Welcome to Pluripotent — it’s Thursday, July 23rd, and I’m still recovering from seeing my first official socially-distant drag show since before the pandemic. Dina Martina, with her singular sense of humor, is a national treasure. Feel free to send tips through direct message and follow me @chasepurdy.
PROVINCETOWN — It was a bet I thought I’d win.
While reporting out Billion Dollar Burger, I traveled to Maastricht University to speak with Dr. Mark Post, the CEO of Mosa Meat and early pioneer of cell-cultured meat. As our conversation began to wind down, I asked him if there were any questions he rarely gets from inquisitive journalists writing about cultured meat.
He mused for a moment, leaning back in his office chair. The following is a snippet from that conversation.
Mark Post: From a technological point of view, nobody has ever asked me, 'Is this cloning or not?'
Chase Purdy: Really?
MP: Nobody has.
CP: Is it?
MP: Of course it is.
[ laughter ]
MP: From a biological point-of-view cloning is non-sexual reproduction. Well, this is that. I'm happy that they don't ask that question because then I have to start explaining and then try to avoid the word ‘cloning,’ because in the minds of people it means something else than in my mind. I would have to have all these qualifications added to it as a typical scientist that this is not the cloning that people think of, creating an entire sentient being.
CP: I wonder what would happen if I went to each of these companies and asked, 'Yes or no: Is this cloning?'
MP: I bet you everybody would say no.
CP: Yeah?
MP: Yes.
CP: I'll do it.
MP: [laughing] I bet you everybody would say no. Do you like Scotch? I can put a bottle of Scotch on it.
CP: Alright! I'll ask it.
Over the course of the following year I posed the question to a bunch of leaders in the cultured meat space. To Post’s credit, they all said they do not consider cultured meat to be cloned meat. Not one of them.
“That's a good question,” one CEO said. “Scientifically, I don't think it matters. Everything that we eat you can say it’s cloned. Wheat is cloned. Corn is cloned.”
A scientist at one of the US cultured meat companies said there are differences on a molecular level that would stop him from describing cultured meat as ‘cloned meat.’ Mostly, people furrowed their brows, noting the question unnecessarily muddies the debate over what to call cultured meat.
A consummate layperson, I decided to learn a bit more and ask friend Dr. Steven Reilly, a geneticist at the Broad Institute Harvard and MIT. Reilly does not have ties to the cultured meat industry, though he is fascinated by the technical questions and hurdles scientists and entrepreneurs in the space face.
As he describes it, one problem is that there just isn't a great definition for cloning writ large, which includes organismic, cellular, and molecular cloning.
The cells that comprise our skin can replicate as they continue to grow. That could be considered cloning. The cells are copying their genomes and making other cells. Consider the same situation for when a person performs a weight lifting exercise on their biceps. The muscle tissue rips, the cells go to work building more muscle tissue, copying their genetic material along the way. This could be considered cloning in the broadest sense, but isn’t normally what scientists think of when talking about cloning.
"Cloning is most often thought of as producing an individual organism with identical or intentionally-modified DNA to another individual,” Reilly says. “We can do that with bacteria and yeast, we can do it with sheep. One hundred meat cells in a vat isn't really a different organism than 10 million cells in a vat. By growing and dividing, the cells are inherently copying their DNA into new cells, so one could strictly refer to this as cellular cloning. Instead, scientists most often use the term ‘culturing’ — expanding the number of cells in a manner that isn’t focused on generating new independent organisms, just increasing the number of cells.”
In other words, both sets of people are correct…and I still owe Post a bottle of liquor.
In other news…
An impressive slate of cultured meat leaders—including Mark Post, Shulamit Levenberg and Nicholas Genovese—authored an update (pdf) on the scientific, sustainability, and regulatory challenges of getting cultured meat to market. It appeared in the journal Nature Food.
New Harvest's Isha Datar chatted about private patents, monopolies, and lobbying around cellular agriculture in her recent conversation with the Red to Green podcast.
The Chinese Institute of Food Science and Technology (CIFST) issued a notice soliciting comments (pdf) on the voluntary standard “Plant-Based Meat Products,” per the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service.
Following the recent BlueNalu-funded survey on what to call cell-cultured meat, Paul Shapiro fleshed out the evolving debate.
New Age Meats and Artemys Foods have joined the ranks of AMPS (Alliance for Meat, Poultry & Seafood Innovation).
UK-based Higher Steaks says its produced an early sample of cultured bacon strips and pork belly, reports Tech Crunch.
The Israel Innovation Authority is going to pay closer attention to alternative meat companies, and will back leading startups in the space, reports The Jerusalem Post.
Billion Dollar Burger was positively reviewed in the journal Nature Food.
That’s all for this week. Until next time, I’ll be on the hunt for ripe heirloom tomatoes because I really need to eat this tomato tart.