I think lab grown meat is closer to a Theranos type scam than most people realize. The problem with Theranos wasn’t that their tech didn’t work at any scale; it

I think lab grown meat is closer to a Theranos type scam than most people realize. The problem with Theranos wasn’t that their tech didn’t work at any scale; it’s that blood drawn from finger capillaries is useless for most diagnostic tests that they claimed to do. It’s a very subtle problem that only investors with proper scientific advisors with diagnostic experience caught onto (aka all the biotech VCs, who stayed far away). “If only” Theranos took regular blood samples from the arm instead of a few droplets from a finger prick, it could have worked but then it’d be just another unsexy competitor in onsite diagnostics. Lab grown meat is full of those kinds of caveats and while no company has committed as egregious a fraud as Theranos, they’re all going to eventually find themselves in the position where they either have to lie to keep getting investments or admit that it’s not feasible and fold. Personally, my bet is that without advanced bioengineering that can design entire artificial immune systems that protect the growing tissue, bioreactors will just be too expensive to scale up and compete with animals. IMO the only way it’ll work is if we have giant (semi-)open vats like salt evaporation pools that convert solar energy directly into protein and fat, with an engineered biome that responds to contamination like an immune system. And that's probably decades if not centuries ahead of us.