 There are many problems with the current wheat production that we will soon encounter actually. So if you think about a quarter pounder hamburger, which is a quarter pound of beef, then seven pounds of grain go into that. Fifty gallons of water, fresh water already alluded to go into that. Seventy square feet of land and about 1,000 BTU of energy. That's a lot of resources that go into a simple hamburger. That's all because we feed cows and the cows then feed us. But the intermediate, the cow is a very, very inefficient animal in terms of converting the vegetables that they eat in the vegetable proteins into animal edible proteins to such an extent that we currently are already using 70% of all our arable land to produce meat and we could use that land for other purposes. In addition, it's increasingly known that our livestock industry is a big emitter of greenhouse gases. Allegedly the same as our transport industry. So those cows, and since I know these numbers, I look at cows in the pasture and I think about these clouds of methane that come out of it. So there are pressing reasons to start thinking about an alternative way of producing meat. And that's not only because we go from 7 to 9 billion people or 10, but also because meat consumption is pretty much related to the gross domestic product of a country. And as the gross domestic product of some countries, in particular India and China, is going up, meat consumption will increase. So this is the human trophic level. It's where we are in the food chain. If it's one, it's a plant. If it's two, it's an animal that eats plants. If it's three, it's an animal that eats animals that eats plants. And we are at 2.3, meaning that 30% of all our proteins come from animals that eat plants. So we are at 2.3 and then India and China went up for the last 30 years and are gradually creeping up to that 2.3. We're indicating, and here is the correlation between the human trophic level and the gross domestic product. And you see there is perfect correlation. Whenever countries become richer, middle-class incomes rise in numbers, people will start to eat meat. The story of human evolution is one that is intimately tied to meat. Once we started cooking meat, then we could get lots of energy. And that energy enabled us to have big brains and become physically, anatomically human. Hunters and gatherers all over the world are very sad if, for a few days at a time, the hunters come back empty-handed. The camp becomes quiet. The dancing stops. And then somebody catches some meat. They bring the prey into the camp or nowadays into somebody's back garden with a barbecue, and everybody gets excited to come and share the meat. It is ritually cut and passed out to people. We are a species designed to love meat. Feeding the world is a complex problem. I think people don't yet realize what an impact meat consumption has on the planet. 18% of our greenhouse gas emissions come from meat production. We're also using something like 1,500 gallons of water to produce just one pound of meat. Meat takes up about 70% of our arable lands. There's no question that if we were able to shift more of our land into intensive fruit and vegetable production, we'd be able to feed a lot more people a lot healthier diet. With the global population growing from 7 billion to 9 billion people, in 2050, the demand for meat will double. We can't just continue doing what we've been doing. Unless we make some changes in how we produce meat on this planet, we're in for a terrible reckoning. Meat consumption was part of the human species. It's been fantastically beneficial for us. And now, by some horrendous irony, it's become part of a system that threatens our species. We have to do something about it. So these guys, much more eloquently than I can, express the need to do something. And of course, we can all become vegetarians. It looks actually very appetizing. And some of you are experienced there. And not only some of you, but 2 billion people on this planet are vegetarian, mostly involuntarily. And they live happy lives, they live creative lives, procreative lives. So there's nothing wrong. We don't need animal proteins. That's just a myth that we need them. We don't need them. However, we like the product. We are, according to Richard Rangham, a species designed to love meat. And that especially resonates with me. I know all the problems with me eating, but I am a meat eater. And I will continue eating meat. So that's why it is also particularly in my own interest to create a product that has the same quality. And it's actually exactly the same, but is derived in a different way. So what's the other option? Since about 2000, we know that all our muscle cells have stem cells in them. They are sitting there waiting to repair tissue in case of injury. What you can do is you can take them out, take a biopsy from a cow, get a small piece of muscle out of it, one centimeter long, one millimeter in diameter. That already has a couple of hundred of those stem cells. Very, very high in density of stem cells. So if you take that under the microscope and you separate the muscle cells from the fat cells, then you can also isolate these stem cells. They can replicate, and they can replicate to the extent that from that one piece of muscle, we can produce 10,000 kilos of beef. So that means that you can basically reduce the total herd of cows in the world from half a billion to, let's say, 30,000. So the replicative capacity is tremendous. And since these are designated stem cells, muscle stem cells, they will start to produce muscle tissue when we provide the right conditions. And so first what they should do, they should merge, because a muscle cell is structure of a lot of other cells. So they should merge. And if we starve them, they start to merge. Then an interesting thing needs to occur. They need to start to perform labor. Because labor, as we all know, exercise will increase the muscle mass, will increase protein mass, and protein is what we are interested in. Muscle is always attached to tendons. It always builds up tension. And that tension is actually the biggest trigger for these cells to produce the proteins that we are interested in. So what we do, we basically, we grow them in donuts around the central column. And then if you wait three weeks, they have started to build up that tension and they have moved into or differentiated into a full-fledged muscle cell that under the microscope is not distinguishable anymore from a muscle cell that you get from a steak from Walmart. So basically what we did is we grew 10,000 of those muscle fibers and produced a hamburger. We decided, this is a proof of concept, we decided to, in a sort of hybrid between a cooking show and a press conference to show that to the world for two reasons. One, to sort of cut the discussion, hey guys, you know, this is not a myth, this is not a fantasy, this can be done. And second, by the way, it also needs to be done because we have a crisis coming up in meat production and meat consumption. So this is a very small video of that presentation. We presented it appropriately in a Petri dish. It was cooked by a very courageous chef, remind you, this was a quarter million dollar hamburger and it was eaten by two volunteers and tasted to people from the food critic and the food journalist community and they said it was okay. For a quarter million dollar hamburger we expected a little bit more but it was okay and what's more importantly they said, well, yes, it's definitely meat and it has the consistency of meat. The taste is okay, it's a little bit bland, there was no fat in it yet, it was pure muscle and I did completely agree actually with their assessment. So then you have a proof of concept which is nice but it's still, you know, not a marketable proposition, a quarter million dollars. So what is required for this to make it into a product? One is we have to be able to produce it in an efficient way, in a resource efficient way, much more efficient than the cow is. Second, it has to be internally sustainable, that means that all the stuff that we put in there has to be either reusable or in plenty quantity present. And third, it has to be exactly the same as meat because it's not the animal protein we're looking for, it's the meat product that we are looking for. So how do we go about that? For that hamburger we cultured 30 billion cells. If you know anything about cell culture, you know that inherently it's not a very efficient process, it's not a very environmentally friendly process, you need a lot of plastic but we already know that we can grow it in 25,000 liter vats for mentors on microcarriers that are reusable and that way we can scale up production and that scaling up is actually essential to make it efficient. So there was an initial life cycle analysis on what would this mean for land and water and energy usage from the University of Oxford and they basically estimated that obviously we can cut tremendously on the amount of land, about 90% amount of water, not an important 90% and energy about 60, 70% depending on where in the world you are doing this. So this is still preliminary but it's a boost obviously for this particular developer. This is a busy slide and it should actually be much busier than this. What we are doing in terms of sustainability, one of the factors that is necessary or has been necessary in cell culture for about 130 years is that you use a blood-derived product to keep the cells alive and to keep them thriving which is called the serum, basically the blood without the cells. And this happens to come from cows. So when we reduce the number of cows as we propose then we won't have enough serum to grow the cells. So we have to get rid of the serum as well. Fortunately for a fair number of cells that has been already developed not for muscle cells. And these are just 30 or so conditions where we tested the proliferation of these cells under serum-containing and serum-free conditions. The red arrows are all serum-containing conditions but the two blue ones are serum-free. And they grow reasonably well on the serum-free up to the point that they are almost the same as serum-containing. So that problem can be cracked and will eventually be cracked completely. In terms of mimicry, I'm just giving a couple of examples. These cells actually don't express a sufficient amount of a protein called myoglobin which is the iron-carrying protein. And that's because we culture them under oxygen conditions that are ambient and turn out to be too high for muscle cells in cell culture. So what we did, we reduced the oxygen concentration and then the myoglobin concentration goes up fivefold. It's a very simple intervention and it's just an example to show that by changing the variables of this cell culture you can actually arrive at a product that is essentially the same as muscle tissue and that is efficiently produced. We're also culturing fat tissue right now. Remember those taster said, well, yeah, it's on the dry side. So now we are culturing fat tissue and it actually can be done pretty easily. These cells coming from the fat tissue from the biopsy that you take and here is our samples of those fat tissues. These are spaghetties of fat tissue that we have created through ways by stimulating the stem cells with naturally occurring fatty acids so that they become fat cells. Then the fourth requirement is that it needs to be accepted. Is it fear for the unknown? Is it lack of control of over how food is being produced? Is it natural or unnatural? How do we work with these sort of qualifications? It's interesting to me that there is a whole culture around meat eating that supposedly drives us to eat meat but also drives us at the same time to reject these types of alternatives. The news is not that bad. When we did a survey among Brits and Dutch people whether they would want to eat this about 52% at least of the Dutch people and 60% of the English people the Brits said, yes, we actually would eat that. So it's not that bad. It's an intellectual exercise that we didn't present the hamburgers in front of them and have them eat it but at least they expressed interest in it and they understand that's the nice thing about this product although it may have sort of visions of futuristic, very technical foods there is a good rationale behind it and people understand that very well. So another interesting thing is that this is supposed to be a hot dog and people eat hot dogs. Do I need to say more? Most people don't know what's in it most people don't want to know how it's being produced and yet you eat it. So why is that? In my mind it all has to do well it's cheap and it's for people who like it it's palatable but it's also safe. You have seen a lot of people eating hot dogs and they live, they stay alive which is a miracle in and by itself. That's an aspect of every new food if it's produced in a new way if it's safe or not and that will just require time to get over that and see it being eaten by a lot of other people. The lack of control you can do something about that. There's a technology that is simple enough so that you can do this in your kitchen instead of having, or in addition to having a vegetable garden you can have a microwave type of equipment in your kitchen where you can produce your meat for your own family. You have to know about nine weeks in advance what you want to eat so there's a downside to it but it can be done and it can be done at any other scale at a scale where you can't have control. This is Pookie. Pookie is a pig that lives in a neighborhood in a small city. It has a couple of brothers and sisters in the same farm, not more. It's fed by the kids of the community. The name Pookie is given by the kids of the community. Once in a while you poke them in the butt, take stem cells and in a barn adjacent to the farm you grow the pork for that community. Then you have full control. You can visit the barn on Sundays with your kids and see the produce of Pookie and then you have full control over how your food is being produced. Yes, that can be done. The other thing I alluded to it is that food is always associated with culture and with emotion. I think when we eat meat there is this aspect well first of all there is this aspect of nutritional value, the heme protein with the iron but there are also aspects of dominance such as the sort of hunting instinct in us, the romance of fire and preparation of food and that is obviously not associated with a lab or a laboratory person. So when this technology develops and we start to eat meat that comes from different sources our whole concept of what meat is is inevitably going to change. It will no longer be a product coming from an animal that we have killed that we have hunted down, that we have killed that we have showed dominance over and that we have sort of a romantic fire experience cooked it. It becomes a very, very different product with advantages and disadvantages. So you can make this in all shapes and forms. You can be very creative about this. You can make it more palatable for kids colorful in all sorts of forms. But you can also change and that's more important to me you can also change those fatty acids that are sitting in those fat cells to be more omega-3 rich. So you can create a healthier product so that at some point your physician prescribes two weekly visits to McDonald's. Now the fifth requirement obviously for this to become a marketable product is that the price has to come down for that quarter million dollar. And we worked with one of the largest companies that produce stem cells for a medical application and they have a model, a cell culture model in which all the costs are involved and we entered our data into their model. It's basically how many cells you can get from that small tissue and how many cells you can culture per milliliter of that fluid. And so they run through the model with all the different phases of cell culture and then they arrived actually at a cost currently with the current technology. No improvements whatsoever just scaling up of $65 per kilo which is still very, very high but it's already sort of in the realm of what the upper end meat industry is used to. Do you know by any chance what the most expensive hamburger is in the world right now? It's $450. It's not only the meat, it comes with all sorts of other stuff of course. But this is not my ambition. It's not my ambition to make a product for a couple of wealthy people. It's the ambition to make a bulk product to serve the world. So we are ways away from it but with one giant step we get close already and I think that the technology can improve and we know where to do that to take this cost even further down. I have gotten used to the idea and I hope you kind of got used to the idea that at some point in time maybe five to ten years from now we will have cultured meat as a choice in our food and although I haven't talked about animal welfare because for me the food security and the environmental issues are more important than animal welfare that's a personal choice for consumers. The fact that we can create meat and keep on eating meat without having an imaginary vegan girlfriend looking over our shoulder and sort of tapping into our conscience will be a big consumer decisive issue. So the ethical issues are probably driving consumers to eventually choose for that because if you imagine that you walk let's say ten years from now and you have those two products that are essentially the same there are essentially the same tissue one says may have a label very similar to smoking kills you but now an animal has been used for this product and the other is animal free and there's no eco-tex and that sort of thing then the choice becomes really hard or maybe really easy that's my dream that's what I wanted to share with you and myself I'm pretty confident that this is going to happen.