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Innovation bounty: $1 million for fake meat
Published: April 23, 2008
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals says its will pay $1 million to the “first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012.”
As The New York Times notes, there are many reasons to support such technology:
New Harvest, a nonprofit organization formed to promote the field, says on its Web site, “Because meat substitutes are produced under controlled conditions impossible to maintain in traditional animal farms, they can be safer, more nutritious, less polluting and more humane than conventional meat.”
Jason Matheny, a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University who formed New Harvest, said the idea of a prize for researchers was promising. Citing the example of the Ansari X Prize, a competition that produced the first privately financed human spacecraft, Mr. Matheny said, “they inspire more dollars spent on a research problem than the prize represents.”
Indeed, a reasonably small prize can inspire people to spend huge sums chasing it. The best illustration of this comes from Netflix, which decided in lat 2006 to give $1 million to anyone who could devise a movie recommendation engine that was 10 percent better than its own. The contest has inspired submissions from hundreds of groups who have collectively spent untold millions on development.
No one has actually solved the problem yet, but a recent article from Wired (which is truly excellent) shows they are making fitful progress by trying many different approaches.
My guess is that a $1 million prize won’t be enough to spur the sort of research it will take to grow meat without animals. It seems like a pretty big task. But a large organization like PETA can surely put up more cash and it could probably recruit other backers with far deeper pockets.
Environmentalists tend to consider industrial agriculture an major nightmare, and there are some very wealthy green groups that would likely put up tens of millions or even more if they thought it could end Big Meat. A prize of, say, $100 million would motivate a lot of research and perhaps lead to better meat.
