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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

I can easily believe it's a fractal of hard, but I cannot believe it's a fractal of no, and absolutely not as a question of thermodynamics.

It's clearly possible to make muscle cells (and other components of meat) reproduce rapidly: cattle exist.

It's clearly hard, or we'd have already have all this plus vat-grown organs and (affordable) vat-grown leather.

And some (non-meat) cells are already convenient to grow in vats (you just don't want to get all your protein from nutritional yeast and/or spirulina).

"1000 ways to not make a lightbulb", or whatever the real original Edison quote was — what's the number, 90% of start-ups fail?

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The "no" in this context is addressing whether cultured meat will ever be economically viable at scale, not just scientifically possible. The article suggests a compelling argument against this viability, in that the breakthroughs needed for commercially viable cultured meat would also revolutionize the far more lucrative pharmaceutical industry. The fact that these advances haven't been achieved in pharma, despite massive financial incentives and decades of research, is strong evidence of their fundamental difficulty or impracticality.

For instance, even the most efficient cell lines used in pharmaceuticals aren't efficient enough for low-cost production of bulk cell mass. This implies cultured meat companies are attempting to solve problems that have long eluded a much larger, better-funded industry. The absence of these breakthroughs in pharma, where the financial rewards would be enormous, suggests they may be fundamentally unattainable with foreseeable technology.

> unattainable with foreseeable technology

This I agree with; it's just… well, I'm 40 now[0], and a lot of biology that can be done today involved technology that was not foreseeable when I was born.

So, yes, pharmaceuticals getting the hard problems solved first, sure — I'd say that I'd know not to invest in vat-meat startups until pharmaceuticals companies have solved problems I'm oblivious to except for the logical impossibility with such a test.

[0] aaaaaaa

The limits in pharma aren't production, they're figuring out which 10% of drugs will get through all the clinical trials.

While drug discovery may be the most lucrative opportunity overall, production costs remain significant in pharma, especially for biologics and cell therapies, and breakthroughs in these areas are well worth pursuing. CAR-T treatments, which use similar technologies to cultured meat, have manufacturing costs of $95,000-$156,000 per dose [0].

For generics and biosimilars, more efficient production could be a major competitive advantage. The fact that we haven't seen breakthroughs in this area, despite clear financial motivation, suggests these are not easily solvable problems.

[0] https://www.fiercepharma.com/manufacturing/car-t-manufacturi...

CAR-T treatments are expensive because they’re individualized. The process has to be repeated per-individual. That’s completely different from lab-meat.

I was responding to the parent poster's assertion that the only area worth focusing on in pharma is drug discovery, but you're right that CAR-T is very different. Monoclonal antibodies are a more apt analog. Key economic drivers in monoclonal antibody production include fermentation titer and overall yield, as highlighted in the article "Process economics of industrial monoclonal antibody manufacture" from ScienceDirect [0]. These same factors—cell density and yield—are also critical for lab-grown meat production.

The persistence of process-related challenges in both industries, despite significant financial motivation to solve them, underscores their complexity. This relates back to the "fractal no" concept from the original article, where each obstacle in cultured meat production is composed of many smaller obstacles. Importantly, monoclonal antibodies can sell for thousands of dollars per gram, orders of magnitude more than meat, yet even with this immense profit incentive, the pharmaceutical industry hasn't solved these bioprocessing issues. This suggests that cultured meat production, with its much lower profit margins, faces an overwhelming set of challenges,

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15700...

> absolutely not as a question of thermodynamics.

it "absolutely" is, anything that exists, is fundamentally a question of thermodynamics, it's unavoidable.

I don't think they were denying thermodynamics. Merely denying that it trumps economics.

Economics itself is a product of thermodynamics.

Which is both true and also missing the point.

The phrase "not a question of $x" does not mean $x can't be asked at all, but that the question is unimportant.

In this case, cows exist, therefore thermodynamics is resolved to "yes you can make a cow for at most the cost of a cow, in the general case", and I don't need to show detailed working to know that. Existence proofs make it obviously "not a question of" any law of nature, including thermodynamics, that we can't reproduce that existence proof synthetically.

This doesn't tell me how to do it, how to make it cheap enough for anyone to care, what the actual ultimate limits are, etc.

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