Mark Post - Professor of Physiology, Maastricht University HARDtalk

have the wrong priorities. There you go. Now on BBC News, it's time for

In what has been billed as a world first, fast food grown in laboratory

has been served up in London recently. Professor Mark Post says

is in the trade burger could leave the answer to our unsustainable

appetite for meat and help ease the burden on the environment. There is

a need for more meat. The World Health Organisation estimates annual

growth production will have to double by 2050. We'll meet grown

from stem cells and a scientist 's lab retreat ever make it to our

have been working on this for a long time but this week he tested it for

the first time. Before the presentation, F samples of it.

is it like? It is like meat. It is not exactly the same yet because it

does not have any facts in its. is not taste like animal meat yet?

It does, but without the facts. The fact adds to the taste. What does it

let like when it is in a petri-dish? It looks like the meat fibres but

without colour. We added colour, organic colours. Read the treat and

saffron. We can fix the colour but it takes a bit longer. The meat you

produce in the laps are tiny little strips. You're not yet producing

slabs of meat. That is correct. Slabs of meat cannot be made at this

stage. The technology is bad but it will need to be implemented to make

it ekes lap and that is more complex than the small slivers of meat.

of the British newspapers are calling it a Frankenberg. We will

get to those in a minute. How did you do it? You start with a single

stem cell from an adult animal. start with a little piece of meat

from a cow. It has themselves in it waiting to repair tissue in case of

injury. We use the property of those cells to create meat. How would this

happen? The cells divide and multiply. Normally our skeletal

muscles to not do that but these repair cells do. We use the property

to make one sell up to 40 billion cells. Because these are designated

to become muscle cells, we can easily create a condition for them

to make muscle fibres, small muscle fibres. Every 1 million cell makes

one muscle fibre. If we have 20,000 of those. It sounds as, that they

have to exercise. Muscle needs to be exercised for it to bulk up and

produce protein. They do that by themselves. If we give them the

right conditions, they will start to contract and build up tension. That

is the primary stimulus. And you don't have two stimulator marked

officially to do that. Not quite. It improves if we do artificially

stimulate them but from an energy efficiency point of view, not really

beneficial. And there are 60 Ian cells in a single burger. 40-60.How

long does it take in the latter, with that. In our lab, it takes

three months, which is already faster than a cow. If you have

sufficient capacity to grow the cells at the same time, you can get

it down to about eight weeks. than a cow. Starting with a single

stem cell, how much meat could you produce? Theoretically, you can make

ten tonnes of meat. 10,000 kg? Theoretically. Is the technology

they are to do it? It is but you just have to optimise it in the lap

or the factory to make that happen. What would it look like? An Olympic

size swimming pool full of artificially created meat? Pretty

much. And for a town like London, it would have about 1200 of those

Olympic sized sprinkles for a year, to feed the town for a year. At the

moment, you can only make little granules of meat. Anything thicker,

the cells beneath the surface begin to die because they can't get

oxygen. How do you overcome that? The same way our body does, by

treating blood vessels and flowing nutrients with oxygen so that you

can get into every look and cranny of the tissue. You have to

artificially correct blood vessels as well? Yes. That was actually

might written all scientific career, making artificial blood vessels. Or

making cells for bypass grafting. That is a lot of scepticism about

this. One Dutch person said, he was at go back to use embryonic stem

cells at some point if he wants to make this commercially viable. Is

that true? We do a lot of collaboration with Hank and we

admire each other's work. This is one point where we disagree. You

could use embryonic stem cells but there are issues with that, ethical

issues. They grow slow and we are not able to grow them from a cow or

peek at the moment. He is working very hard on that and I hope he

succeeds. In the meantime, we have the cells in our skeletal muscle

that are stem cells but we will need to harvest them more often from a

cow to produce the meat. If you take one stem cell, it can make 10,000 kg

of meat out of it. But you will still need Cowles. I happen to think

that is an advantage. These cells divide and divide and multiply. Do

they divide indefinitely? Is there a limit? There is with the adult stem

cells are limit to how often they divide. We have them up to 50

divisions which is how you come up with the number of 10,000 kg.

Embryonic stem cells can divide for a much longer time. The advantage of

a embryonic stem cell. Let's talk about whether this might be the

future of food. You envision it laboratories, giant test tubes. Is

that the way we are heading in the food industry? I think it is the way

we might be heading. This is presented as an alternative for

clearly unsustainable meat production through livestock. You

can scale it up by Olympic sized swimming pools and you can groom

each in a sustainable way without the ethical issue without

environmental issues. Will it replace livestock? Not entirely

because we will still need donor animals to supply the cells. And if

you want keep livestock, you can, but you have to be a word that they

are a burden for the environment. Can this be done on a small scale?

In kitchens? I have been proposing to avert the fear or distrust. You

could do this in the comfort of your kitchen but you need to know two

months in advance what you are going to eat. Is it fair to call it meat?

Eventually, it is going to be meat. It is just great outside of the cow.

It is exactly the same composition and material. Eventually, it will

look and feel and taste exactly the same. A lot depends on your being

able to do this to a very large scale. Let me quote something from a

biologist from UCLA. Whenever I hear about industrial scale as they

cure, my scepticism alarm start going off. Cell cultures were the

most expensive and resource intensive techniques in modern

biology. Keeping cells warm and healthy and well fed and free of

contamination takes incredible labour and energy, even when scaled

to the 10,000 litre fact that people are talking about. We have a machine

to do this. It is called a cow. Why do you need to produce a VAT?

cow is inefficient. It has 15% conversion of vegetable proteins

into animal protein. It is clearly inefficient. Currently, the cell

culture technologies are also inefficient. But there are many,

many strides forward to make it more efficient. And we have much more

variability and much more control over the whole process to eventually

make it more efficient. Doctor Robert Spyro says that this idea is

a fantasy promoted by scientists who neglect the social and emotional

meaning of food. This is the big danger, flying in the face of public

sentiment. I am not sure where the emotion comes from if you convert it

that into various areas. We are already familiar with high-tech

foods, fast foods, artificially made foods, and we started doing that

13,000 years ago when we domesticated grasses and made

something that was natural into something that was much more like an

efficient way of producing crops will stop and we built our societies

on that. So we on moving step-by-step towards more

technological foods. The idea of having a dominion of the

nature seems to so often lead to catastrophe. Right. Again, you have

to analyse whether fear is coming from. My sense is that it comes from

basically this trust towards large companies, human intervention in

general. Mistakes are being made, malpractices are out there. You

should separate that from the technology because if you can do

this in your home and like you make renting a home, you can avert those

issues. This is not a very permissive environment to be doing

this in, but it leak in Europe. The GM company has pulled out of Europe

because they can not get the licences. It is because of the

entrenched nature of public scepticism. I am not sure what the

entrenched nature of public scepticism... The public realises

the issues with current meat production and there is scepticism

towards current meat production, which seems natural, but we all know

that it is not. This is about public perception as much as anything. GM

got off to a very bad start in Britain as well as Europe, and it

never really recovered. It has been hanging in there for years and years

and in the end, they have given up. Let us make this very clear. This is

not GM food. This is just using the same cells and letting them do their

thing but not in a car but in a laboratory or in a factory. -- not

in an animal. And it does not have the potential risks of GM that it

disturbs the natural balance in an animal. And it does not have the

potential risks of GM that it disturbs the natural balancing

ecosystems because it is not our air in an ecosystem, it is taken out of

it. So, it does not carry the same risks as GM. Many believe this flies

in the face of entrenched public sentiment. Phil Hadley says this is

the antithesis of the direction the consumer is going in. Its chemical

and synthetic at a time when people are seeking out natural product,

where they know the history and where it came from. Right. And yet

ended ended with 68% of Britons wanting to

try this. So, I think, yeah, might be a trend towards organic and

natural but that is not a large-scale consumption of meat.

People want cheap meat. They want readily available... They do not

want meat they do not trust. The recent horse meat scandal all over

Europe confirmed that strongly and led to a decrease in meat

consumption over Europe. Right. And that is Europe. There are different

regions all over the globe. When you mention that the World Health

Organisation predicts a global growing of meet demand, possibly

doubling, that will not happen in Europe, it will happen in areas

where the middle class is rising like in China, India, South America

and possibly Africa. That is where the growing meat demand is

happening. You distinguish yourself explicitly from the GM experiment at

the moment but there is something that you share with them and that is

the scepticism about the promise. Joanna Brightman writes that when GM

crops are first developed, their creators promised an era of green

innovation and... If you cannot make this commercially viable, if the

meat you produce at the end costs twice as much as the meat grown

inefficiently in an animal, you will not sell it. That is correct. And so

there are a couple of boundary conditions we require to meet in

order to be successful. One is that it has to be the same price or even

cheaper than regular meat. And for sure, that price will increase

because we are not capable of producing sufficient meat through

livestock as demand increases. That is one. Second, it must be meat.

Have not talked about that but there is some innate craving in civil

meat. Three to 5% of the population is vegetarian. That is not

increasing. We have to consider that people will keep eating meat. And

third, of course, it has to be made readily available and in an

environment and friendly and ethical way. And you believe this can be

fairly and accurately labelled as meat? I have problems with labelling

it as something else because in the end, it is exactly the same product,

so why would you call it something else? There are dangers in trying to

remove livestock herds. They are important for the ecosystem. They

eat grass we cannot eat, grass, for example, and they pass on the

nutrients from the grass through the meat. What you create will still

need those nutrients. It will have to come from somewhere, possibly

allergy. Anything that can provide a amino acid, sugars, fatty acids, to

feed these cells. There are options. There are regional differences in

some areas of the world. Cattle may be very efficient and remain

efficient because they eat grasses that nobody else in. -- nobody else

will eat. But the majority of meat production in industrialised society

is very artificial, in large farms, with artificially produced feed for

those animals. The chief scientist for the agricultural development

board told us that he thought land used for meat production in the UK

was very efficient and he wants to know if your manufactured meat is

more energy efficient per kilogram than traditional methods of

producing meat are. How energy-efficient is it going to be?

We don't know yet but a life cycle analysis to predict that has been

done at the University of Oxford. And she has calculated that this

would reduce the amount of land by 90% and energy by 90%. If you use

saltwater allergy to produce the amino acids and sugars for this meat

to grow. There is another sense in which it seems to be going in the

wrong direction. In Europe and North America, we eat too much meat, more

than is good for us already. Should not public energy be focused on us

cutting down our meat consumption? fully agree with that but it is an

issue that should be separated from the issues that we now have with

feeding the global population not only in Europe but across the world.

And globally, the world health organisation predicts that meat

demand is going to increase. We can stress here and possibly put into

effect that people will eat less meat. We have vegetarians and other

movements going in that direction. Although meat consumption in the

industrialised world is not going down as fast as we would wish. But

globally, it is going to increase and that is what we have to face.

How much work have you done on the economic viability of this project?

Do we know how much this will cost if it ever goes into mass

production? We have worked with companies that mass-produce stem

cells for medical purposes and with the numbers we gave them from our

production method, they came up with a fair price. It is still high but

that is with the current technology, without any improvement. We can get

it down to roughly $70 per kilogram. $70 per kilogram. That is much more

expensive than meat produced Max right, but that isn't the current

state of technology. And that is all very good. The first computer was $2

million and had less calculating capacity than our mobile phone that

you get for free with a subscription to any of the telecom companies.

you have these dozens, indeed hundreds of these containers

producing this meat, where does the food come from? The nutrients? The

algae? The watercress Mack how do you get that there are? -- the water

's you can place these anywhere so that you can reduce the transport of

materials. I would love to place the first plant at the mouth of the

Mississippi where there is an allergy dead zone, where we have so

much allergy in the ocean that nothing else lives there. -- algae.

You can basically placed this anywhere where it is

energy-efficient and better for the environment. You would need

somewhere with a well-developed infrastructure, wouldn't you? You

could not place it in the middle of Africa. If you can do it at home,

you can do it in the middle of Africa. What is the timeline? When

can we expect to see this kind of meat in everyday use on our dinner

plate is 's that is difficult to predict because there are major

issues we have to resolve, mostly of a technological nature. I am

confident they can be solved, but in my mind, it will take ten years. If

announcer believes it can boost done in three years, but we differ on

that. -- my financier believes it can be done in three years but we

disagree on that. And the reason why we presented it the way we did,

which was unusual for science, we wanted to make the point that this

was really a necessary development and it can be done and we can have

shown that it can be done but we need a lot more resources, more

people working on it and more money to address the issues that we still

have with going from this product to a product that can enter the

consumer market. And public scepticism? Well, the Guardian poll

shows and also a survey we have done in the Netherlands, they show that

there is a public out there ready to try it. Think that public scepticism

is somewhat overrated. I think it will be accepted as when people

realise there are major issues with livestock meat production. And

frankly, we have not realised that there is a major issue with meat

production right now and we are heading towards a crisis, if you

like, if that meets demand clearly develops as the world health

organisation predicts and we cannot meet that demand. Prices will go up,

there will be scarcity and it will become a luxury item. Even worse, if

the larger meat producing companies want to try and meet that demand, it

will put pressure on our crops, which are also used to feed us. It

is a serious challenge and people have to be aware of it. Once they

are aware of it, they will look at alternatives. Once the price of meat

doubles, they will look for alternatives. You sound

fantastically optimistic. I do. It has great promise but it is still a

promise, not a reality. My real wish is that a lot of people start

working on this and we make this happen or find out as soon as we can