Meet the new meat: Mark Post at TEDxHaarlem

A hamburger of grown meat! Mark Post, a physiology professor at the university of Utrecht and Harvard, is working on tissue engineering, cultivating beef from skeletal muscle stem cells, creating an alternative for traditional meat production, by cows and other livestock themselves. He plans to present the world's first hamburger from cultured beef in the beginning of 2013.

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)