Transcriber: Ile Mon Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
So, power of small.
This could have also been deconstruction.
We have seen the universe deconstructed,
we have seen management deconstructed,
we have seen construction being deconstructed,
and ego being deconstructed,
and I'm going to deconstruct a cow for you.
Which might seem a little bit odd,
and why would you do such a thing,
and I will explain.
First of all, are there any vegetarians in here?
It's hard to see, about 4 or 5, which is pretty much
the average for the Netherlands, and for every industrial population.
You can doze off for a while...
I'm talking to the meat eaters right now.
After five minutes, you can wake up
because then it becomes really interesting,
but I'm first going to tell you
what the problems are with meat production.
So it all has to do with that these animals,
these pigs and cows were never really designed
and never had an evolution to serve as dinner for us,
so they are not necessarily efficient,
and in fact, they are very, very inefficient:
for every 15 grams of meat that we eat,
we have to feed those animals 100 grams of vegetable proteins.
And so they have a bioconversion rate of 15 %.
Already as we speak, livestock is using 70%
of all our arable lands in the world.
And what's even worse,
the World Health Organization is predicting,
that in 2050, meat consumption will be double what it is right now
because of growing middle class in India, China, Brazil, Africa.
So you can do the math, that's not going to work,
and we need to come up with a solution.
That's not the only problem, so food security is serious,
but that's not the only problem.
By now, we also know
that these animals, being ruminants,
actually excrete a whole lot of methane and CO².
Now the ruminologists among you might say,
well, actually, they don't fart methane,
they belch methane, but, you know
either way it comes out, and it gets into our atmosphere
and it's a greenhouse gas, it's a very noxious greenhouse gas.
So, that's another issue:
20% of all the greenhouse gas emission comes from livestock.
So, a vegetarian with a Hummer is actually better for the environment
than a meat-eater with a bicycle. Right?
(Laughter)
And then there's of course animal welfare issues.
I won't dwell on it but we all know it and we sort of hide it
and we don't want to talk about it, so,
can we have a solution for that problem?
And in fact in 1932, Winston Churchill of all people
mentioned in his book "Thoughts and adventures" that
why would we actually grow an entire chicken
if we only eat the breast and the wing?
And he was befriended,
--he was of course a statesman, so what did he know about biology?--
but he had a friend, Alexis Carrel,
who was a Nobel prize winning physiologist
and he at the first time, at that time, could keep organs alive
outside of the body.
He couldn't make organs, he couldn't create them,
but he could keep them alive outside of the body,
and from then they went on dreaming,
what if we can also create these organs?
At that time it just wasn't possible but nowadays,
thanks to the advances in the medical field,
we have stem cell technology, we have tissue engineering,
and we are getting there.
So, let's see how that works.
Let's deconstruct this cow.
You take a biopsy from a cow,
that will give you a small piece of muscle,
and muscle of course is the main ingredient of meat.
Not the only one, I'll come back to that later,
but we have this piece of muscle,
and if you look at that piece of muscle
under the microscope, you'll see muscle
and you'll also see fat tissue, which gives some of the taste.
And if you then look even closer at this material,
you will see the skeletal muscle,
the muscle cells, and there are tiny cells in there
that are stem cells.
Muscle stem cells, that only can make muscle.
They're sitting there, waiting to repair the muscle
once it's injured.
Think about Robben at the European Soccer Championship
three or four years ago.
So they are sitting there, waiting to repair
and they have a couple of very nice characteristics.
Being stem cells, they can divide,
they can multiply to tremendous numbers.
Actually, from one stem cell,
we can make 10,000 kilos of meat, theoretically.
So, that is one of the crazy features of these cells,
they can divide, they can multiply,
they can make an entire mass of muscle.
But these particular skeletal muscle cells
are even more, sort of special, because they merge.
They have to merge because
a muscle fibre is actually a large fibre with lots of nuclei.
It's a merger of a number of cells,
and they do that pretty much by themselves.
The only thing that we do is we starve them,
and once we starve them,
they stop proliferating and they start to merge into large fibers.
And then there is another cool thing,
that if you put them in a petri dish
and you provide anchor points.
-- and we use velcro for that,
klittenbands, I bought this morning at the Hema here in Haarlem.
And so we use actually the loop part of the velcro,
it works a little bit better than the hook part,
don't ask me why but it's just empirical.
And we actually use the same from the Heima.
And if you put that in your petri dish
and you provide anchor points for those cells,
they start to grab on it.
They are actually exercise junkies, if you like,
so we don't have to do anything they exercise themselves,
they grab onto these anchor points
and provide tension and they form a muscle,
I will show a picture a little bit later.
They form a muscle, provide tension, start to contract even,
and with that they will exercise themselves
and they will grow tissue, muscle fibers, small muscle fibers.
If you just take a large number of those muscle fibers,
20,000 to be exact, you can assemble a patty, a hamburger,
and that's exactly what we have done.
Of course you can also add fat to it.
Now this hamburger contains 60 billion cells, so that's a lot.
You need to culture a lot of cells
and you need to somehow find a way to do that efficiently
because, remember, we have to be more efficient than a cow or a pig.
Currently we are using an inefficient system for it,
and eventually we are going to use a bioreactor,
a silver tank like this of 25,000 litre
that is a sizeable pool, an olympic pool I guess,
but with that you can feed 40,000 people per year,
so that is already reasonable.
Of course, I already said,
it has to be efficient and it has to also be meat,
not some kind of substitute.
We have more than enough substitutes, from vegetable proteins.
It needs really to be meat.
And nothing less and nothing more.
So mimicry is very very important, now what do you want in meat?
You want of course taste, you want it to be red or pink or whatever
but not yellow or white,
and you want to have that particular mouthfeel of the meat.
So how do we do that? Well, currently this is where we are.
This hamburger on your left was assembled a couple of weeks ago
from 8,000 of those muscle strips
individually prepared in these culture dishes,
taken out, harvested,
making a patty out of it.
And you see it's pretty close, wouldn't you say?
Reasonably close.
On the other side you see the cooked one,
actually, one is a regular one from a cow, and the other is ours.
And most of the people we fooled
by letting them guess which one is which, they found it hard to tell.
We did cheat a little bit here, because we painted this hamburger
with beet juice from red beets which are actually purple
so we added a little bit of saffron to it
to make it a little bit more yellow and red.
So the fibers are not quite red yet, they are yellow to be honest,
because there is no blood in the system
and what's more, there is no myoglobin in the system
or not enough myoglobin.
Myoglobin is a protein in those skeletal muscle cells
that is very similar to hemoglobin in our blood.
It turns red if it's exposed to oxygen,
and muscle cells typically have a whole lot of it.
Now, there are a fair amount of clues
how you would induce that myoglobin in these tissues,
and a talented postdoc in the lab
started to work on actually starving the cells of oxygen.
So low oxygen, we have systems for that, very easy to do,
and then you see that myoglobin actually goes five fold up.
There was also a report that caffeine, which is kind of interesting,
caffeine would also induce that myoglobin,
so the only thing is you couldn't eat hamburgers at night
but, you know, that's a minor detail.
Fortunately for us, the caffeine really didn't work,
so we can revert to the lower oxygen,
and we can in that way stimulate the myoglobin
and turn our fibers into pink fibers.
We haven't done that yet
because we have only one of those incubators
with a low oxygen capacity
so all the others are just regular oxygen
but that's just a matter of how you organize it,
it can be done.
Of course we need to feed those cells.
-- now we get to efficiency --
We still need to feed them.
We need to feed them sugars, we need to feed them aminoacids,
we need to feed them lipids.
Which by the way also gives us opportunities to change,
use the biochemistry of the cell,
of that very smart cell, which we really don't do anything with
other than feeding it, and providing those anchor points.
We use the biochemistry of these cells
to produce more polyunsaturated fatty acids.
We know they can do it, because if grazing animals
have a higher polyunsaturated fatty acid fat
than animals being fed from a feed lock,
so we know they have the capacity to do it,
they just usually don't.
So we can use that biochemistry in the lab
because we have all those variables very tightly under control
to make it more efficient, to provide those proteins,
and aminoacids in the right way,
and to give fatty acids to make it into a healthier fat
and a healthier burger.
So this is the system,
it looks like a refrigerator but it's in fact the opposite
it's 37º C like our body, we call it an incubator.
And the cells grow in there for a while.
It takes about 7-8 weeks to grow a muscle fiber
and so also 7-8 weeks to grow a hamburger.
You could do it at home if you like.
Needs quite a bit of space still, but
eventually you can do it at home
in your kitchen if you have the right equipment,
it's very very easy to do.
And in fact those stem cells, which is kind of interesting,
that you could envision they survive
freezing drying, so you could envision
that over the internet, we would eventually sell
little, sort of, tea bags of stem cells
from tuna, from tiger, from cows, from pigs,
from whatever animal you can imagine!
And then you could in your own--
in the comfort of your own kitchen,
you could grow your own tissue.
You would have to know
8 weeks in advance what you want to eat,
because it takes a while.
(Laughter)
But it's a minor detail.
Anyway. So the process right now, what I'm trying to tell you,
the process right now is not really efficient.
But we have all the variables under control so that
we can eventually make it efficient.
And if we go from 2D to 3D culture,
we actually make a huge step in efficiency.
So, that's our next step.
And we also are dreaming of feeding those cells algae, salt-water algae.
I'm thinking that the first factory is going to be
at the mouth of the Mississippi,
which is an algae dead zone,
a huge, huge algae dead zone,
that we can harvest those algae there,
mesh them up and feed them to our cells,
because these cells are not very picky.
So, you could combine those technologies
to make it even more efficient and
you can also build in recycling mechanisms to improve the efficiency.
And then of course I've already told you that
these are exercise junkies.
They really perform labor in there,
but we want to get from a muscle like this
to what I call a "Schwarzenegger bull".
This is in fact a blanc bleu belge.
I don't know whether you recognize them,
this is a particular strain in Belgium,
and these animals actually have a mutation,
a natural mutation in a protein that limits muscle growth.
So, we don't want limitation of muscle growth in the petri dish,
so, we are also using the stem cells of these guys to see
whether we can improve protein concentration.
Now, this is the cool part.
Imagine those cells where we have taken them out of a biopsy.
They grow out of that muscle.
They have become from 1 to 10 ^14 cells, 10,000 kilos of meat,
and then we put them in a gel in between two anchor points.
And you see that on your left here,
and it's a gel and here the anchors are not velcro
but are silk wires, it's all the same.
24 hours after this, if you take the same picture,
they have organized that gel,
and they have organized it into a muscle fiber
in between those anchor points.
Basically, already a muscle.
Then they need another three weeks of maturing
to build a full muscle.
Now, we can also electro-stimulate them, we can zap them.
then they will contract even more and they will produce fibers
that are indistinguishable from the real thing.
But of course, that takes a lot of energy.
And in fact our muscle in our body is not really electrically stimulated,
it's chemically stimulated, so we might eventually
take another mechanism and give the chemical stimulus
sort of in a repetitive manner to train those muscles even more.
And now you would say, the skeletal muscle
is not the only component of meat.
We want fat in there, we want really marbled steaks,
we want, you know, juicy stuff.
And maybe you want a T-bone steak even, if you are really into it.
So, can you make that as well?
And of course we can make that as well,
we can pretty much make everything.
Excuse me, I'm going too fast.
We can make those-- we can use those stem cells also
to create fat tissue.
And in fact, we have already done that.
For the current prototype hamburger we haven't yet,
because it's really cumbersome to do them all at the same time,
but it can be done and we have shown that it can be done.
And currently we are using that with very varied methods
that are compatible with eating.
Now currently we are making these small fibers,
which is good for processed meats such as a hamburger,
and which is, by the way, about 50 % of all the meat consumption;
so, you know, even if we would stick to that,
we would already make a big step ahead,
but my ambition is actually to make a steak or a pork chop.
So what would you need to do, that's a limitation of tissue engineering
because the thicker the tissue gets, the inside cells
will be deprived of nutrients and of oxygen,
so they will start to die.
So, that's why we have blood vessels,
and I also make blood vessels,
I would like to make blood vessels, it's not particularly
necessary in these tissues because we don't have any blood,
but we still need a channel system, in a flow system
to get all the nutrients and oxygen
to all the nooks and crannies of that tissue.
And that can be done.
Friends of mine in California have a 3D printer
where you 3D print, basically, a steak, you print the cells
and you print the material, and you print those little tubes
in a hierarchical manner and you have an inflow and an outflow
and you can create, in principle, thicker tissues.
So eventually we can create steaks and pork chops if you,
again, are into it.
OK, so then there is another final challenge, minor one.
Will people ever eat this?
It's coming out of a factory, or out of a lab even,
it's sort of Frankenstein-ish, creepy, you know, whatever...
So will people eat this? And if you go with a microphone
through the streets of Haarlem and you, sort of randomly ask people,
they'll say, "No way, are you out of your mind?"
But if you rephrase the question: "So, 20 years from now,
you walk into a supermarket
and you see those two products, those two meats.
One is made in the lab, it has an LM (lean meat) on it,
and it's cheap and it's at the same price,
it's the same taste, and the same color and the same mouthfeel,
and you have these other products that now has an eco tax
is four times more expensive because it's scarce,
and it also has this nasty little label
that animals have suffered for that product,
what are you going to choose?"
I bet the choice is going to be, you know, favorable
in terms of this particular product.
Currently this hamburger costs 250,000 euros.
Hmm, and I'd like to stress that, and also to make the point
that it's not a real product yet, it's a proof of concept.
Showing to the world, guys, we can do this.
We can make this product in an efficient way.
We actually have done some calculations which
come down to a much more reasonable price.
But we can do this, and my ambition is
to gather a lot of people and a lot of money
to do all the research that's required to, sort of
take out all the small obstacles and get these onto your plates basically.
Thank you.
(Applause)