Science Friday - Lab-Grown Meat Progress, Early Human Migration Updates. January 13, 2023, Part 1

Episode Date: January 13, 2023

Early Migration To North America Likely Wasn’t A One-Way Road The story of how early humans migrated to North America might not be as simple as we once thought. The prevailing theory was that ancient peoples traveled from Siberia to modern-day Alaska using the Bering strait as a land bridge. But new genomic research, published in Current Biology, reveals movement in the opposite direction, back to Asia, as well. Ira talks with Sophie Bushwick, technology editor at Scientific American, about the new research, and other top science stories of the week, including a new AI voice generator, a green comet visible visit in the night sky for the first time in 50,000 years, and how a specific atmospheric weather pattern caused historic flooding in California. Lab-Grown Meats Are Finally Inching Closer To Commercial The United States is one of the largest consumers of meat in the world, with the average American eating 273 pounds of meat per year That’s not to say that tastes aren’t changing: Nearly a quarter of Americans say they have cut down on meat consumption, and 41% of Americans under 50 have tried plant-based meat. There’s been a wave of companies and academic institutions working on cellular agriculture—a fancy way of saying animal products grown from cells in labs, and not from a meat farm. While lab-grown meat is not available in grocery stores yet, the FDA gave approval to make meat from animal cell culture for the first time in November. Upside Foods, the company making the product, makes chicken from cells grown in tanks. Joining Ira to talk about cell agriculture are Andrew Stout, cellular agriculture biologist based in Boston, Massachusetts, and Aryé Elfenbein, co-founder of Wildtype, based in San Francisco, California, a company working on growing seafood from cells. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour, we're going to talk about the future of lab-grown meat. We'll take your calls. Would you eat lab-grown meat? What are your thoughts on this? Call us 844-825, or you can tweet us at SciFri. But first, the story of how early humans migrated to North America just got a little bit more complicated and interesting. You probably remember the story pretty well. Early humans, living in what is now Siberia, cross the bering, straight into modern-day Alaska. And here's where it gets even more interesting because new genomic research shows movement in the opposite direction, too. These early migrants traveled back again to Asia. Joining me now to explain this fascinating new research and other top science stories of the week

is Sophie Bushwick, technology editor at Scientific American here in New York. Sophie, welcome back. Always good to see you on Science Friday. Thank you. It's good to see you for the first time in 2023. And that's a happy New Year to you. Let's talk about this. What's the new information we're learning here? So researchers took the remains of 10 individuals from what is now, we now call Siberia, that area of the world. And they did a genetic analysis. And these are the remains of humans who lived at various periods of time.

The oldest ones are about 7,500 years old. And they just, yeah, they tested their genes. They said, like, who are your ancestors? And they found evidence that the population, that they had Native America, genes. And this suggests that there were not one, but multiple times when Native Americans either crossed over or people from Siberia crossed to America and then came back. Wow. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of genetic mixing in there that suggests that these populations were not just traveling to a new place and staying there forever, that there was back and forth going on for thousands of years.

So how does this new research change then, our understanding of, like? of early human migration patterns. Well, it shows that these early nomadic humans were traveling very large distances. You know, some of these remains they tested were not, they weren't just in the area around the Bering Strait. They were much further away in the far eastern part of modern day Russia. And they also have, in these same populations, they've found genetic influence from other groups, right?

They found that people from Japan probably had genetic measurements. mixing with people from what is now Russia. So there was a lot of travel going on in the ancient world. We think of ourselves as being at the most connected time in human history with planes and stuff. But our ancestors were no slouches either. I love it when new stuff like this comes up, right? Yes.

Makes everything so much more interesting. All right, let's move on to some rather depressing news this week, as if we need any more of it. And this one's about the state of our glaciers and not those in the Arctic or Antarctic, but the mountain glaciers, right? Half of them are expected to melt by 2,100? And that's the best case scenario. Really?

Yes. So if the world managed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, then we would still expect half of all the mountain glaciers in the world to be melting by 2100. But the problem is that that's if we limit warming to 1.5 degrees. Right now we're on track for 2 degrees based on the limitations that countries have made and the attempts to reduce. emissions, and that would melt about 60% of the mountain glaciers. And each time that number goes up, each time that amount of global warming increases, we can expect to lose more and more glaciers. And so we're talking about major mountain chains. Absolutely. Yes. So there's glaciers in places like big mountain chains in South America. You might think of the Alps. These glaciers are very

valuable, not just as sources of tourism for people who want to, you know, check them out. They are also, in some places, they have a spiritual significance to indigenous populations, and they also provide a reservoir of water. So, you know, when it warms up, water from the glaciers might melt and flow down from the mountains and supply people who live in lower and lower elevations. So these are very, very important parts of our world. And not the risk is not just that we'll lose them, but where are they going to go? They're going to go to the ocean and contribute to rising sea levels. Loss of the snowpack, that is an important. That's a big deal.

Yeah. Let's move on to a team of researchers in China announcing earlier this week that they have figured out how to break one of the most common digital encryption methods. And they're using quantum computing? That's right. So researchers have known about an algorithm for breaking this type of encryption for a long time called Shores algorithm. But the problem is you would need a quantum computer with about a million cubits. That's quantum bits, the building blocks of quantum computer, in order to run this algorithm. Now, these Chinese researchers have said there's a different algorithm, confusingly named Schnoor's algorithm, as opposed to Shores algorithm, which can be, it was written originally for a regular classical computer.

But they said, if you run it on a classic computer, you can break encryption using a computer with just a few hundred cubits instead of a million or more. Mm-hmm. But they, they, so is that the big, is that the big breakthrough here? They don't need a supercomputer or they can run it on a, well, it sounds really like a big breakthrough on the surface. Right, but don't, don't worry. Once you start looking a little closer, you realize that I don't think we have anything to worry about yet. So first of all, if you wanted to run it with on this a quantum computer, you would need to have extremely low rates of error. It would have to be extremely accurate. And quantum computers just aren't that accurate. They've got to be kept in these very pristine, uh, specific. specific conditions in order for all these cubits to remain entangled and in the right state. And it's just essentially really, at our current level of technology, it's nearly impossible to get the error levels down to the point where this would work. And then the other issue is it's unclear how long it would take this quantum computer to crack encryption running this algorithm. So it could crack it, but how long would it take?

Would it take, you know, hundreds of thousands of years? We're not sure how much faster we're going to be able to. to break it to the point where it would be like a practical solution. So until they've got a better sense of that, I would say, don't worry. I mean, the big problem that we're worried about is down the road, like let's say today a hacker steals some encrypted data and then they hold onto it for several years. And then maybe eventually the technology catches up and then quantum computers get good enough to run these algorithms that break encryption and they have this cache of data that they can now break into.

I think that's the worry that a lot of cryptographers have. But they're also at the same time, you know, people aren't just sitting around waiting for this to happen. They're working on new forms of encryption that hopefully even a quantum computer couldn't crack. Well, let's get a little deeper into the digital world. And I'm talking about artificial intelligence because this week, Microsoft researchers announced a new tool called Val E. You can recreate someone's voice just on three seconds of recorded audio. I'm fearful about my job now. How does that work?

So this is work from Microsoft researchers, but they actually used a tool developed by a different tech giant meta, the company formerly known as Facebook. But meta has a tool that these Microsoft researchers took advantage of, which can basically break down your three second clip of audio into all these little discrete components. And then the Microsoft researchers built a tool that you use these components to teach a model how to make a voice that's imitating the original clip. So, yeah, they say that using only a three-second audio clip, they can reproduce a voice. But something I'm grateful for is that they have not released this yet. You know, a lot of other AI tools, people are free to play around with. You know, you can play around with chat GPT. You can play around with Dolly.

But that's not the case for this. The Microsoft researchers have said, first of all, they're not going to release it right away. And second of all, when they do, they're going to include a sort of watermark in any recordings or audio that's built on this tool so that you can tell. it's not original, which would help cut down on, you know, using a deep fake to make, you know, to spread misinformation or to try to blackmail someone, for instance. Well, you could tell it's not original in mine if there are no dad jokes in it. That'll be the dead giveaway. I mean, but this is not the first program, right, to use AI to recreate someone else's voice or even video.

Right. The difference here is how fast it can do it, how little of a sample it needs and in order to recreate that rate. Like a lot of people who build. deep fakes of someone's voice, you know, they might want to look at hundreds of hours of recorded audio as opposed to three seconds. And the other thing is that it can, it can, it also reproduces the emotional tone of the voice in the three second clip and also what's going on in the background. So if I'm talking cheerfully in this clip and I'm talking on a telephone, so it's got a certain sound quality to it, any imitations of that clip are going to sound like I'm talking on the telephone and I'm cheerful.

Wow, wow, wow. This is so interesting. We're going to develop, devote a whole segment to this coming up in the near future talking about AI and the explosion of all these tools. It's really fascinating technology. Really, really. Let's go off to space. There's a new comet and it's green and you can see it in the night sky, right? It's coming around the first time in 50,000 years. I know. It orbits the sun at a very far distance, which is why we haven't seen it in, you know, a few 50,000 years, as you say. And it's going to be visible in the northern. Hemisphere in the early evening and also possibly in the early morning. If you want to look for this, you're going to probably need binoculars, although it might be bright enough to see without, with the naked eye towards the end of the month. But what you're going to want to do is look for the North Star, Polaris, and it should be around there, and it'll have this fuzzy green glow around it. And Friday night, tonight it gets closest to the sun, right? That's right. That's right.

I'm going to look for that. I remember seeing in common hail bop. I remember and it was years ago. But it was, it's one of the most exciting things you can do if you're, you know, an amateur astronomers is actually see a comment for yourself. But that's another story. Let's end on a tasty note. Utensils that can make your food sweeter or saltier without sugar or salt. That's right. So people have known for a while that a whole bunch of factors influence the taste of your

food other than the contents of the food itself. You know, some people try to eat with cutlery made of gold or different materials. They found out that cutlery with different. different textures can change the way something tastes. So previously researchers had developed these chopsticks with a very mild electric current running through them. And the idea is that that current moves around sodium ions in food. And so when you eat food with these chopsticks, it tastes salty even if there's not salt in it.

Oh, no kidding. Right. So if you're trying to cut down on your sodium, but you don't like bland food, you know, you could have a low salt meal but eat it with these electric chopsticks. and that would sort of stimulate your senses a little more. No one's getting zapped with these chopsticks, though. Right, right. This would be a very mild current.

And those are actually supposed to come to market this year in 2023. So they might be available for purchase soon. And then there's a spoon that's not quite as close to being available, but some student researchers actually developed the idea, the design for a spoon they call sugarware, that would have these bumps on the bottom of it. and the bumps would be coated with a material that interacts with the sweet sensors on your taste buds. There you go.

Thank you, Sophie. Always exciting stuff. Thanks for taking time to be with this day, Sophie. Thanks for having me. Sophie Bushwick Technology Editor at Scientific American. She's based here in New York. We have to take a short break and let me come back a future where your burger is made in a lab. We're going to talk about all kinds of new kinds of food where they're growing meat in the laboratory.

Would you eat it? Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. If you're like me, have you walked down the aisles of the meat section in the supermarket and thought, that's a lot of meat? That's a lot of water that went toward raising and feeding the cattle. Is that sustainable? Well, perhaps lots of others have the same thoughts because tastes are changing here in the U.S.

Nearly a quarter of Americans say they've cut down on eating meat, and close to half of Americans under 50 have tried plant-bent. based meat. I mean, I like those veggie burgers. But if you must have the real thing or something closer to it, there's another alternative on the horizon called cellular agriculture. That's a fancy way of saying animal products grown in a lab from cells. There are companies and academic researchers working on a future where you could buy burgers and sashimi, even butter that never came from a living, breathing animal. So what are the hurdles that these products face? And when could we see them in your supermarket? That's what we're going to be talking about this hour.

If you'd like to join us on number 844-724-8255-8-4-Sai Talk, or you can also tweet us at SciFri. Let me introduce my guests. Dr. Andrew Stout, cellular agriculture biologists based in Boston, and Dr. Arie Elfenbine, co-founder of Wild Type, based in San Francisco. Welcome both of you to Science Friday. Thank you so much for having us. Yeah, thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. Nice to have you. Andrew, I know you work on cow cells. Give me the ABCs. Can you walk me through how you build meat in a lab? Yeah, totally. So I do personally work with cow cells, but you can use cells from any species that you're interested in, be it terrestrial species, a fish species, whatever it is.

And what we do is we go to the animal. We, at Tufts University, we work with the vet school, and they have a herd of cattle. And we go and we get. a small biopsy of muscle or fat tissue from a cow. So we work with a veterinarian there who will take basically a jelly bean-sized piece of tissue from the cow. We then isolate the tissue-specific stem cells, so muscle-specific stem cells or fat-specific stem cells. And once we've isolated those cells, we can grow them in a lab, sort of using whatever processes we want that have been developed in biomedic medicine and tissue engineering for cell culture. So we take these cells, we feed them a nutrient broth called culture media, which contains the amino acids, sugars, all those things that the cells need to survive, as well as certain proteins that signal to the cells and tell them what to

do. And what we want them to do is to grow a lot. So, you know, we start with this jellybee size of tissue and the goal is to grow, you know, kilograms and kilograms of cells from this starting cell mass. And once you have that cell mass, that biomass of muscle or fat cells, it then needs to be built into a product. And there are a couple of ways to do that. A lot of what people are working on now is basically incorporating those cells with some sort of plant-based filler or binder or something like that to provide texture to the cells to have a food product, or kind of looking into more sort of biomimetic tissue engineering strategies, you can take those cells and incorporate them into something that's called a scaffold, which basically is an extracellular

environment that encourages the cells to really mature and differentiate into mature muscle and fat tissue that, you know, looks identical to what you might find in an animal. And in that way, you can get, you know, something like a whole cut of, you know, steak or whatever your meat of interest is. Does it taste like meat? So I, this is, we got to my biggest insecurity very quickly, which is that I've actually never eaten cultured meat. So I've been working in the field for about 10 years now. And I've never, I've never ate it. And that's, and that's, because in the lab where I work, we do things on, you know, a really small scale. So we're, we're studying cell biology and we're just kind of answering the biological questions that don't

really necessitate at scale production. So I'll turn the question to Aria, because he has, and so he'll have a much better sense of that. Okay. Are you, does it taste like meat? Yeah, I mean, you know, in our case, we work on seafood and salmon in particular. And I'll say that in the beginning, we weren't sure exactly which nutrients to feed these cells. When we grew them, we had to guess. And over time, I think, as we were able to better understand how these cells grow, what keeps them in a state where they are thriving, the flavors were ones that became more similar to what you'd expect from conventional salmon. And so in our case, it actually does.

And we've now, you know, done a lot of taste testing, seeing what, what, you know, future customers think. What are the complexities of flavor and texture? What are the sort of aromas that we think about? And, you know, in the case of salmon, even, there's a pretty wide spectrum of the kind of wild, very sort of subtle flavor. to ones that are much fishier. And often that's kind of what we're used to for farmed fish. Can you choose how it tastes by what you feed it in a laboratory? Absolutely.

You know, just like in the wild, the way that a certain animal will taste as meat will be largely dependent on what it's consumed during its life. And so you can kind of see that when farmed fish are typically fattier than wildfish who spend their lives either swimming away from predators or trying to catch prey. I know that in November there was a big hurdle cleared for cellular agriculture when the company upside foods received FDA approval for its lab-grown chicken, Andrew. How big a deal is this for the industry? Yeah, I think it's really quite a big deal. You know, it's not the end of the story. For a product like chicken, upside foods now has to go and get USDA approval as well. And so there's still regulatory hurdles to jump. But I think that the field, at least from my perspective, was really quite happily, not surprised, but the outcome of the FDA announcement seemed to really be something of a best case scenario, at least from my perspective, there was. were a lot of interesting aspects of the product that Upside was discussing and presenting that the FDA supported and was okay with, which I think opened the doors pretty wide for the field.

And how close are we to getting, I'll ask both of you, Ariya, you can answer first. How close are we to seeing something in the stores? Yeah, I mean, in our case, we've been in discussions with FDA for a little over four years now. And what I can say is that it's been a very thoughtful process invariably. And I think as we and other companies in the space also approach that letter of no further questions, essentially, is kind of how the FDA puts it. I think we can probably start to see the first products hopefully this year. Okay, let's go to the phones. Lots of people. 844-724-825. Michael in Fayette, Alabama. Hi, Michael.

Good afternoon. Thanks, big time for taking my call. I would personally try this meat out my lab culture, whatever it's called. Myself, if you all found a way to include liquid meat smoke or some other type of smoky flavor into it, I think it would get much bigger reception from customers in developed countries who've never tried it. My concern is about something that vegetarian, especially secular vegetarians, don't talk much about. And in the past 40 to 50 years ago, environmentalist and animal protectionist, wild life protected, didn't seem to care about. and that's people in the third world, which is a huge, as a Christian, a huge concern of mine, is there any way that this and also soy protein artificial meat can be increased like with food processing companies or charities,

especially the wonderful child sponsorship charities, to increase production or to get farmers themselves in the third world involved in, producing it, having a market for it as well as for their children and family members. Oh, and one more favor to the sci-fi staff, please consider a wonderful way to even further reduce carbon emissions in the future because I don't think that electric vehicles alone will do it. All right. Plant-based plastics and hard plastics maybe from dead animal bones for a future episode.

Thank you very much. Okay, that's an interesting topic. What about it? Let me ask both Andrew and Ariya, what about sustainability? Will this help in the world? Andrew? Yeah, sure. I can take the first stab.

So, you know, I guess the best answer is I really hope so and I really believe so. You know, that's been a huge motivation for me throughout the time that I've worked in this field. It's really what got me interested in the first place. And basically it boils down to the fact that when you feed any animal, and I think that beef are often kind of the biggest culprits here, but when you feed a cow food, its caloric conversion efficiency is really low. You know, so you feed a cow, I think it's about 10 calories to get one calorie of meat out. And that inefficiency is inherently has sustainability limitations. And so by sort of focusing your input calorie energy on cell growth, you're able to hopefully increase that efficiency in a way that really benefits sustainability.

The one thing that I'll add to that, and I think that I'll add to kind of the listener's question, is that, you know, I think that these are all possibilities for cultured meat, but they need to be focused on and they need to be worked on. They're not inevitable outcomes of the technology. And so groups that are working on this need to be asking, you know, how can we ensure that we're not just focusing on getting this on the market, but we're focusing on getting it on the market in as sustainable of a way as possible, as equitable of a way as possible in a way that can benefit countries all around the world

with different crop systems and different food cultures and all of that. Our listeners are very interested in this angle. Sarah from Duluth tweets thinks it's a great idea, and more sustainable. Julie from Minneapolis wants to know what's the environmental impact of lab-grown meat versus traditional farming. Have you put that into your equations yet?

Yeah, I'll let Aria talk about that one, maybe. We've lost Aria for a moment. Oh, okay, okay, no worries. Well, then I can definitely tackle it. Please do that. Yeah, so there have been a number of life cycle assessment studies, which is basically the field of study of asking the question,

You know, if we kind of project out a world where we have at-scale cultured meat production, what does the environmental impact look like? And it's hard to get really exact details from those studies. You know, they're inherently noisy. It incorporates a lot of assumptions. But generally, there seem to be some, you know, coalescing takeaways that are pretty consistent. It looks like culture meat will have a, has a big potential to have significantly less greenhouse gas emissions. and global warming potential, specifically from its ability to reduce methane emissions.

So, you know, when we think of cattle as emitters, a big aspect of that is methane, which has a much higher global warming potential than something like carbon dioxide. And so that's sort of a big lever that can be polled. Also, in terms of land use and water use, it's projected that cultured meat could really, really reduce the impact there. the area where it's a little bit more of a less well understood is in electricity consumption and energy usage from that perspective. Right. And that's basically because it takes a lot of energy to run the bioreactors, and it doesn't

take all that much electricity to run a cow. Got it. Let's go to Orlando to Joe. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hey, can you hear me? Yes, go ahead. Hey, thank you so much for taking my call. I love sci-fry.

I'm really glad you're talking about this. I'm a whole food vegan, so I'm not going to be eating it, but I am concerned about the 85 billion land animals that we slaughter every year and three trillion fish that we slaughter every year, emitting 87% of the greenhouse gases. So I'm really happy that this option is developing, and I'm hoping that this would lead to animal liberation and eliminate the suffering of the animals.

Why won't you eat this if you're a vegan and it doesn't come from a real animal? Well, we have to understand that animal products are loaded with saturated, fat, cholesterol, antibiotic, hormones, and overall, it may cause inflammation in the body, so I'm concerned about that, and we have over 300,000 foods and vegetables, nuts, cream, freeze, mushroom. So why not eat our body and feed our body, which is the temple for our soul? Okay, thank you for calling, Joe. Have you heard that, Andrew or are you, from other vegans, that they're not really going to jump on this bandwaguer? Yeah, for sure. You know, we've actually had people who have tried fish for the first times in their lives when they've come to visit us at Wild Type, which is always actually kind of an emotional thing to see. It's a really special moment. But I think, you know, some people who haven't grown up with those flavors or haven't really, you know, experienced that don't often have the curiosity to know what it's all about. And so there often isn't as much interest. And the interesting thing also is, you know, the reason behind people being vegan.

So if it is for either animal rights or ecological conservation or for any reasons like that, then, you know, our product is sort of takes a lot of those moral issues off the table. But, you know, at the same time, it's not a vegan product. The main ingredient in our case are fish cells. Right, right. Andrew, can you adjust the nutritional kind of? intent to make it more nutritious. Yeah, totally.

So that's an area of research that I focused on a lot a few years ago. And so what we did specifically was we engineered the cow muscle cells to produce beta carotene, which is an antioxidant that's found in high levels in, say, carrots. It's what turns carrots orange. And it's a nutrient that's not typically present in beef. But by engineering the cow cells to produce that beta-carotene, we're able to reduce the oxidation that comes from cooking and consuming red meat. And that lipid oxidation is one of the things that's actually associated between red and

processed meat consumption and increased incidences of diseases such as colorectal cancer. So we were trying to basically, you know, sort of show along kind of the proof of principle of that idea that you can engineer these cells to have nutrient profiles that might be better than you could get from conventional meat. Wow, wow, that's quite interesting. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to talk more with our guests on the future of cellular agriculture, lab grown meat. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break. We're continuing our conversation about cellular agriculture. Maybe you know it better as lab grown meat. My guests are Dr. Andrew Stout, cellular agriculture, bioculture, bioculture.

based in Boston, Aria Elfinbine, co-founder of Wild Type, based in San Francisco, California, and we're taking your calls 844-724-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFRI. Andrew, we've talked about some of the ethics of why to choose cell ag meat versus normal meat. A big reason for some people is animal rights. However, to traditionally make cell ag meat, you need something called fetal bovine serum, and that's nutritional slurry made from baby cows. What is the status on the cell ag industry moving away from this?

Yeah, I think that the status is that we have moved away from it. You know, I think that it's as new cells are isolated and incorporated, and, you know, if we develop systems for new species, then FBS has proven time and time again, or fetal bovine serum FBS has proven time and time again to be a very valuable research tool. But groups that are working on large-scale production have moved away from fetal bovine serum. And there's been an increasing number of publications in academic literature, basically providing recipes for culture media that don't use fetal bovine serum.

So, you know, I think that media development is still a big open question. there's a lot of optimization that needs to happen. There's a lot of cost reduction that needs to happen. But I think, you know, the question of whether we'll ultimately be able to get away from FBS is definitely an answered one. Yeah, I agree. I'd say that, you know, pretty much every company has or is moving towards that. For us, we haven't been producing with animal serum for quite a while now.

It's just, you know, when we started to look at what these cells need, to grow, and a lot of these papers actually came out of the 1970s. It was, you know, without knowing what to feed them, this was the kind of magical elixir in which pretty much any animal cell type would be able to grow. But I think every company in this space is certainly moving away from it. Let's go to Kim in Scottsdale, Arizona. Hi, Kim, welcome to Science Friday. Hi.

The comment I wanted to make is that I definitely would give it a try. Mainly because my husband is a hunter, and we've eaten just about every type of meat that you could possibly name. And so why not this? Yeah, yeah. So, that's my comment. So you would just add this as another meat to try? Exactly, yeah. I mean, I've eaten bear and havelina and all sorts of weird stuff, so why not?

Why not? That's great. Thank you, Kim. There's a future fan for you. Yeah, I love that. What is the biggest hurdle that's facing? You know, sometimes I give out a blank check question to my guests, which is a way of asking them, how much money do you need?

What's the biggest hurdle? Ria, let me ask you, what is the biggest hurdle toward getting more of salmon, lab-based salmon on our plates? You know, I think the biggest hurdle is actually time. So every aspect of what we need to do has, in a different, context been done. So people have grown cells at large scale before. People have been able to, you know, get cells to turn into muscle or fat or something like that. Like that, that is not, not the issue. But, you know, we made a calculation recently that if we were to produce just one percent

of the seafood that is consumed in the world, if we were to, if we were able to do that, it would actually require all of the steel tanks in the world to do that. Wow. And so, So, you know, when you think about what it means to have a meaningful impact, it means, in many cases, rethinking a lot of the technologies of fermentation, and how can we use different materials? How can we think about ways to do it even more efficiently than for beer, for example? And so, you know, what we think about more than anything else is, is are we going to be able to scale up these technologies fast enough to offset? a lot of the deleterious consequences that we're seeing in the environment right now. Not only that, but can you scale it up enough so that it's cheap enough to eat, right? Isn't price must be a big...

Right, yeah. You know, when we started about almost six years ago, if we were to have made a whole pound of salmon, it probably would have cost about $400,000 a pound. We certainly didn't do that. And, you know, we just have now, And I think also most companies in the space have really been able to look at a lot of the inefficiencies and in growing these types of products and are really approaching price parity pretty quickly. I don't think that's going to be as much of an issue as I think people believed in their early days of this field. We have a tweet coming in. Robert on Twitter asks, can lab grown meat be engineered to not spoil? Andrew. I mean, if it's real meat, it's going to spoil, isn't it?

Yeah, so that's a great question. So, you know, there are two, there are two, or there are different ways that meat can spoil and go bad. One is microbial. So you have bacteria that are, you know, present on an animal and there's some, you know, number of colony forming units of that bacteria on meat. And eventually it'll go bad because those will grow. And that's when you start seeing, you know, mold on your food. I think, that culture meat has enormous potential to drastically reduce that risk of spoilage, because these cells have to be grown in sterile environments. You can't have any bacteria or fungi in the culture with the cells because they'll outcompete the animal cells and you'll just get a culture

full of bacteria. So because of that, these products, you know, when they exit the bioreactor are going to be much more sterile than a piece of meat when it exits a cow. So that's sort of one answer. And then the other side is, you know, the other form of spoilage is chemical and sort of metabolic processes that happen in food. So earlier I mentioned, you know, lipid oxidation is kind of this thing that we were trying to engineer the cells away from. And that's relevant from a nutrition perspective, but it's also really relevant from a

spoilage perspective because lipid oxidation is the number one cause of non-microbial food quality degradation in meat. And so if you can engineer the cells using these sort of same processes to try to control lipid oxidation or things like that, then I think you could also really impact the shelf life of those foods in a positive way. Interesting. Let's go to Tom in Chicago. Hi, Tom. Welcome to Science Friday. Hey, thanks for having me. Go ahead. Yeah, so I have a question. I was wondering, have they or have you or would you engineer anything that's either illegal or unethical to eat, such as like the American ball of eagle? Because I would like to know what that tastes like.

Okay. I guess that is, that's a serious question, right, Tom? Yeah. Well, it's about ethics. It's actually about ethics. Okay. Good question. Thanks for calling.

Let's get an answer to that. Are you? Andrew? Yeah. I mean, it's a great question. And I think from the early days of imagining what these types of technologies could do, people have wondered, you know, could we see what a dinosaur steak tastes like? And I think that, you know, these types of things, while they might be possible,

I think, you know, to the best of my knowledge, no companies are active working on these types of animals. I believe that there are some companies working on more what we'd consider exotic animals or animals that are not typically thought of as just sort of conventional meats or seafoods. And some have actually even worked on combining different species and the cells of different species to create certain culinary properties that maybe we wouldn't have been able to imagine from a single animal. Sherry in Fort Collins, Colorado. Hi, Sherry. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. I have two things to say about this. One, I wouldn't eat it because it is an ultra-processed food. And recent studies in nutrition have shown that processed food cause inflammation and may even be a greater contributor to

heart disease, cancer, and other diseases than sugar and bad fats. So I wouldn't eat it. for that reason. And another is, I think it's the wrong direction to go in as far as the health of the planet. Because if we eat less meat and we use the meat that we raise, sequester carbon in the soil, and in a regenerative agriculture natural system, we can raise better crops, reduce water, and use these animals in a humane way to raise better quality for humans. Okay.

Through the planet. Yeah. You know, I completely agree with that. I, so I actually still work as a cardiologist in the intensive care unit and think about this a lot, about what processing means, what nutritive or more healthy products mean. In our case, you know, I think a lot of the processing steps that you might be describing actually don't apply and aren't part of, of what production is. But your second point is, you know, I'd say even more important is that the answer would be to consume less meat and seafood. We see all of the consequences of that. But that said, I think looking at where the trends are going in terms of both, in our case,

when we think about fish farming and wildcought, both have been proven to be unsustainable, and we're seeing the demand just continue to increase more and more. And so while that would be the solution, we actually just don't see humans making those decisions as a species, unfortunately. And so this is a way to provide another alternative. Ben in Monterey, Vermont. Hi, Ben. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, I had two questions. The first has been covered. But I wanted to bring up the topic of regenerative agriculture. and as a farmer myself who raises regenerative meat,

just voice my concern that the focus on lab-grown meat perhaps does detract from the focus on meats that restore the planet. And, you know, as we've heard, to make, and 1% of the fish would require an enormous amount of resources, and we have the way to deal with this, just with some minor tweaks to our farming systems. Good comment. Thanks for calling. What about that, are you regenerative meat being able to work in that way he describes? Yeah, I don't think that any one technique or approach on its own is going to solve the problems that we have. I think that we actually need all of this. For example, when it comes to fishing, I think that the price that we pay for a wild caught, let's say salmon, should be far higher than. what it is. People who are stewards of the ocean who care about the numbers of fish that they pull out of the water every year who are really attuned to this should be

able to command a premium, I think, that is far greater than what we have now and what people are used to paying. And so I think that, you know, the only way to really address this is with approaches. And I actually really applaud the efforts of gender agriculture. I think it's incredible. And this is definitely the direction we should be moving when it comes to conventional agriculture. It's just not clear to me if that on its own is going to be able to keep up with the increasing demand. Arlene and Corvallis, Oregon, you're next. Hi, Arlene. Hi. Hi, go for it. Thank you. Yeah. So my first comment is about something that was discussed earlier about why wouldn't a vegan or a vegetarian eat this product? And I think you're missing a key point that

one of the reasons people choose to not eat meat is because we don't want the flesh of an animal in our mouth to begin with. We just don't agree with consuming animals, period, right? So I think you kind of miss that point. Secondly, the idea of creating a new product that maybe blends properties from different animals. To me, that sounds like a slippery slope as well, because you're introducing the idea of consuming an animal that might not have been previously consumed, and if that is something that is desirable after consuming that, that might perpetuate the harvest of those animals, whether they're wild or otherwise. So I just wanted to put those two thoughts out there. Thank you. Thanks for that contribution. Andrew, any reaction?

Yeah, no, I think they're both really great points. I think that from the perspective of, you know, why vegans and vegetarians might not choose to consume these products. And touching back on one of the earlier questions and points that was brought up, you know, I think a lot of people in the field kind of say, you know, if you're vegan and you don't want to try this product, awesome. You know, getting back to that caloric efficiency, we can maybe do better than a cow, but we'll never do better than a plant on a caloric efficiency. right? Because one calorie of a plant is one calorie of a plant. So from an environmental standpoint, you know, for people that are happy just consuming plants, then, you know, by all means, continue to live that lifestyle. And, you know, I think that's incredible and wonderful. It's more to Aria's point for the people who don't make that change. And due to the fact that the trends,

we keep seeing that the population on a whole is moving away from that direction rather than towards that direction. Well, how many years down the road do you imagine that it'll take sell ag meat to be affordable to the average person and in competition with actual meat market? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, go ahead. No, no, I was going to plead the fifth on the question. So it's all you are you. Are you? You want to tackle that? Yeah, I mean, it certainly depends on, you know, the product that we're talking about, you know, chicken, for example, is very different from, you know, when we're talking about, bluefin tuna. But, you know, I think in general where the projections have landed is that within the next five years, we should be able to see production approach price parity. And, you know, even before

then, I think that companies will be selling at a loss just to, you know, get customer feedback and improve, you know, kind of what we're able to produce. So many more questions, so many more phone calls. We'll have to save it for the next time. Thank you both. Andrew Stout Cellular Agriculture Biologist in Boston and Arya Elfinbine, co-founder of Wild Type based in San Francisco. Thanks again for joining us today. Thank you so much, Ira. Thank you very much.

You're welcome. It's wonderful. Here's Valissa Mayors with some of the folks who helped make this show happen. Thanks, Ira. John Donkowski is our director of news and audio. Diana Montano is our experiences manager. Beth Rami is our controller. And I'm office manager, Valisa Mayors.

Thanks for listeners. And thank you, Melissa. B.J. Leiderman composed our theme music, and we had helped this hour from audio engineers Lisa Gosselin and Kevin Wolf. And of course, if you missed any part of the program, or you'd like to hear it again. Subscribe to our podcast or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. And you can contact us our old-fashioned email address, SciFri at ScienceFri.com. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato.