a 17-year-old innovator and creator building in cellular agriculture space to end animal suffering and thus solve climate crisis 🌎
from the time I remember myself, I’ve always cared about what other living beings felt. Always wondered why humans thought that if we discovered DNA, or landed on moon we had the right to take wild animals out of their nature, and entertain kids in zoos or circuits.
growing up, I became a vegetarian, but still didn’t really understand the way our food production worked, before I learned that:
<aside> 🩸 more than 100 billion animals are slaughtered every year for meat and animal products, while living in intense confinement right from the moment they’re born
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that’s not just about animal welfare. Factory farming contributes to 14,5% of all greenhouse gasses, that’s an equal to the entire transportation sector. We use 77% of all farmland to produce only 18% of world calories
the inefficiency of producing meat
over the last few months, I got obsessed with this problem and the potential solution to tackle it - cellular agriculture 🌱. Instead of growing, feeding, spending land and water on the whole animal, it proposes the idea to grow cells that we only need for meat.
i’ve been reading articles and research papers, watching videos and just learning about how scientists grow meat from stem cells in the labs. It led me to building a project in the space.
The more animals suffer, the better for the climate
as I understood some basic concepts behind cultured meat, I thrived for hands-on experience, literally do anything with plants/ cells in the laboratory. So I shared my surface-level understanding of lab-grown meat with some biologists. Stepping into the greenhouse, I didn’t have any ideas on what I’d do 👀
i worked with drosophila (fruit flies) as they are widely used for genetics, inheritance and mutagenesis. Thanks to their low generation time, high fecundity, and already sequenced genome.
to grow cultured meat from mammalian cells we need to provide it with growth factors that contribute to 95% of the cost. As it turned out, insects can be used for recombinant proteins to grow mammalian cells since fruit flies can adapt to simpler conditions and nutrients