 You can survive without food for three maybe four weeks You can survive without water for seven Or maybe ten days It doesn't get more basic when we're talking about basic needs food and water are really leading there My name is Ella Madde. I'm a founding partner at a venture fund based in San Francisco called 50 years And today I'm going to tell you about the all the problems with the current food and water systems we have And how Winston Churchill Can help us solve them Let's start with water We use fresh water for drinking sanitation Agriculture the core problem is that just there isn't enough of it In fact according to the World Health Organization millions of people lack a basic drinking water service and in low and middle-income countries over a third of Health care facilities do not have clean water and soap for hand-washing So globally over two billion people use drinking water that's contaminated with feces and on top of Being just disgusting it helps spread Diseases such as diarrhea and polio which then in result kill hundreds of thousands if not millions of people and it's just in It's not just in the developing countries in the United States Alarming levels of bacteria and viruses and even poisonous lead are found in water on a regular basis and recently a Saudi came out showing that almost all of us tap water is contaminated with micro plastics And yes, we don't fully it know what micro plastics do to us, but we know they stay in our body So we're about to find out So the state of the art of technology in water handling Is pretty lame we Have fresh water from open water sources or we dig it from the ground using pipes And then we use other pipes and trucks and ships to move that water around so water might be cheap But moving it around is very expensive and because we use fresh water On such a massive scale. We're depleting the current source. We have faster than we can replenish them In fact just a few years from now half of the world's population will be we'll be living in water stress areas Let's stop here and move on to food The good news and food is that there seems to be enough of it. The bad news is that it's not Distributed very well and it's killing us and it's killing the planet 10% of the world's population is still undernourished in 2017 and again. It's not just in the developing countries millions of Americans We're food insecure And we're food insecure as well last year and that includes 10 millions of children and In addition to that we actually need to start making more food to meet the demands of the growing populations So we clearly should have a really good technology to do that, right? Well, that is a state-of-the-art technology in protein production in 2017 it literally has not changed in thousands of years and I was Not going to guide you through Terrifying pictures from slaughterhouses to show you how we actually extract the protein But looking at the math alone can make you question if this is really the best we can do We put 30 calories in we get one calorie out. This is the current food system For beef and that's in addition to land use water use the time needed to raise those poor animals and All the ways that comes from animal agriculture In fact animal agriculture produces more greenhouse gases than all sectors of transportation combined. That's Ground transportation water transportation planes all of it and We were able to on the way create another problem, which is not just a problem It's actually an existential threat to the humanity itself because we're feeding animals antibiotics that end up in their bodies and in the soil There is a new class of bacteria growing that's just resistant to common antibiotics and that might not sound as dangerous Until you think that antibiotic resistance may be the largest killer in 2050 why because we need antibiotics that work for even a simplest surgery and When we don't have working antibiotics Children immunocompromised individuals and air daily can die of common cold and this is real because we're not Getting much better We're not creating more antibiotics right now so you can ask what the heck does Winster Churchill has to do with all of that well in 1931 he wrote this amazing essay called 50 years hence and In that essay he was looking at all the developments that were happening in science and he was looking at all the Developments in engineering and he was thinking about the state of the world So he starts that essay by saying that the great mass of human beings is only dimly conscious of the pace Which at which the mind kind mankind has begun to travel and Then he talks about what's going to happen And he makes the brave thesis that by observing science we can predict and also design the world and Applying it to food He said 86 years ago and I'll read it in hall We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or a wink by growing these parts separately Under a suitable medium So in 86 years ago he essentially predicted cellular agriculture what's only becoming possible now and He doesn't start there in that essay written I'm reminding you in the early 30s. He was talking about using bacteria and yeast as Platforms for making proteins and other materials. He talks about Harvesting solar wind and even nuclear energy He talks about advanced nano engineering and putting together atoms directly to make novel types of material he talks about Climate control and geoengineering he predicts wireless communication Genetic modification end of disease. It's pretty mind-boggling how just looking at Where this what was the state of science in the 1930s and reasoning from there? He was able to predict those things and a great part about that essay is at the end He talks about the immense powers that scientists and us technologists have and he talks about that with the great power comes great Responsibility and we should all be taking a principled approach to our work and in fact we named our firm we named our firm after that essay So since 2015 we've been we've been investing in brave Technological solutions to the world's biggest problems and in the last 32 years in the last two and a half years We we invested in 32 companies including the now famous Memphis meats, which is growing real clean meat outside of animals a Company building novel proteins with plans and a company using Computer vision sensors and machine learning to reinvent the way we farm So the less in the last almost three years we've learned some lessons from Winston and from the entrepreneurs were able to back first Yes, look at the past But remember you're in the business of building the future So apply scientific rigor and the principles engineering the problem solving and specifically to solving the biggest problems in the world and We see that the best entrepreneurs start with first principles and they don't settle for small improvements For the five ten percent improvement they the best entrepreneurs Imagine the world what the world could be and they find a way to take to work backwards from there Finally take responsibility For the world around you and if you're working on something impactful Remember about all the impacts it can have So let's get back to food and water Some interesting technologies in water we can talk about industrial desalination different types of filters from From nanofilters to UV and micro microbiological solutions for purification we can even Think if chemical synthesis of water would be Would it be a viable solution at large scale, but I want to tell you about a new type of porous crystals called metal or granic frameworks and they're really excited because with them we can be taking water from air so there's a mind-boggling hundreds of millions of billions of liters of water in the air in the form of vapor and That water gets replenished daily and it's just there. So I think the type of Revolution that's been happening for fossil fuels when we're taking stuff from the ground and moving it around and pipes and ships and trucks To solar where we just harvest the energy that's there is going to happen for water a a small Cube of metal or granic crystal of a size of a of a of a Sugar cube Has an internal surface area of a football field So those materials can absorb crazy amounts of water and there's no reason to to doubt that in a few years This is how we will be getting our water even in the driest places on earth Let's get back to food There are multiple ways in which we can fix the existing food systems And some of them are just getting ready for scale And I think the food system is about to see a massive transformation You're going to hear about different types of plant proteins that some of them We haven't used before and for some of them We're going to use new applique some of them. We're going to find new applications for we can harvest protein from insects for algae and mycelium which I'm personally very excited about we can Get novel ingredients and and protein to eat from yeast fermentation and we can feed methane to bacteria To make stuff for us But I want to draw your attention again to cellular agriculture to this new idea of instead of Using animals as bioreactors to make food Using their cells directly in that way you can farm the cells outside of animals in a matter of weeks Not days and reduce the land and water and energy consumptions by You up to 99% So here I want to finish by quoting Winston We know enough to be sure That scientific achievements of the next 50 years will be far greater more rapid and more surprising than those we have already experience and to that we at 50 years Channel our inner Winston and we say bring it on Thank you