Gadgetory

listen to this this will make you sick but are you - what is it what are you five ounce hamburger growing in a lab from the stem cells what cow will be served next week in London it's not natural no it's called the Frankenberger would you take a bite of the Frankenberger Frankenberger the frankenburger what you'd call it maybe a freaking burger some cool Franken bogus Frankenberg frankenburger test-tube freakin burgers Frankenberger Frankenberger Juli Banderas would you eat one of these No good afternoon and welcome to what we hope will be an historic event this will be the first time a burger made with cultured beef has been cooked and tasted for the past five years one scientist has led the research in this field please welcome onto the stage from Maastricht University in the Netherlands the professor of physiology mark post I think most people just don't realize that the current meat production is at its maximum so we need to come up with an alternative there's no question we've devoted huge amounts of land fertilizer pesticides energy and water to a production system that also results in inhumane conditions for the animals to be raised in lots of food safety issues just the other day we saw another recall of 50,000 pounds of ground beef because it was contaminated with a strain of e.coli that's extremely dangerous if you have a technology that can check all of those boxes and and begin to eliminate those problems to me at least it's worth a look with the real estate market reeling color companies crumbling and the overall outlook ominous there is one juicy exception everything seems to be failing in America right now yeah except for the burger which is booming that's right and it always will boom because the burger is omnipotent and irresistible it can never be weakened it can never be slowed down it can never stop its ever-increasing growth in popularity it's the most single powerful force in the food universe their current methods of production today aren't sustainable looking at the global demand for me they won't be sustainable when we hit 500 million annual times by 2050 so whether or not regardless of your stance you need to look and say this is where we're starting from where can we go from here how safe is it if you produce the tissue and and you end up with the same tissue as beef there's no reason to assume that it's going to be unsafe so you can just start to let people eat it he's right in that theoretically there's no reason why it would be unsafe and if we look at kind of where tissue engineering has existed so far a lot of it is in these medical applications where you're you know you're putting organs into people or you're you know transplanting their body parts with these kind of synthetically produced tissues to consider doing that as more safe than consuming I think there's something you know there's a question to be asked there that how come is safe to put this stuff like physically in your body rather than to ingest it honey you have eaten taste it digesting your thoughts what did it taste like there's quite some intense taste it's close to meat it's not that juicy the texture the the the mouthfeel has I feel like meat oh yeah I just saw that you put away the rest of the burger so what are you gonna do with it can I please have a small bite I think in terms of I had to say that at the beginning you know we've got one small burger we've got a room full of people who are desperate to try it I mean you're asking the world press basically to report on something that happened really they can only report on second hand so would you be willing to give a tiny little bit one random member of the audience that would be sort of unfair to a number of you just to avoid any riots in the crowd I'll just take care of this finish you know one of my greatest fear was that it tasted awful and then it was gonna provoke a gagging reflex and I was gonna puke on TV and it was gonna go viral and then you know for the rest of my life I'd be known as that guy but I it would have had a very neutral flavor and had a familiar buddy I didn't have a chance to do this today or I just didn't have the balls to do it but I wanted to say this is one small bite for man one giant bite for mankind and I do feel that way you know I do feel like hey this is this is you know it's important to explore a lot of different ways of dealing with the problems lady in the black dress with the white necklace I think a huge part of this story is that a lot of development has been philanthropic in the past what do you think has made it philanthropic rather than more of a technology push from industry I think food companies in general I hope no offense are kind of conservative are trying to stay away from really revolutionary improvements now gradually some companies start to become interested and I hope this worldwide emphasis on this technology may foster it it's essentially totally open source right now because it's completely philanthropically funded Sergey was funding it a lot of the funding came from new harvests and its donors all the publications are online on the new harvest website anyone can read about this maybe that's why it remains the kind of a startup thing is because individuals can get on board with this kind of research I'm thrilled that Sergey Brin invested in this and it also could help make this happen people think this is science fiction it's not real somewhere out there I actually think that's a good if what you're doing is not seen by some people a science fiction that's probably not transformative enough