Google's Sergey Brin explains why he paid $330,000 for lab burger

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/googles-sergey-brin-explains-why-he-paid-330-000-lab-6C10853442

by codegeek • 13 years ago

45 60 13 years ago

fredley• 13 years ago

What are the cells for the burger fed on? In tissue culture it's normal to feed cells Foetal Bovine Serum. Is this the case with these cells? If so we haven't fully removed the need for living, breathing animals from the equation.

antimatter15• 13 years ago

During the Q&A session of the press event, I think he did mention that they used Fetal bovine serum, and that it worked better than the alternatives.

tovmeod• 13 years ago

maybe this is not the objective, rather having a more efficient way to produce meat, you're taking out of the equation the farm, meaning less space used, maybe healthier meat (without all the antibiotics and less fat) from one cow you can produce 10 tons of meat without all the space needed not only to raise the cows, but to grow their food, the lab can also be closer to consumers having obvious implications on that.

kentor• 13 years ago

fat is good for you. more fat please

runarberg8• 13 years ago

Well, if efficiency is the endgoal here, than bean cultivation seems way more logical answere to beef alternatives than fake meat. You basically take the the food you would otherwice feed your cows, stew it together with some saffran and beet juice (the same colorants as for the fake meat) and you have your economy-burger.

No intermediate step which takes 10 times the space of a traditional meat-farm, no anti-biotics, fat-free and no need for any living, breathing animal slughtering.

Honestly I cant find a single logical reason why this artificial-meat buisness is a good idea except for "just because we can"

Someone2• 13 years ago

The goal is not to completely get rid of the use of cows. Scroll down on http://culturedbeef.net/home/, and you will read

   "Better livestock conditions
    Cultured Beef can be produced without the slaughter
    of cattle, and far fewer cows are needed, so they
    can be reared without the need for intensive
    farming."

http://culturedbeef.net/faqs/ also states:

   "Cultured Beef is created by painlessly harvesting
    muscle cells from a living cow. Scientists then
    feed and nurture the cells so they multiply to
    create muscle tissue, which is the main component
    of the meat we eat. It is biologically exactly
    the same as the meat tissue that comes from a cow."

lechevalierd3on• 13 years ago

Yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6159743

marcuspovey• 13 years ago

...And what happens when we no longer need cows? It's not going to be happy fun time for the species, because as soon as there's not a reason to breed them then we'll have a few cows kicking around in zoos and that's it.

Good for the environment, possibly, but bad for the species.

mtgx• 13 years ago

We don't need hundreds of millions of cows, do we? I think they contribute a lot to Earth's pollution, too.

geebee• 13 years ago

http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2013/08/05/taste-testers-sa...

I've read that methane emissions from cattle contribute substantially to global warming and other pollution problems. According to the link above, this method could reduce methand emissions from cattle by 96%, and reduce the amount of land needed by 99%.

I haven't followed the link to the study at Oxford and Amsterdam University (always a good idea if you start to get excited about general science coverage). I plan to do this later.

lttlrck• 13 years ago

Do you think they are having fun now? They are bred to be eaten, if we don't need them we'll stop breeding them.

Ives• 13 years ago

A lot of them are bread for milk too... (Whether they're having fun is another question, the ones that are allowed to graze outside probably are, the ones that never see the light of day probably aren't).

corresation2• 13 years ago

Do you think they are having fun now?

That's a very existential question that doesn't have an easy answer. Is a somewhat brief existence worse than no existence at all? If we eradicate fruit flies (or the many species that live short, brutish existences), have we done them a favor?

I am a huge fan of the Omnivore's Dilemma and recommend it wholeheartedly because while Pollan faces these serious questions, he doesn't simply resort to the easy answer.

jeltz2• 13 years ago

Why wouldn't they have fun? They get a comfortable life up until the horrible end. Most cattle is not kept inside huge industrial buildings like chickens or pigs.

iak8god• 13 years ago

We can worry about that when they figure out how to make milk in the lab. Industrial meat production is a pretty brutal affair. It's not quite clear what it might mean for something to be good or bad for a species, but I'd think that having a large population suffering constantly under shockingly inhumane conditions would fall on the bad side.

grey413• 13 years ago

I find it highly unlikely that vat meat would totally replace livestock. For starters, a large portion of the world doesn't have refrigeration or reliable transport infrastructure, let alone industrial labs. Even in developed areas, you have to take into account the large existing demand for pasture raised meat.

Vat meat simply has externalities associated with it – civil infrastructure, educational overhead, perception issues, etc – that make it so that it can't compete with traditional livestock models in many areas.

Realistically, vat meat competes with factory farming, and not a whole lot else. Which, don't get me wrong, is fantastic all on it's own.

warfangle• 13 years ago

I doubt the market for "real" meat will ever die completely.

evan_• 13 years ago

The cow is already extinct in the wild. It's not an animal that gets along well outside of human care. An argument could be made that the kindest thing to do is let the species, twisted and distorted by humanity into a ghoulish parody of a once-mighty beast, regain its dignity in extinction.

I have a feeling though that however easy faux-beef gets, there will always be people who won't eat it- just look at the "pink slime" controversy, or the anti-GMO movement.

Lockyy• 13 years ago

My prediction:

There will always be a market for real meat and real leather. If/when the major sources of the two are "not-real" the producers of real meat and leather will be seen as a luxury, so the remaining cows bred to produce meat and leather will be cared for well to produce high quality outputs. So the population will drop but those that remain will be bred to produce luxury goods and so be kept in better conditions.

benburleson• 13 years ago

It seems like this is all for solving the wrong problem. Why isn't there a shift away from the perceived need for more meat.

myko• 13 years ago

Could you elaborate? I don't understand what you mean by perceived need for more meat - to me this seems like a project geared at creating more ethical, future proof meat products.

runarberg8• 13 years ago

Humanity has never -- with the exception of extreme cases, historical or modern -- eaten as much meat as the western man does now [1]. The only reason we eat as much meat as we do, I think, is out of marketing. The perceived need for more meat is therefor to saturate the marked.

The problem arising from growing meat consumption include, pollution, maldistribution of food, animal suffering, wasting of land and resources, wasting of water, etc.

[1] I suppose I need a reference for this claim, but think in terms of economy and you'll find that no other culture can afford this much land and resorces to go under meat-farming other than current western cultures

--edit--

I forgot about humans living in extreme environments that live (by necesity) almost exclusively on meat, like the inuits in Greenland, before major western influence. It doesn't change the fact that the majority of all culteres do, and have in the past, eaten but a porportion of the meat that the average westerners eat today.

tunnuz2• 13 years ago

The real cool thing is that they are making great advertising to stem cells, by doing something that has a very positive ethical connotation (which is the typical argument against using stem cell in medicine).

runarberg8• 13 years ago

Stem cells don´t sell unless they come with hamburgers

tunnuz2• 13 years ago

That's another way to put it :D

cko• 13 years ago

If it's stem cells from a cow, then it's okay because it's delicious.

If it's stem cells from the human species it's controversial even if the purpose is to save lives.

Unless both are controversial?

6cxs2hd62• 13 years ago

The timing on this is amusing:

Jeff Bezos buys a newspaper for $250,000.

Sergey Brin buys a burger for €250,000.

Each smart in its own way.

div• 13 years ago

You're missing a few zeroes ;)

easytiger• 13 years ago

I think you accidentally the exchange rate

ngoel36• 13 years ago

The inaccuracy on this is amusing as well.

6cxs2hd62• 13 years ago

Gah. Coffee, why hath thou forsaken me.

Thanks for not downvoting this as mercilessly as it deserved.

/me slinks off

scott_meyer• 13 years ago

Was that with or without a tip?

agentsaran2• 13 years ago

A complete waste for $250,000. Lab meat? Why? Why would any one want to buy artificial, lab processed meat? Why do people insist on complicating food? Our supermarkets all already filled with things that can be barely classified as "food" and now we have this.

clicks2• 13 years ago

Well, it's a good indication you chose to make a throwaway account for that post, as it suggests that you yourself are aware to some extent how uninformed and ignorant the question is.

But, to answer: These animals are brought up in very inhumane conditions -- in crowded spaces, with no light, no freedom. The whole process is unsustainable, what happens when the world population reaches above 10 billion and demand for meat keeps getting higher? Do we have enough space to keep these animals, enough food to sustainably feed them without having bad environmental implications?

It turns out there are alternative methods, and they may prove to be well worth the cost of investigating them. So here we are, doing science, in the hopes of a brighter future. Experimenting with food, to make it taste better, healthier, cheaper, more environmentally-friendly.

corresation2• 13 years ago

These animals are brought up in very inhumane conditions -- in crowded spaces, with no light, no freedom.

It isn't accurate to paint an entire, very diverse industry with the paints of the worst offenders (e.g. Texas factory fattening houses).

runarberg8• 13 years ago

I'm going to make political remark because the issue by its nature is very political.

We are wasting time and energy investigating solution to a real problem from the wrong end. Doing science is not enough to solve this problem, we need to do politics too (or social science for that matter). Infact doing science might ultimately lead us to enhance the problem.

Now we are looking for a way to make a very wastefull behavior more economy friendly. Meat consumption at the current mass scale is unpresidented and there is no reason to enforce it. Alternatives include alternative diet, less waste, better usage of the food we already grow. We have found brilliant ways to cultivate food at minimum cost, but it is not securing the majority of our species food intake. And the western meat marked might be the biggest factor for this injustice.

Now trying to solve it by further saturating the western marked with meat -- a product that is to blame for this mal-distribution of food -- is not going to solve any problem. It is going to shift the attention away from the real issue at hand and further stabilizing a marked that is currently really unfair and damaging.

agentsaran2• 13 years ago

Its not a throw away account. So a better future is lab produced meat? I'm not saying that the current demand for meat is not bad for the environment. All I'm saying is food is something that is best not experimented with. Nothing good has come up with food scientists tinkering with food. We live in an age where food is seen as a combination of nutrients. We keep track of calories, we read a new study everyday about the benefits for this food/that food, each study contradicting the one before it. Surely, the ultimate solution to making food "better, healthier, cheaper, more environmentally-friendly." is a pill, which will have everything that the body needs. right? Thats what all this experimenting will ultimately lead to. Maybe your scientific mind finds artificial meat appealing. Ask you grandmother how she feels about it.

mesozoic• 13 years ago

This guy could pay $330k for a burger for lunch every day and not care.

Google's Sergey Brin explains why he paid $330,000 for lab burger

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