29 ms·
As a big fan of the idea of manufacturing meat in an environmentally sustainable way (and without having to resort to raising and killing animals), reading this
by cs702 5y ago
As a big fan of the idea of manufacturing meat in an environmentally sustainable way (and without having to resort to raising and killing animals), reading this article felt as if someone was throwning a bucket's worth of ice-cold water on my face.
According to the article, the barriers to cost-efficient manufacturing of lab-grown meat at large scale are fundamental, e.g., impossible to overcome according to the Laws of Thermodynamics and our current understanding of cell biology and chemistry.
Quoting from the OP:
> David Humbird, the UC Berkeley-trained chemical engineer who spent over two years researching the report, found that the cell-culture process will be plagued by extreme, intractable technical challenges at food scale. In an extensive series of interviews with The Counter, he said it was “hard to find an angle that wasn’t a ludicrous dead end.”
> Humbird likened the process of researching the report to encountering an impenetrable “Wall of No”—his term for the barriers in thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design, ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat.
Is there anyone on HN with deep expertise in this area who can comment on this article's scientific accuracy?
- ElijahLynn 5y agoIt is hard for me to fully buy into this too. I feel like the same was said for electric cars...
- void_mint 5y agoIt's the treadmill of solving previously thought to be unsolvable problems. Each step is going to be more "See it's impossible", until it's not.
- woeirua 5y agoAnd it was true, until cheap LI ion batteries became commercially available because they have the required power density to make it viable. From there it was just a matter of the economies of scale.
- CamperBob2 5y agoIt's like saying that it's impossible to climb a mountain because, from a mile away, you can't see any handholds. Obviously thermodynamic arguments that conclude with, "And so, we see that it's actually more efficient to house, feed, water, and slaughter real, live animals for meat," are ridiculously invalid. The same will eventually become true for the economic arguments in the article. It's 'just' a matter of asking how we get there from here, and putting in the R&D work necessary to make it happen.
- jjoonathan 5y agoAll advanced technology looks like a "wall of no" until someone finds a path through. Or doesn't. The only way to know is to throw dollars and smart people at it until one's appetite for risk is spent, or one hits it big.
- mixmastamyk 5y agoExactly. Putting folks on Mars is very difficult too, yet we’re still working on it.
- Jweb_Guru 5y agoWe haven't done it yet, but even if we had it's not a comparable analogy. We have a plan to get a few people to Mars that (while not exactly cheap) could conceivably happen. Similarly we already have lab-grown meat at very small scales, at a fairly high markup. What would be a comparable analogy would be maintaining a stable, economically sustainable colony on Mars with similar population growth to what we might experience on Earth. Nobody has any remotely realistic proposal for how we are going to get there, just as no one has a remotely viable proposal for how to scale up current lab grown meat production to even an appreciable fraction of current meat consumption.
- mixmastamyk 5y agoThe article is as hand wavy with defeatism as enthusiasts. Mars would never support current levels of population on it, it’s too small and tech can’t change that.
- pas 5y agoHow is it too small?
- mixmastamyk 5y agoSize affects everything. Area, gravity, atmosphere, radiation, all related.
- cameronh90 5y agoI have no experience in the area, but just to point out that you could equally apply some of those arguments to meat production. The current meat industry is only cost effective because we've spent the last few millennia optimising the everloving hell out of it - and its scale is just as unfathomable. A significant proportion of the Earth's land surface is currently dedicated to either growing animals or growing animal feed. So of course, for an alternative to displace it, it would also have to work at unfathomable scales too. And bearing in mind, the technology to grow meat is essentially an exercise in recreating eons of evolution in a factory. It's an enormous challenge, but that alone doesn't mean it's impossible. Current meat production is also incredibly inefficient from a thermodynamic perspective. I have no idea whether lab meat will ever come to pass. I suspect it will eventually, but probably take longer than expected.
- nitrogen 5y agoA significant proportion of the Earth's land surface is currently dedicated to either growing animals or growing animal feed. If those stats include wild areas double-used as grazing land, then "dedicated" is too strong of a word.
- missedthecue 5y ago"A significant proportion of the Earth's land surface is currently dedicated to either growing animals or growing animal feed." It's important to note that almost all of the land that cattle are raised on is unsuitable for any other purpose. They aren't grazing cattle in Manhattan, it's in places like rural Australia or Texas where there is no infrastructure, no arable land, and no human population that is competing with the cattle population for resources.
- boston_clone 5y agoThat's only a portion of it, though. That area could be used for something other than agriculture, and a significant portion of arable land is used for growing crops that go exclusively toward animals that are later slaughtered, e.g. soybeans. Moving away from meat is the right way forward - ethically, ecologically, and economically.
- fabian2k 5y agoIf you use current technology for growing cells I can easily believe that it will never be competitive. Even with economies of scale that is rather sensitive work that is very easily spoiled. Unless you figure out how to ensure clean-room conditions for low cost this part alone might make this too expensive. But I don't see how there could be any kind of insurmountable problem here. Animals "solve" this problem for us right now, so there is a way. I just think that the solution has to be quite different than how we grow cell cultures in the lab right now. Short term I'd be really skeptical on the prospects of replacing meat in this way. But long term is an entirely different question.
- lazerpants 5y agoIt's like looking at the Wright Flyer and saying that it is neat proof of concept, but that affordable transatlantic flight will simply never be possible. Prescient at that point in history, but myopic over a long enough time frame.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoI'm surprised it was downvoted. It was a good point. Those of us in the computer industry can well remember when "640K should be enough for anyone." We literally cannot imagine what the future will bring. I'm still waiting on my flying atomicar. I think it will end up being necessary to make food this way, and that we'll figure out how to do it (Soylent Green, anyone?).
- White_Wolf 5y agoI do have times when I look at my phone and think about the first "computer" I touched. I'm still amazed sometimes of how tech changed since I was 6-7 years old(talking almost 40 years) I'm no fan of lab growing anything because or banning people from raising animals or having food plots because those that make the food make the rules. That being said... I wouldn't be suprised to see, in 2-3 decades, something taking off in that regard. All it takes is one stroke of genius and a ton of elbow grease to change it all.
- 5y ago
- resonantjacket5 5y ago> Nothing on this scale has ever existed—though if we wanted to switch to cultivated meat by 2030, we’d better start now. If cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030, we will need 4,000 factories like the one GFI envisions, according to an analysis by the trade publication Food Navigator. To meet that deadline, building at a rate of one mega-facility a day would be too slow. Optimistically it seems even according to this article that most of barriers for affordable cultivated protein are with high capital costs and once the factories are built, you can eventually amortize a lot of the costs aka how solar/electric cars did so. Also they are aiming for a self-imposed 2030 deadline, sure it might take until 2040/2050 but nothing the article says it won't eventually be built. (Unlike say the water/housing/ education/healthcare crises with bottlenecks of land/regulations/labor)
- sinemetu11 5y ago> If cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030 Why do we need protein from meat? The money to engineer cultivated protein could be directed to educating simple americans on the fact that they're consuming way too much protein already. Most americans consume twice the daily protein they need.[1][2] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/well/eat/how-much-protein-do-we-need.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/well/eat/how-much-protein... [2]https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/how-much-protein-do-you-need-every-day-201506188096 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/how-much-protein-do-you-...
- ryan93 5y agoPeople want it. Who cares about eating the exact minimum.
- DoreenMichele 5y agoCutting out something you don't actually need rather than inventing lab grown meat is an elegant answer to a complex problem. It isn't like asking people to be vegan or something extreme like that. Just be aware of what your body actually needs and don't go overboard or be wasteful. Why would that be some kind of controversial message or idea?
- 908B64B197 5y agoDiscussing computing pre-transistor must have been pretty similar.
- Melkman 5y agoIndeed. Back when dialup internet was the norm I had the opinion that after the 57k6 faster access at home would take ages and require new infrastructure to the homes since the phone system was build for low bandwidth voice. With 4kHz bandwidth and 45dB Shannons theorem didn't allow for much more. Understandably I was really amazed at the first ADSL implemenations I saw. Felt a bit like they were cheating. Yeah if you just bypass the exchange and use the raw last mile sure it's possible.
- mchusma 5y agoI think this article is more clickbaity than it should be. From a physics perspective, of course you should be able to grow meat, because we do it now with a bunch of other unnecessary things like thoughts, nerves, behaviors, etc. There is no reason in principle that it cannot be done. But it's a lot of work, which everyone agrees. I personally think a blend of lab grown and veggie (Impossible/Beyond) will be the first "killer app": tastes better and costs less than traditional meat for most applications. IMO impossible is close now for some cases, cost is probably the main issue with some extra flavor that I think may need to be synthesized.
- dqv 5y ago> I personally think a blend of lab grown and veggie (Impossible/Beyond) will be the first "killer app": tastes better and costs less than traditional meat for most applications. Well we have seitan which, when prepared, can get very close to a meat-like texture. So I think it will be some lab grown meat and gluten abomination.
- michaelrpeskin 5y agoI've been on the other side of this - going more toward regenerative ranching as the other way away from the industrial food supply. I can't really beat Diana Rogers on explaining this, so I'll just point you here. https://sustainabledish.com/fake-burgers-make-no-sense/ https://sustainabledish.com/fake-burgers-make-no-sense/ Also - before folks say that we couldn't feed everyone that way, I always like to point out that before the Europeans decimated the American bison, there were more head of bison roaming the west than there are head of cattle today. Just turning our monocrop soy and corn farms in the midwest back to prairie (by actually doing nothing to the land - just leave it alone), we could have regenerative ranching and cows and more food for less energy input than we do today.
- mikeg8 5y agoYou are right on the money here and I wish more people understood that there is a sustainable path forward using animals as part of the carbon capture solution. When you say you are on the other side do you mean actively working on ranching? It's something I'm very interested in myself.
- Falling3 5y ago>I always like to point out that before the Europeans decimated the American bison, there were more head of bison roaming the west than there are head of cattle today. I don't think that's true. Most estimates of the peak Bison population I've seen put them at about 30 million. Some estimates are as high as 60 million. Today, we have about 94 million head of cattle down from a peak of 104. Additionally, your linked article is incredibly unconvincing. It's riddled with Appeals to Nature and attempts to use a single instance of questionable behavior by a single company to poison the well for all alternatives to raising animals for slaughter.
- atweiden 5y agoRegenerative agriculture is not a sustainability solution [1]: Written by FCRN’s Dr Tara Garnett in collaboration with Cécile Godde of CSIRO and a team of international experts, this report dissects claims made by different stakeholders in the debate, and evaluates them against the best available science. This report finds that better management of grass-fed livestock do not hold a solution to climate change as only under very specific conditions can they help sequester carbon. This sequestering of carbon is even then small, time-limited, reversible and substantially outweighed by the greenhouse gas emissions these grazing animals generate. Dr Garnett explains the key takeaways from this report: “This report concludes that grass-fed livestock are not a climate solution. Grazing livestock are net contributors to the climate problem, as are all livestock. Rising animal production and consumption, whatever the farming system and animal type, is causing damaging greenhouse gas release and contributing to changes in land use. Ultimately, if high consuming individuals and countries want to do something positive for the climate, maintaining their current consumption levels but simply switching to grass-fed beef is not a solution. Eating less meat, of all types, is.” [1]: https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-news-grazed-and-confused/ https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-news-grazed-and-...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- je_bailey 5y agoI think the thing to keep in mind is that this is very specific to the concept of growing meat using a cellular culture. This in no way invalidates other methods of replicating meat.
- tobiasSoftware 5y ago"According to the article, the barriers to cost-efficient manufacturing of lab-grown meat at large scale are fundamental, e.g., impossible to overcome according to the Laws of Thermodynamics and our current understanding of cell biology and chemistry." I came away with the opposite understanding. I don't understand why lower cost lab grown meat would be fundamentally impossible. At its theoretical best, lab grown meat takes the existing non-lab grown situation and improves on it in two very important ways - less energy wasted growing non-meat, and less land required due to vertical farming capabilities. Rather, the issues I saw that the article talks about, such as issues maintaining sterile environments, aren't things that are theoretical limits, but are practical problems that might or might not have an eventual answer.
- verdverm 5y agoThere is the relatively free transformation of solar energy into meat when done naturally. Lab grown meat would seem to require a lot more process to turn that free solar energy into a consumable product.
- ppseafield 5y agoFor certain definitions of "free" and "naturally". But certainly not free of side effects on the environment: land and water use with deforestation and water crises, pesticide runoff, pesticide resistance, increased transportation costs and pollution for supplies and feed, increased transfer of disease (swine flu), increased CO2 and methane production. And also increased animal suffering.
- jessaustin 5y agoIf we can assume that the meat labs could overcome all their serious challenges if only we tried hard enough, ISTM certain problems related to traditional livestock agriculture could also be solved with some effort. Vote with your meat-purchasing dollars!
- verdverm 5y ago
- da_chicken 5y agoI'm imagining a conversation: Scientist: We need a machine that can cheaply and efficiently cultivate animal protein at scale. Universe: We have one. It is called a cow. It took me a few billion years to make an auroch, and you tuned it for your purposes and called it a cow.
- PretzelPirate 5y agoThe universe would be equally happy if we ate humans instead.
- Avicebron 5y agoThis doesn't detract from the argument, this is just highlighting a different shade of gray
- lovemenot 5y agoThe universe is of course amoral and wouldn't observe any satire in Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal Spoiler alert: impoverished Irish families should be encouraged to sell their surplus children to wealthy Englishmen, as food.
- thevardanian 5y agoScientist: We need a machine that can fly so we can travel faster. Universe: You have feet. It took me a few billion years to craft the perfect long distance running machine, and tuned it for your purposes and called it human. In other words, what the are you even talking about? Naturalism is stupid. If we were to rely solely on what "God", err rather "universe" has "created" for us we would have been stuck in a stagnant evolutionary pool with little of the modern conveniences most of us enjoy today. Forget spacefaring civilizations, forget even planetary civilizations, actually forget even nation-states we would be happily meandering about the Sahara with little care save for your typical eat-sleep-fuck routine.
- thatcat 5y agoScaling up and replicating the digestive tract and metabolic processes of a cow is so much more complex than a plane, that's a terrible comparison. Continuing with your naive reasoning, let's make synthetic corn instead of farming too, because why not needlessly maximize complexity of the systems that we have to maintain?
- superbaconman 5y agoThere's no way we can't genetically engineer a solution to this problem. Maybe not today, but certainly in the near future. I'm surprised he seems so pessimistic.
- Avicebron 5y agoWe did genetically engineer a solution to this problem, the program was called "selective breeding" and it was first practiced by the group called "early pastoralists" who published their findings in the journal "ancient history"
- superbaconman 5y agoTrue, but wouldn't lab grown meat be better? It's a more ethically sourced protein, and can be tailored to the individual for optimum health
- thatcat 5y agoThe same issues happen with most biotech production. As you try to scale you need different bioreactor geometry bc the amount of heat, co2/o2 distribution, and waste build up in proportion to side wall area of the vessel changes drastically. Also genetic drift increases as you increase the population of microbes, making it difficult to keep your target organisms on the right metabolic path. Amyris biofuel is a good case study for why biotech fails during the scale up.. https://www.fastcompany.com/3000040/rise-and-fall-company-was-going-have-us-all-using-biofuels https://www.fastcompany.com/3000040/rise-and-fall-company-wa...
- beerandt 5y agoManufactures and researchers/professors have been trying to push bioreactors onto civil engineers for wastewater treatment for years, because they're infinitely configurable and admittedly are neat, but they can't come remotely close to scaling up like a traditional WW treatment plant or even an activated sludge plant. It's always seemed to be an inherent limitation of bioreactors. Which tells me that the solution these people need to be looking for will resemble something between a wastewater treatment plant and an oil refinery, but in any case, steady state manufacturing, not bioreactors and batches.
- thatcat 5y agoI agree about WW design being the current scalable form of bioreactors. There are steady state type designs of bioreactors - called chemostats.
- cm2012 5y agoI'm reminded of the patent officer in 1910 who said everything that's possible has been invented. Or Malthus.
- pdonis 5y agoThe obvious alternative to meat long term is plant protein. That cuts out an entire stage in the food chain, which is obviously going to be more efficient (about a factor of 10 more is the usual rule of thumb). The key is to make sure the plant protein is complete, which is why pea protein and legumes are preferred over things like soy.
- Falling3 5y ago> The key is to make sure the plant protein is complete, which is why pea protein and legumes are preferred over things like soy. 1. I thought we were done pushing the complete protein thing? All the essential amino acids are essential (duh), but don't need to be consumed together like once thought. 2. With that said, soy is a complete protein. 3. Soy is also a legume.
- pdonis 5y ago> I thought we were done pushing the complete protein thing? By "complete protein" I just meant that you need to have all the essential amino acids in your diet, not that they all need to be contained in the same dish. However, AFAIK all animal proteins do contain all the essential amino acids in a single dish, which makes it a lot easier to make sure you are getting them all. So any plant protein that is going to be a good meat substitute should have that same property. > soy is a complete protein. 3. Soy is also a legume. Agreed, that was a mistake on my part.
- Avicebron 5y agoThe day that this complete protein tastes, looks, and behaves exactly like meat..might be the day it's accepted as a substitute, otherwise it's a lost cause. and before that one has to factor in the effort to make that change to the plant protein.
- pdonis 5y ago> The day that this complete protein tastes, looks, and behaves exactly like meat..might be the day it's accepted as a substitute While I'm sure there are people who won't accept anything less than that, I suspect there are many more who, like me, would be quite happy with "fairly close" to meat instead of "exactly like". There are plant protein products on the market now that already meet that goal. Even if such products don't displace 100% of meat consumption, they might still make a huge dent in it.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoI personally think that "vegan meat replacements" will only get better. We may never beat a rare veal steak but we'll get close. I like hamburgers and hot dogs more than most big hunks of meat anyway :) . I've replaced at least half of my meat intake with vegan version. I'll probably never be a full on vegan though.
- dqv 5y agoA lot of people won’t be, but it’s probably a good idea to get prepared for a less-meat future because of the lack of sustainability at scale.
- cwp 5y agoI don't have any expertise here, but I don't really see anything in the article to support the idea that the problems are fundamental. That's certainly the conclusion their experts come to, but it all seems to be based on looking at the proposed technique and poking holes in the assumptions. There are all these problems, and while they have solutions, the solutions are expensive. Ok, but maybe there's another technique that's better. We can't think of one right now, and maybe we never will, but it's not in the same class of impossible as faster-than-light travel. It's more like fusion power: the engineering is too hard. The article is pretty persuasive on the lesser claim though - all this enthusiasm is unwarranted, and we shouldn't invest heavily.
- aaroninsf 5y agoWhat comes most to mind is the impossibility of flight and the mortal peril of traveling at speeds above 60 mph. I.e., "never" is a lot longer than hyperbole allows for; and, it's easy to poke holes in a selected straw-person, a lot harder to anticipate the manners in which someone might change some of your axioms out from under you. One off the cuff example: actual-whey-protein non-animal ice cream is now available down the street from me. Is it "vat milk"? Well, no; it's a novel solution that marries the actual protein in cow milk, with fats from vegetable sources. They didn't violate thermodynamics to produce an interesting middle ground between cow-milk and plant milks (oat, almond, soy, coconut, whatever). Similarly, it's a lot easier to tsk tsk about some arbitrary idea of what cultured meat is, than to anticipate the ways in which it might be grown which have nothing to do with your tidy model. As an aside, I'm interested to look in who is funding David there. The American industrial farm meat industry has a LOT to lose if we get vat-bacon. Certainly enough to fund some opposition research water-muddying, eh?
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago> actual-whey-protein non-animal ice cream is now available down the street from me. Is it "vat milk"? Well, no; it's a novel solution that marries the actual protein in cow milk, with fats from vegetable sources. In what sense is cow milk derived whey protein non-animal?
- plaidfuji 5y agoI work in industrial biotech, read the entire article and found it mostly compelling, aside from lacking discussion of the reasons meat production might increase in cost over the time frame of the analysis. The fundamental challenge is not a lack of understanding - it seems to be mostly centered around keeping bacteria out of giant 100,000 Liter vats, and out of all of the smaller upstream processes. Think of biotech as happening in successively larger tanks. Start in a vial, go up to a flask, go up to a tank fermenter, go up to a bigger and bigger vat. If competing bacteria get into your process at any of these steps or the transfers between them and start winning, you kill the batch and start over. And you probably take down your equipment for a deep clean as well. This takes you offline for some time. This is already a problem for fermentation of other bacterial cultures, but it’s an even bigger problem for animal cells because they grow so much slower. So there’s some lack of fundamental understanding on animal cell growth mechanisms. Given how much attention has been focused during the pandemic on understanding how to limit the spread of germs, it seems to me that there may be some synergistic advancements in keeping large scale processes contamination-free. A lot of it is human factors.. operators using proper PPE etc. Now we have a global population that understands all of that better.. maybe that moves the baseline.
- kbenson 5y agoIt seems like it should be possible, eventually, to use a bioengineered organism to grow the tissue (and just cut down on unneeded things like extra brain matter, or eyes, etc), and let immune systems deal with bacteria and infections. I mean, that's what evolution has already come up with as a solution to this problem. What we would need though is an organism that's far more symbiotic, where we provide security, and food, and protection from the elements, and it provides lots of tissue and hopefully at a good rate if return for input calories (and why not flavor while we're at it). It's not that far a stretch from some of our domesticated animals, at least with the symbiotic relationships involved. We would just need to ramp that up to 11 and optimize out the parts that we can do more efficiently at scale or that we don't want (like cognitive function and much more than a pain response to keep it from hurting itself).
- spoonjim 5y ago
- redis_mlc 5y ago> this article felt as if someone was throwning a bucket's worth of ice-cold water on my face. Wait until you hear about the lie of progessivism (Marxism) ...
- car 5y agoI'll try to answer as best I can. I have done cell culture in a research lab, specifically mammalian cells (human and mice), which is what's needed for meat. Typically, the cells get fed with nutrients, but also something called FBCS, fetal bovine calf serum. This is the blood of unborn cows, and it is required because of a mix of growth factors and hormones the cells also need (the article mentions this too). Now imagine doing this for growing meat, it does not make sense to me, since you'd need the calf serum to begin with. Maybe today the required factors have been defined, but would have to be made with biotechnology, prohibitively expensive (think insulin and cancer drugs). So just from this perspective, it sounds like a no-go. Mammalian cells have to be babied, unlike yeast (beer, bread) or bacteria (yoghurt). Yeast genome = 12 Megabases, Human genome = 3 Gigabases, vastly more complex and difficult to grow. Pat Brown, the founder of Impossible foods, who was trained as an MD and clearly has the background to judge this is also pointing out the fundamental issue [0]. Anyone who says that he has a vested interest I can just tell that I have worked with Pat, and the first thing I was told about him was that "he's the real deal.". He really is. [0] https://www.eco-business.com/news/economics-of-cell-based-meat-will-never-be-competitive-says-impossible-foods-founder/ https://www.eco-business.com/news/economics-of-cell-based-me...
- elmomle 5y agoWhen we remove subsidies and start pricing in the negative externalities (water, soil, carbon) of raising animals for meat, the calculus will certainly be different. It may well be different enough to make lab-grown meat the more cost-effective option. The field is also remarkably young, and scientific innovation has a pretty robust history of being non-obvious until after it has happened.
- libertine 5y agoBut that's the thing, who will price those negative externalities? Anyone in a poor country (with access to fertile land and water of course), with little to no education, will always be able to raise animals without a lab. Basically for it to have a real impact over plant based meat, it will have to be cheaper then cattle meat - else it will just become luxury food for those who can afford it.
- hhmc 5y agoGetting rid of subsidies would be a very good start, and I suspect farmers in poor countires don't get subsidies.
- libertine 5y agoMost definitely, but again I think that would just render meat more expensive. You need to get rid of subsidies and help the shift to something else, that something else needs to be more attractive. This should have been going on for the past decade or so.
- vegai_ 5y ago>As a big fan of the idea of manufacturing meat in an environmentally sustainable way (and without having to resort to raising and killing animals), reading this article felt as if someone was throwning a bucket's worth of ice-cold water on my face. Indeed. But the problem isn't that lab-grown meat is too expensive. It's that the industrialized murder of hundreds of millions of sentient beings EVERY SINGLE DAY (and that's only counting the land-based animals!) for the pleasure of our taste buds has been made cheap. Eating meat should be at least 1000x more expensive than it currently is. Or more correctly, it should be exactly as illegal as killing a human being and eating them currently is. But more expensive would be a fine starting point -- it would work better with the principles of human freedom, and it would make it possible to make the living conditions of our food better. Plus it would make lab-grown meat more viable. As it currently is, we are forcing these sentient beings into horrible conditions, and committing genocide every day. If we count sea-based creatures, we are killing a number equal to the total human population every 2-3 days.
- axilmar 5y agoWhy shouldn't we kill sentient beings for the pleasure of our taste buds?
- adrian_b 5y agoWhile all the problems presented in the article are true, none are fundamental. What is true is that there is no chance of sustainable production of lab-grown meat in 10 years and it is doubtful whether 20 years might be enough. All the problems described just show that the current approach of trying to grow isolated muscle cells in an artificial device does not have chances to be efficient. While most parts of an animal are not needed to grow meat, there remains a need for some simplified circulatory system, excretory system, respiratory system (this is the easy part) and digestive system (e.g. to transform the proteins from food into the amino-acids needed by the cells). Currently the functions of these missing systems are implemented by extremely expensive and inefficient artificial devices. As the article says, it is very unlikely that these bioreactors could ever be improved to have performances similar to a living animal. So what is needed is not an artificial bioreactor with muscle cells, but a genetically-modified simplified animal, something worm-like made mostly of beef-like muscle but containing the required systems for feeding and growing. Even better would be a plant growing some muscle tissue instead of fruits, but designing something like that would become possible only even further in the future. Currently we do not know enough to modify an animal to grow only the organs that we want and in the shape that we want. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that sometime in this century and probably in its first half, we will reach the point when we will have this ability (unless humanity destroys itself before that, which unfortunately is something that cannot be completely dismissed).
- sytelus 5y agoThe article is nothing but a hit piece, very likely funded by meat industry. I don’t see any theoretical reasons argued here. You cannot write off future potential based on current state of technology. It’s like you will look at mainframe and say that there will never be a computer in every home. The thing that matters is rate of change over time. Write’s Law dictates that as the total production capacity increases, cost exponentially declines. This law is the driver of Moor’s law and it is exactly why we can enjoy so many modern conveniences ranging from TVs to refrigerators that was initially affordable to only ultra rich. The cause of this law is believed to be the fact that far many more brains looks at various parts of production pipelines and optimizes it relentlessly. Cultured meat factories may look expensive today but over next couple of decades, they can become norm compared to traditional industry.
- marcus_holmes 5y agoReminds me of all those articles from ~20 years ago saying that solar power will never be cost-effective [0]. There'll be a series of incremental improvements, a couple of sudden "aha" shifts in thinking, and suddenly it's not only cost-effective, but massively better. [0] searching for one now, I can't find an example, which is interesting. Did I mis-remember, or have they all been pulled down?
- native_samples 5y agoSolar power isn't cost effective, which is why there's now an energy crisis in Europe ... it became a lot cheaper, but it didn't reach the point of making economic sense for it to replace other forms of power at scale, largely due to fundamentals outside of the semiconductor industry: lack of reliable sunshine, lack of sufficiently cheap batteries, etc.
- marcus_holmes 5y agoI used to live in Western Australia. Vast areas of land with extremely reliable sunshine, and very little other uses [0]. The storage problem is being solved, battery tech is hot and getting hotter (kinda pun intended). The transmission problem is still being worked on - there are unconventional options for cheap, plentiful solar power, like extracting hydrogen from seawater and then shipping the hydrogen to power plants near where the power is needed. The costs used to be prohibitive because the panels were so expensive. But the tech for solar panels has progressed hugely (and quickly) and this is no longer a factor. Solar power plants will never be a drop-in replacement for fossil fuel plants, for the reasons you describe. But that doesn't mean we can't replace fossil fuel plants with an energy system that uses solar power for generation. The same will happen with vat-grown meat. One by one the difficulties will be overcome and the commercial problems will be solved. What we end up with will probably not look anything like our current meat industry. But it will replace our current meat industry. [0] apologies to the indigenous people who have "used" this land for tens of thousands of years and would probably disagree with this statement.
- maccard 5y agoThe article says this: > To be fair, the traditional meat industry already benefits from enormous direct and indirect government subsidies and then ignores the impact that that has. In the EU, CAP subsidies are absolutely enormous [0], and are only slightly smaller in the US [1]. - Between the two, that's $115 billion dollars per year on farming subsidies, which is roughly 40% of farm income in both the EU and the US.If it's acceptable to prop up the farm industry, why isn't it acceptable to prop up the manufactured meat industry? [0] https://theconversation.com/eu-subsidies-benefit-big-farms-while-underfunding-greener-and-poorer-plots-new-research-144880 https://theconversation.com/eu-subsidies-benefit-big-farms-w... [1] https://www.agriculture.com/news/business/record-high-ag-subsidies-to-supply-39-of-farm-income https://www.agriculture.com/news/business/record-high-ag-sub...
- audiometry 5y agoI wonder if we would have heard similar analysis decades ago in regards to solar panels or other technologies that have surprised us as they’ve scaled up.
- rep_movsd 5y agoSome people confuse energy efficient with market viable Many products are way more expensive than the energy required to mine them. Gold, Bitcoin, Kobe Beef, etc. etc. etc. Science is not economics. You need to create a market for cruelty free meat. 200 years ago, slave labor would have been the most "cheapest option" and any system to replace it would have been economically unviable. The point of veganism, vegetarianism, or animal rights in general at any level is a moral issue, not a utilitarian one. If it costs more to be a more moral society we will do so.
- bambax 5y ago> For cultivated meat, though, FBS is anathema. Cultured animal protein can’t really be “meat without slaughter” if it’s dependent on an ingredient that’s intertwined with the current, grim realities of commodity beef production. Meat with LESS slaughter would still be better than the current situation. Numbers matter.
- louis___ 5y agoI too plead guilty of not having at all a deep expertise in this area. But this makes me think of the myth of AI achieving "General Intelligence", ie an intelligence adapting to life and all its messy complexity, like humans do. Everybody thought it would be a piece of cake in the 1970s, and then the science just didn't followed. Now with neural networks, and GPUs, this myth is back on the table, but all researchers in the field continue to claim "AI is nowhere near General Intelligence"
- tim333 5y agoA little off topic but people like Kurzweil and Moravec have always made fairly sensible predictions that we'd get AGI around 2030 plus or minus a bit. The fact that some fools said it would be a piece of cake in the 70s or whenever doesn't really prove it's a myth.
- timbit42 5y agoNeural networks are decades and decades old.
- gradschoolfail 5y agoMy phd is in the physics of complex systems, so its not exactly this area but the arguments in the engrxiv paper linked in TFA seem robust to me. In my mind there is an abstract question and a concrete question which illustrates the hardness of the problem. The concrete question is, were there historical examples which showed the feasibility of this kind of endeavor? I dont think so. In fact there is a recent counterexample. Biofuels. They were big in the last hype cycle. George Church, the Tom Knight of Harvard, got involved in Joule, which is now dead. Biofuels was a much simpler pipedream than todays lab grown factory and yet… we are back to designing batteries, which are far simpler than algae. So after this bubble bursts, I predict that we will be putting our money in making jellyfish tasty. it will be a step up from making yeast or algae tasty for sure. Another prediction would be uh the second coming of 6502… of amino acid manufacturing. The abstract question is, is it possible to design a large scale self replicating machine that runs more efficiently than evolution can give us? Again, no historical examples.. but I see the current deep learning “success” as a victory for evolution, not design… My guess is, if we want to make lab grown meat work we might as well solve the easier problems of immortality and general AI, first.
- roca 5y agoChinese cuisine already includes jellyfish. A bit bland, but not bad, and surprisingly good texture. Make them more tasty and you might be onto something. No idea bout nutritional value though.
- gradschoolfail 5y agoHaha based on your tip I went for a wikipedia dive. “ The Japanese company Tango Jersey Dairy produces a vanilla and jellyfish ice cream using Nomura's jellyfish.[12][13] Consuming echizen kurage is potentially dangerous if the toxic part is not thoroughly cleaned and cooked.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomura%27s_jellyfish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomura%27s_jellyfish
- kuu 5y ago> is it possible to design a large scale self replicating machine that runs more efficiently than evolution can give us? Transistors miniaturization may fit under that category. We created something that every year doubled down the scale, augmented performance and reduced energy costs; and for that we needed those previous transistors. I don't think natural evolution has done any other process that fast. I may be wrong...
- rolandog 5y agoAs a chemical engineer, what I can comment (without having enough time to read the whole report) are the following short facts: We cannot continue our uncontrolled population growth without increasing the effect our average lifestyle has on the environment. Whether lab based meat is attainable or not, (currently, and at this scale) we cannot continue to eat a meat-centric diet without impacting the environment much in the same way that we cannot have a chocolate-cake based diet without gaining weight or eventually having malnutrition. In order to have more average 'freedom' of choices when it comes to our diet and lifestyle, we need to agree to decrease the population so we can lessen or revert the impact we have. Some may snarkily say that if we don't do it, mother nature may do it for us.
- jordanbeiber 5y agoThe use of anti-biotics as a growth agent is probably not taken in to account for the cost of doing our current meat business. This is a big one, IMHO! The cost of this will be for my children to deal with. Also - a normal adult, not pursuing an athletic career need about 120g of meat protein A WEEK.
- baremetal 5y agohow about everyone convert their lawns into gardens. have a few chickens too, feeding them with kitchen and garden waste then you dont have to truck everything around, or use huge amounts of fuel to work the land. oh wait that takes effort, everyone wants a low effort, idealistic (yet unfeasible), solution to the food problem.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoI've no expertise on the technical area, but if the headline says "will never be cost-competitive" in a climate change related story then that pretty much means that it does make sense economically, but that it requires taxes/subsidies to price in externalities. Because, if it just plain didn't work, the headline would say "This just plain doesn't work". If it was so inefficient in terms of carbon input/output that it would a net-negative, then the headline would say "This would work but not be helpful to climate goals" So by a process of elimination, the headline indicates that it does work, and it does make economic sense, but that government intervention in the market will be required to get the best outcome for everyone. Some people see this and think "okay, lets write some legislation to fix that", while other people see it and think "oh, well I guess the human race will just have to die out in some kind of mad-max apocalypse, because that's better than regulations that ensure the free market actually works as promised".
- Lutger 5y agoNot having a deep expertise on the technical difficulties of cultured meat, but let me point out something obvious: farmed meat is usually heavily sponsored by the public through taxes and it's toll on the environment, on healthcare, on the future, etc. is paid for by others. The true cost of meat is far, far greater than what you pay for it. If this cost is ever charged to the consumer, then the comparison with cultured meat will look very different.
- namlem 5y agoI wouldn't call myself an expert, but I'm somewhat familiar with the principles. In general, I think the article is correct in most of its claims, however, I also think it's a bit too pessimistic and narrow-minded. I agree that the bioreactor model is probably not going to scale well, the requirents are simply too extreme for it to be affordable. However, there are other methods that could hypothetically be developed. As the article points out, contamination is a huge problem because cell cultures don't have immune systems. But who is to say we can't create an immune system. I've never been too optimistic about the prospects of cell cultures for meat production. However, perhaps with more advanced cloning and genetic engineering techniques, we won't need to rely on cell cultures. One greusome, but potentially workable, solution might be to create "deconstructed animals". That is to say, harvest entire organ systems from live animals, or clone artificial ones, and use them to support muscle tissue that is periodically harvested. This way, you have all the necessary biological functions, including an immune system. Certainly, developing such a system at an industrial scale would be incredibly difficult, but probably still easier than getting cultures to work. Another potential model, which has already been explored somewhat, "meat doping" where you take a substrate derived from plant matter and dope it with animal stem cells. Getting this to produce a meaty texture would be tricky, but in terms of flavor and nutritional profile it should work. This gets around the problem of muscle cells growing too slowly, and reduces the duration for which the a given batch must be kept sterile.
- pacman2 5y agoLate to the party but: "Is there anyone on HN with deep expertise in this area who can comment on this article's scientific accuracy?" Yes, I do. But I wont do it since beside me expertise I would have to take at least several weeks of full time to dig through the scientific literature and potential patent situation. "Most of us have a limited appetite for 50-dollar lab-grown chicken nuggets." This is where I become skeptical. We are not talking about fusion energy, something that does not violate physical laws but has not been able to work net energy positive in a man made setting. We are talking about something that has been shown it can be down. 50 USD per nugget? What immediately comes to mind is the BCG Experience Curve: https://www.bcg.com/publications/2013/growth-business-unit-strategy-experience-curve-bcg-classics-revisited https://www.bcg.com/publications/2013/growth-business-unit-s... Hence, gut feeling without literature research: He is wrong. Prediction: 1. We will see commercially lab grown meet bigger than lab scale within the next 10-20 years. 2. It will still be a minority market in the next 10-20 years 3. First products will be chicken nuggets, Hamburgers and (surprise) pet food.
- xyzzy21 5y agoI'd say it's likely and not surprising. NO ONE, in my experience, who is pushing any number of "radical improvements" (EVs, plant-based foods, etc.) has EVER TAKEN a thermo class or econ class to even being to grok reality of it. (I'm an engineer with an MBA who's founded 5 tech companies including roles of CTO and CFO) Most propaganda spewed by the MSM doesn't even pass the simplest thermo or econ litmus tests of viability. Far too many startups these days don't either.
- fragmede 5y ago> Is there anyone on HN with deep expertise in this area who can comment on this article's scientific accuracy? Yes but that's not me. Instead, if we skip the biology stuff because our technology there is still in its infancy (CRISPR is utterly amazing, but rather limited, compared to things we can build in the varios engineering disciplines.) And also because I didn't study advanced biology in college. Okay, so if we take 800 million acres used for animal feed and actual grazing land[], and a heavy approximation of a total 4.8 kwh of energy from the sun per square meter for a single day, and plug in a 1200 calorie diet, we get 110^13, or that the land can support 10 Terahumans, assuming 100% efficient conversion from sun's energy to human calories. Which is ridiculously wrong. (That would be the "impossible to overcome according to the Laws of Thermodynamics and our current understanding of cell biology and chemistry." bit referenced, plus human diet is a bit more complex than pure number of calories.) So if we can get humans to photosynthesize directly instead of having to eat food (along with the resulting efficiency losses) the Earth can support another few orders of magnitude more humans than there are today by reusing the land that's already being used support cattle. (It's only a small if*. Totally feasible. I only need a few million dollars in funding but we'll have that figured out in a couple years, tops.) [] https://www.treehugger.com/land-contiguous-us-used-feed-livestock-4858254 https://www.treehugger.com/land-contiguous-us-used-feed-live... [] http://zebu.uoregon.edu/disted/ph162/l4.html http://zebu.uoregon.edu/disted/ph162/l4.html