Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World

by Paul Shapiro

One of the skeptics is synthetic biologist Christina Agapakis. The scientist, who earned her PhD in biomedical sciences at Harvard, wrote a piece denouncing what she sees as the false promise of cultured meat. “Cell culture is one of the most expensive and resource-intensive techniques in modern biology,” she warns. “Keeping the cells warm, healthy, well-fed, and free of contamination takes incredible labor and energy.” It’s one thing to spend like that for medically therapeutic uses, but no one’s going to drop those kind of dollars for food. “Grand technological fixes can look good if you don’t peer too close at their workings. But as should be clear once you examine the case of in vitro meat, the meat problem won’t really be solved with flashy tech.” The only real solution, Agapakis believes, is for humans just to eat less meat.