Currently: ?
Previously: Biosecurity at Telis and Alvea, Cellular Agriculture at Tufts and Mission Barns, Global Health at Medical Teams International
kyle_fish
Karma: 1,655
This is a good point. I don’t want anyone to write off cultured meat on the basis of my argument alone, but I do want to push us toward much more nuanced conversations. Ideally, discussions of feasibility will include an evaluation of all relevant systems and the ways in which they could improve over animals, weighed against their limitations. I’d refer anyone who is interested in a more rigorous and technical evaluation to the Humbird report.
That said, for me the relevant question isn’t whether it’s strictly possible to make cultured meat competitive in the long run, but whether pursuing cultured meat as a strategy is the best/most cost effective use of money and talent. I think arguments of the style I made can be very helpful for quick comparative evaluations. For example, plant-based meat looks far more promising than cultured meat through this lens, because it is a fundamentally different approach that circumvents many of the limitations of mammalian and avian biology.
As a former cultured meat scientist, I think these predictions have been off in large part because the core technical problems are way harder than most people know (or would care to admit). However, I also suspect that forecasts for many other deep tech sectors, even ones that have been quite successful (e.g. space), have not fared any better. I’d be curious to see how cultured meat predictions have done relative to plant-based meat, algal biofuels, rocketry, and maybe others.
fidelity: their “open an account” page (https://www.fidelitycharitable.org/open-account.html) directs to their program guidelines (https://www.fidelitycharitable.org/content/dam/fc-public/docs/programs/fidelity-charitable-program-guidelines.pdf), with the relevant info on page 17. on closer inspection, it looks like disbursement of 5% of net assets per year could be a policy for fidelity charitable as a whole, not necessarily for each individual account. even so, they claim to require active grantmaking and say they will start making grants from any account that hasn’t disbursed anything for two years (top of page 18). i don’t know if this policy is commonly applied, but at the very least it’s a risk.
vanguard: their “open an account” page (https://www.vanguardcharitable.org/open-an-account/consent/) has a link to their policies and guidelines, with the relevant information under heading “minimums, timing, and amounts”, subheading “minimum account activity”.
i didn’t see any minimum activity info on the schwab website and haven’t had a chance to check others.
another relevant minimum is minimum account activity—have you or others incorporated this into your comparisons? for example, it looks like fidelity requires disbursement of 5% of net assets per year (averaged over 5 year periods), whereas vanguard requires at least one $500 grant every 30 months.
There’s been some discussion over the years of genetically engineering farm animals so they don’t experience pain, but I don’t know of any efforts to remove sentience entirely.