not going to come out with a steak we're going to come out with a hamburger so it's a structured stuff real meat is composed of various types of cells it has its familiar texture thanks to both muscle
fibers and fat cells as well as blood vessels tendons connective tissues and so on but bioreactors typically can only cultivate one type of cell at a time meaning an entirely different process will be needed to assemble various cells and additives together into a texture that resembles something like a steak or pork chop so the price is even more important because while someone might pay top dollar for a T-bone steak they're not going to pay 20 a pound for mashy ground beef several of the compounds that contribute to the flavor and nutritional profile of meat arrive there thanks to processes going on elsewhere in the animal's body these things don't just appear in the cell so to match real meat various nutrients and
compounds will need to be added one by one at some point in the process of making lab meat because in the end when I've got a cell paste I don't have any structure I actually need some fibrous material so I'll blend in some plant material I think in the end cell based meat will be the new plant-based category because I'm going to guess that there's probably going to be more plant-based material in those products than there is cell based the point is a lot of work will need to be done to get consumers to actually like it as much as real meat the lab meat industry has a history of making promises they can't keep in 2021 Mother Jones published an illustration of the many predictions made by research
institutions and lab meat companies but when lab meat would be available that ended up being wrong as you're building a business don't be naive about the power storytelling you need them to give you money when all you have is a PowerPoint deck this is Josh Hoffman he was the CEO of the synthetic biology companies emergent his skill of painting a vision for the future earns I mergen one billion dollars of venture capital zeimergen is rewriting the potential of biology our work has the potential to revolutionize chemicals and materials agriculture human health so we really think this has the potential we're going to change the entire economy he had an optimistic vision of reducing our
Reliance on petrochemicals by producing everyday products like anything from optic film to mosquito repellent in bioreactors these bioreactors would be filled with microbes specially engineered to produce specific compounds we regularly rely on petrochemicals for but the challenge was the same as lab Meats how would they ever do this at scale for a reasonable price zymergin went public in April 2021 but just four months later they announced that they would bring in zero dollars in product revenue for 2021 and 2022 CEO Josh Hoffman ended up leaving zymerge in August of 2021 and by July of 2022 94 of the company's stock value had vanished since going public a former employee
said that Josh Hoffman misled people with exaggerated Financial figures and made overly optimistic projections about the company's capabilities one of the big players in the lab meat space eat just has raised over 800 million dollars in Venture Capital has recently faced a slew of negative coverage accusing it of classic Silicon Valley hubris and overreach it just came under scrutiny in 2016 when they sent many of their workers into grocery stores to buy out tons of their vegan mayonnaise product hundreds of jars of its own product here you go folks yeah here's the extra mayonnaise you orders a former scientist at the company said that this type of behavior was common in the company's
entire board stepped down last month with little explanation just because you can do something in the lab does not at all mean you can do something at commercial scale but in 2022 he just made the impressive announcement that they will be building 10 never before seen 250 000 liter bioreactors people say oh we're going to grow 250 000 liters I don't think that's feasible I don't think it's feasible by from a biological point of view it just claims a 250 000 liter bioreactors will be able to produce 30 million pounds of meat A year by 2030. these big numbers May wow investors and earn them more investment but even if everything goes perfectly to plan their magic facility would replace a mere point zero three percent of the United States
conventional meat production even yaakov nakmias CEO of the lab Meat Company believer meets says that a quarter of a million liter bioreactor is just a fantasy and though is to talk about you know a quarter of healing the bioreactor is explains that while a bigger bi-reactor would help scale the production it makes a cell growing process less efficient the binary active is small full pound then your factory is not a little bit efficient the problem is that the bigger the bioreactor is the more non-homogeneous it becomes the process becomes less sufficient there's a in a contamination something got into the lab another huge difficulty with massive lab meat plants is that they need to be exceedingly clean a
bioreactor doesn't have an immune system to protect the fragile animal cells so if the tiniest bit of bacteria virus or other contaminant on a worker's glove or clothing gets into these massive bioreactors the entire batch of cell slurry would be ruined this is a well-known million dollar problem with bioreactors in the pharmaceutical industry can you tell us about The Million Dollar Club they lost a batch because of contamination so there's dudes walking around San Francisco that because they contaminated a tank join the Million Dollar Club he said you only get to join it once you do it again you're gone some people have used the misleading analogy that a lab meat facility will basically be like a beer brewery kind of like brewing beer
or growing yogurt it's not dissimilar from how you would culture food or how you would brew beer it's your friendly neighborhood meat Brewery do you know how to make beer so you'll know how to make cultured meat that is not the same that drives me nuts we know that this isn't like brewing beer can be made in your backyard while you're smoking a cigarette and wearing the same sweaty clothes you had been wearing at the gym an extra clean lab meat facility handling the same volume as a beer brewery could be well over six times the price due to all the measures necessary to keep it clean like for example level 6 and level 8 clean rooms that constantly purify the air I don't think it's a backyard operation
this is a sophisticated technology the people who operate these facilities get paid very well and they're very well qualified because you cannot afford to get yourselves contaminated back in 2017 when eat just was selling vegan meal products all of their products were pulled off of the retailer targets shelves after allegations of food safety problems like listeria and salmonella contamination at the manufacturing facility so let's hope that they're able to keep their lab meat facilities cleaner or they could be wasting millions of dollars when talking to Joe fassler Dr David Humbert summed up the feasibility of scaling lab-grown meat as a big wall of no he even said that it was a fractal no that the big no is
comprised of many smaller nodes Derek Reisner has written two papers that point out the extreme cost and resource intensity of preparing that nutrient liquid the growth medium for the cells he agrees with humbert's assessment that lab meat is a big wall of no yeah I would say with the big wall now on that boat for sure however in late 2022 Yakov nakmias founder of believer meets announced that his team's new work growing cells in the lab had conclusively shattered humbered so-called big wall of no this is pretty big after I read about this I thought I might have to just rewrite this entire video believe your meat's approach is to increase the number of cells in the bioreactor by getting rid of those toxic
waste products like ammonia and lactate that we talked about earlier more cells in the bioreactor means more meat at a lower cost in their experiment they used a perfusion device it's kind of like an artificial liver that pumps fluid in and out of the bioreactor and clears out the toxins they claim that their protocol using this perfusion device allowed them to get a number of cells per liter that is way higher than what Humbert said would be possible that sounds really exciting at first but these results were done in a mere 2 liter bioreactor if we're talking about what can be done at very small scale in the lab this isn't actually new at all another team already achieved similar cell growth results way
back in 2013 and it was with less resource intensive equipment so an experiment in a 2-liter tank doesn't really tell you much to mass-produce lab meat at commercial scale we need bioreactors that handle thousands of liters like is it reasonable at all to say a two liter experiment is going to scale to a thousand liter or 10 000 liter bioreactor look I think with this sort of Technology no I think I think you've got to be very careful about claims you make on scaling Derek Risner pointed out that the pharmaceutical industry will often attempt to scale in multiples of four so if you achieve 2 liters in the lab the next step is to run an experiment at 8 liters you don't just jump from two leaders in the lab to commercial scale
of a thousand liters and when it comes to cost Dr nakamas himself acknowledges that using this type of perfusion technology is so expensive that it's not appropriate for commercial scale production of lab meat one of the things that they said in the food Navigator article is like this conclusively shatters the limits set forth by humbered to say that it's shattered I think that is um a pretty big overstep and I think it's the sort of things we're seeing from a lot of companies because they're still Capital raising so you always have to be positive the way the General Media reports uncultured meat is through the lens of investment this company just raised 40 million dollars this company just raised
140 million dollars and some of the off the record conversations I've had with people within the industry is they're like listen investors do not do their due diligence some of them like couldn't pass a biology class last year Dr Jeffrey Lee Funk published an article titled fake it till you make it is an old trick Silicon Valley startups used to get money he explains a cycle of how startups are often overly optimistic to the point of misleading investors into investing but even then people see that investment as evidence that the company is likely to succeed which drives more investment Bruce Friedrich is the CEO and founder of the earlier mentioned good food Institute he's featured in Ezra Klein's
article saying public investment in lab-grown meat is urgently needed Joe fassler wrote in his article that when Friedrich was skeptically questioned by Ricardo San Martin who has a PHD in biotechnology Friedrich Snapback saying that the proof that people have invested is proof that scalene lab meat is practical there is a surprising number of overfunded House of Cards startups today as laid out by Dr Jeffrey Lee Funk just to name a few Uber has raised 25 billion dollars but their cumulative losses are 32 billion wework raised 21 billion dollars with cumulative losses of 20.7 billion even Ginkgo bioworks which has acquired the earlier mentioned companies zymergin has raised 800
million dollars but has cumulative losses of 3.3 billion throwing money at companies doesn't make them profitable so why should we assume that throwing money at lab meat will make it cheap to produce one reason why that perfusion technology is so expensive is that it uses tons of that expensive growth medium the cost of growth medium has been a concern for the bioprocessing industry for decades if anybody could make a super cheap yet effective medium then they would be rich just from that yet various lab meat companies act as if it's a given that this is going to be solved really soon so as things are now lab meat is a kind of catch-22. if you want to make a lot of lab meat
efficiently you need a big vessel but it's really difficult and expensive to keep big vessels clean and the bigger the vessel the less efficient the cells grow you can use perfusion to make your cells grow more efficiently but perfusion is even more expensive and it doesn't scale it uses way too much of that expensive growth medium and making tons of growth medium is currently too resource expensive and bad for the environment which defeats the whole purpose of lab mate some companies are aiming to make hybrid products instead for example they'll just make the animal fats in bioreactors and use that to make plant-based products taste better perfect day alone weighs 361 million
dollars perfect day is a company making synthetic whey protein using fungus in a fermentation tank they mix that with water sugar sunflower oil and other ingredients to make a milk-like product even though this type of fermentation is typically way easier to do than growing meat in a bioreactor there are animal-free milk product currently costs about three times as much as organic grass-fed milk and about 10 times as much as regular milk the optimistic of us may still assume that just like how Moore's Law allowed us to go from macintoshes to Tiny iPhones will go from 50 lab chicken nuggets to five dollar lab steaks but Moore's Law doesn't apply to biological systems and even if it did
Moore's Law is plateauing lately it can't go on forever lab meat technology will probably improve but at some point that progress will hit a plateau thinking that Plateau won't come before lab mate's cost is practical is a huge gamble about three billion dollars has been invested into lab meat so far yet the available evidence does not guarantee that lab meat will be practical profitable or even good for the environment lucky for us humans aren't like a bioreactor we don't need to drink growth medium we just need to drink enough water to stay hydrated that's why this video sponsor element comes in element is a great way to add electrolytes and stay hydrated without any sugar many people don't realize that electrolytes
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