I am compelled to point out that the vat-grown hamburger everybody’s read about killed quite literally the most cows per hamburger of any burger in human history, by several orders of magnitude.
It was assembled in tens of thousands of strips grown laboriously as near-monolayers of cells in sterile tissue culture (since the muscle cells themselves have no immune system) fed refined protein and cell culture products. All of this has to come from somewhere. Most hilariously, mammalian cells actually require various growth factor proteins around them to divide, they will not do so on their own. Even the HeLa tumor cells from the sixties that I’ve worked on in the past require at least a little bit of them, and straight up muscle cells require a lot. The best place to get these hormones is from FBS, fetal bovine serum—a fancy name for the filtered blood of unborn cows. This is a slaughterhouse product, made as a byproduct that they sell to labs whenever they get a pregnant cow coming through. Nobody’s actually gone and figured out which of the thousands of substances in it are most important for its growth-allowing effects or synthesized them in vitro, and knowing how biology works it’s probably a number of them that are necessary.
I’ve lost the calculation I made, but I saw a source somewhere saying that something like a third of the cost of production was for fetal bovine serum. I went to a laboratory supply company’s website and looked at bulk options, found sources from slaughterhouses about the amount of FBS they get from a single pregnant cow, and estimated that it required in the range of 300 pregnant cows to die to make that burger...
edit: great now I’m going to need to go digging for those sources again...
edit2: here comes the calculations:
This indicates 1-3 cow fetuses per litre of serum, a Life Technologies catalog indicates a rate of about $700/litre but other sources indicate bulk rates down to $250/litre can be negotiated, and a Bloomberg article indicates that of the $300,000 cost of the burger, the cost of the FBS is the ‘most significant’ obstacle to reducing its price. Let’s call it 10% of the cost for generosity’s sake, and let’s go with the most expensive FBS for the same reason.
$30,000/$700 = 42 L = up to 126 pregnant cows. If they got a bulk rate on FBS or any of my assumptions are overgenerous, it could be well up into the hundreds.
Trying another calculation, this time trying to figure out the media used. I can’t seem to find hard numbers on it, but given the sheer number of cultured strips and the fact that over the time course of growing each one you WILL need to change the media (several mL, which is typically at least 1% FBS) several times, it doesn’t look good. Let’s say 10,000 tissue strips, ignore the separate propagation of the stem cells, and assume you have to change 5 mL of media that’s 1% FBS 10 times each. That’s only 5L of FBS (for up to 15 cows), but the 1% FBS was a very generous assumption. Most mammalian tissue culture media I’ve actually seen is 5-10% because differentiated non-tumor cells need more growth factors, boosting the amount to 25-50 L, and we’re exactly back to where we were at the last calculation. And no I didn’t tune the numbers so that would happen, that’s literally what I got on my first plugging in of nice round numbers.
I am compelled to point out that the vat-grown hamburger everybody’s read about killed quite literally the most cows per hamburger of any burger in human history, by several orders of magnitude.
It was assembled in tens of thousands of strips grown laboriously as near-monolayers of cells in sterile tissue culture (since the muscle cells themselves have no immune system) fed refined protein and cell culture products. All of this has to come from somewhere. Most hilariously, mammalian cells actually require various growth factor proteins around them to divide, they will not do so on their own. Even the HeLa tumor cells from the sixties that I’ve worked on in the past require at least a little bit of them, and straight up muscle cells require a lot. The best place to get these hormones is from FBS, fetal bovine serum—a fancy name for the filtered blood of unborn cows. This is a slaughterhouse product, made as a byproduct that they sell to labs whenever they get a pregnant cow coming through. Nobody’s actually gone and figured out which of the thousands of substances in it are most important for its growth-allowing effects or synthesized them in vitro, and knowing how biology works it’s probably a number of them that are necessary.
I’ve lost the calculation I made, but I saw a source somewhere saying that something like a third of the cost of production was for fetal bovine serum. I went to a laboratory supply company’s website and looked at bulk options, found sources from slaughterhouses about the amount of FBS they get from a single pregnant cow, and estimated that it required in the range of 300 pregnant cows to die to make that burger...
edit: great now I’m going to need to go digging for those sources again...
edit2: here comes the calculations:
This indicates 1-3 cow fetuses per litre of serum, a Life Technologies catalog indicates a rate of about $700/litre but other sources indicate bulk rates down to $250/litre can be negotiated, and a Bloomberg article indicates that of the $300,000 cost of the burger, the cost of the FBS is the ‘most significant’ obstacle to reducing its price. Let’s call it 10% of the cost for generosity’s sake, and let’s go with the most expensive FBS for the same reason.
$30,000/$700 = 42 L = up to 126 pregnant cows. If they got a bulk rate on FBS or any of my assumptions are overgenerous, it could be well up into the hundreds.
Trying another calculation, this time trying to figure out the media used. I can’t seem to find hard numbers on it, but given the sheer number of cultured strips and the fact that over the time course of growing each one you WILL need to change the media (several mL, which is typically at least 1% FBS) several times, it doesn’t look good. Let’s say 10,000 tissue strips, ignore the separate propagation of the stem cells, and assume you have to change 5 mL of media that’s 1% FBS 10 times each. That’s only 5L of FBS (for up to 15 cows), but the 1% FBS was a very generous assumption. Most mammalian tissue culture media I’ve actually seen is 5-10% because differentiated non-tumor cells need more growth factors, boosting the amount to 25-50 L, and we’re exactly back to where we were at the last calculation. And no I didn’t tune the numbers so that would happen, that’s literally what I got on my first plugging in of nice round numbers.