[MUSIC PLAYING]
DAVID BERRY: Thank you for the opportunity
to speak here today.
I'm going to talk about a little bit of a way that we
can rethink the way we think about food.
When you look at where we are today, we have a world that's
already exhausted in feeding seven billion people.
Now going forward, we've got to add another
two billion to that.
To do that, we have to increase the amount of food
that everyone's eating, because that's the trend line
that we're seeing.
We're going to increase the amount of animal feed.
We're going to increase the amount of fuel that each
person is consuming, which of course is becoming more
dependent an agricultural land.
And we have to do all of this over the next handful of
years, at the same time without getting any more water
than we've had on this Earth since the beginning of time.
And we have to do it without hopefully wrecking our
environment any more than we've started out.
So we've got a little bit of a challenge here today.
The solution we use today is what we call agriculture.
Now agriculture today basically uses up 75% of all
of our fresh water, consumes about 40% of all land-- not
just arable land, all land in the world-- emits more
greenhouse gases than the entirety of the transportation
sector, yet at the same time leaves one billion people
chronically undernourished and another two billion people
suffering from regular malnutrition.
And on top of that the nutrition system that we have
today takes the people that we consider well-nourished, i.e.
us Americans, and gives us a set of nutrients that drives
most of the morbidity and the mortality we know today.
Think nutrients in our food, like cholesterol, like fat,
like high-fructose corn syrup.
I challenge most of you to look at most of the things
that people eat on a regular basis and find something that
doesn't have that.
And those are the drivers of obesity, of diabetes, of
cancer, and of heart disease.
So we look at this system.
And we say, well, it's working.
But at the end of the day, it's actually
already a broken system.
And it's going to be stressed to an incredible
degree going forward.
So we ask the question of, well, is there actually
something that we can do here.
So the first question is-- as Astro was laying out-- that we
started to ask is how do we actually think about food?
Well, food as we know it today does two things.
One is it provides the fundamental nutrition that we
need to live.
It provides proteins.
It provides fats, sugars, vitamins, minerals.
But it also is something that provides pleasure and is tied
in inextricably with our social fabric.
We think about it as something that we actually enjoy.
And so the first instinct that people have when you say we
want to rethink nutrition is, well, I don't want to give up
my Big Mac.
I don't want to give up my porterhouse steak.
But the question is really what would happen if we
actually separated out our nutrition from food so that we
all went through the day knowing as of the first moment
that our nutrition was taken care of, and we could enjoy
food for the purpose of enjoyment, for the purpose of
our social fabric.
Not for the purpose of getting rid of it, but now changing
the utility and not trying to combine all of
that into one approach.
So what I'm going to tell you a little about is an approach
that [? Nubar ?] and I have been working on, an approach
we call NutraCulture that's attempting to do
basically just that.
So what NutraCulture is is something that combines
cutting edge protein science, the world's first truly
molecular understanding of nutrition, and ultra low-cost,
ultra-sustainable production systems. So ultimately what
we're doing is giving the world the ability to produce
nutrients for the first time in a way that's entirely
independent of arable land, independent of fresh water,
that minimizes greenhouse gases, and is able to produce
nutrients at less than a tenth of the minimum
cost that we see today.
Do it predictably and do it sustainably and tailor the
nutrients that we actually produce to the
actual needs of people.
Now, of course, our system that we use today is
agriculture.
What we've started out by doing is basically looking at
agriculture, looking at what it does well, take the things
that it does well, streamline them, optimize them, and
systematically improve them.
The good thing is agriculture has given us a ton of headway.
Since the beginning of agriculture about 10,000 years
ago, we've improved net field level productivity only about
six-fold or so.
And when you think about it, it's sort of logical.
A cow is not the most efficient transducer of solar
energy into protein nutrition.
So what we said is when we look at this, well let's start
from the beginning.
What we did is we took single-cell photosynthetic
organisms. We asked the question, can we find
something that has the right features, the ability to live
in salt water, the ability to have a robustness for a
process which I'll come back to, the ability to withstand
the right sorts of thermal tolerances to be able to be
productive outside, and the ability to produce at very,
very high qualities.
So we screened several thousand organisms
that exist on Earth.
It turns out there's a very small number of them that have
all the qualities that we want.
And it turns out, unfortunately, that no one was
really working on them.
So we don't get the tools given to us.
And what we've done is taken these organisms and given them
the ability to directly take in sunlight, CO2, non-fresh
water, and one other thing depending on what we're
making, and directly secrete out a pure nutrient.
So ultimately you can think of this as something that acts as
a catalyst to take minimal ingredients and produce the
pure nutrition that we ultimately need.
Now the way we do this-- we take the cells that we've
started out.
We look at them in a detailed metabolic and biochemical way,
and basically figure out how we can take out all the
regulatory constraints, allow the cells to be driven as fast
as they possibly can, and give them the capability to secrete
the specific nutrient and only that nutrient that we want.
So in this way what we ultimately do is we create a
continuous process, as opposed to the expensive batch
processes that hamper a lot of industrial processes.
We start our separations process.
And then we can reduce the traditional highest cost
barrier to being able to produce anything industrial,
which is the separations, and get a pure product at the end.
The other component that goes into this is the system in
which we actually produce this.
So after you get the cell that's a very high producing
cell, you need to grow it in something where it's a
transparent system that's closed off so you don't get
evaporation, that allows the CO2, which comes in in gas
form to come into the liquid form in as efficiently way as
possible which involves some form of mixing.
The cells it turns out-- and this is the same with plants--
don't want constant light.
They want light coming in at about one tenth of a second
bright light and then 0.9 seconds dark light.
Don't ask why they were designed that way.
But that's the way that they actually turn to work out the
best. And on top of that you need to be able to engage all
of the mixing that's needed for that.
You need to off-gas your oxygen.
You need a material that doesn't interact with cells or
the product.
Put all that together and we need to also do that with just
about no energy.
And once we solve that, hey, it's easy.
But we've been working on that for a little while.
And we've developed a pilot system that we've had the
opportunity of running in Texas.
We've learned a lot along the way.
We now have our sixth generation system that we're
testing and validating in our lab.
And the ultimate potential when you put all this together
is a system that can produce pure nutrients at up to
220,000 pounds per acre per year.
This compares to what is currently the global record
for agriculture-- this is not the average.
This is the record-- of 3600.
We can do it at less than $0.20 a pound.
And we can do it again with no dependency on arable land or
fresh water.
What does this mean as we think about global nutrition?
Well, if we want to take the system and provide baseline
protein nutrition for every single one of those
chronically undernourished people, it would take the land
area of about 250 square miles.
That's about 160,000 acres or smaller than some of the
ranches in Texas today.
If you wanted to provide complete protein nutrition to
every single person in the world, it would take the land
area the size of Rhode Island.
If you ask a lot of people, they might say that's a better
way of using Rhode Island.
But I'm not going to get into that part of the discussion.
So then the question is, well, what do you make out of this?
And we started asking the question of just saying, well,
what's the best stuff that we know of today, things like
whey, things like ovalbumin?
And when we started looking at this, we said, OK, well,
that's good.
But why is the stuff that we know today-- why does that
actually have to be the best?
And realized-- and this is actually inspired by a number
of conversations that we had-- that there may be
better stuff in there.
So what we did is we looked at food, basically everything
that humans eat on a regular basis, computationally
deconvoluted every ingredient that exists there, and run it
through Insilco assays basically to look at the
nutritional value and the physio-chemical values against
a whole series of metrics depending on what
we're trying to do.
And ultimately are able to select out from food things
that actually have true high-end performance.
So ultimately what this does is allows us to produce in
pure form really high-end ingredients that
we already eat today.
But they're now given to us in a volume that actually allows
us to take advantage of that.
And so the way I like to think about it is we're now for the
first time really understanding what is the best
stuff on Earth.
And unfortunately, it's not in Snapple.
And so we need a new way to actually think
about producing this.
We've developed a whole series of different
products thus far.
We have, for example, a product that gives you gold
standard nutrition but tastes just like sugar.
We have a product that tastes and feels just like fat.
But it actually has none of the health
consequences of fat.
We have products that can actually help you add muscle.
We have products that can actually curb one's appetite
in a good way.
And when you think about what the opportunities are, it's
really starting to ask the question of what is that we
actually want out of nutrition?
And how can we actually make the products that ultimately
get us there?
So this is, of course, a system that's meant to try to
recognize that perhaps our food was not optimally
designed for us.
After all a cow was not evolved for the specific
purpose feeding us.
Nor was a soybean evolved for making a delicious milkshake.
And so that as we can rethink things like nutrition, there
may be bigger opportunities out there.
Now we look at this and say, well, on the off chance that
we might just be half right, this is going to at least put
us down a path where we can start rethinking the
possibility of nutrition.
But we hope at a minimum by starting this rethink, we can
at least engage others in a dialogue.
And frankly in the science and the technology development, to
think about how we can enhance our fundamental nutritional
needs for the world going forward.
Because frankly we're at a point where our leash is
running short we have to do something.
Thank you.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MALE SPEAKER: Let us define x.
x is a solution, a solution to a seemingly insurmountable
problem like climate change or cancer, one
that effects the world.
But what if we redefine x as a challenge, an opportunity for
radical thinking, a chance to light up the world with
breakthrough ideas and cutting edge technology, the stuff of
science fiction that just might fly after all.
Solving for x requires wonder and imagination and a vision
to build seemingly impossible solutions to the world's
biggest problems. Solve for x.
Moon-shot thinking.