Speaker 1: Would you eat a burder grown from human muscle cells?
Speaker 1: And what does this question uncover about neuroscience and our
Speaker 1: calculations of morality? And whether your children will have a
Speaker 1: different answer, And what does this have to do with
Speaker 1: endangered species or the sacred versus the profane, or brain plasticity,
Speaker 1: or moral positioning or social belonging, or stepping on the
Speaker 1: boundaries between moral categories or flesh copyrights or the future
Speaker 1: of personhood, or what your food choices say about you.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagelman. I'm a
Speaker 1: neuroscientist and an author at Stanford, and in these episodes
Speaker 1: we sail deeply into our three pound universe to uncover
Speaker 1: some of the most surprising aspects.
Speaker 2: Of our life.
Speaker 1: Today's episode is for sure the weirdest topic I've tackled.
Speaker 1: But I found myself chewing on a question that is
Speaker 1: hypothetical for now but will not be in a decade,
Speaker 1: and I realized that asking the question serves as a
Speaker 1: great lever to open up several issues about neuroscience and
Speaker 1: our sense of morality. So let's begin with something familiar,
Speaker 1: a hamburger, not the fast food kind of burger from
Speaker 1: a cow that you're used to. This one you're holding
Speaker 1: in your hand now was never part of an animal.
Speaker 1: This one never mooed or clocked or ran through a field.
Speaker 1: This burger started its life not on a farm, but
Speaker 1: in a lab. This is the world of lab grown
Speaker 1: meat that has been trucking along for years. The way
Speaker 1: this works is you take a few little cells from
Speaker 1: an animal. In theory, you could take just one cell.
Speaker 1: This is a totally harmless, almost undetectable little biopsy. So
Speaker 1: you pop off a cell from an animal's muscle. You
Speaker 1: can also take it from the skin and reprogram that
Speaker 1: into a stem cell and then differentiate it into a
Speaker 1: muscle cell. But it's easier if you just start with
Speaker 1: a muscle cell. Then what do you do with that
Speaker 1: little cell. You put together the right cocktail of nutrients
Speaker 1: and growth factors, and you stick it all in a
Speaker 1: little petri dish or a bigger bioreactor, and that single
Speaker 1: cell starts to divide and divide and divide, until eventually
Speaker 1: you've got lots of cells. And what is that It's
Speaker 1: a chunk of meat. That's all meat is, of course,
Speaker 1: just a hunk of muscle tissue made of lots and
Speaker 1: lots of little cells. Now, in practice people coculture some
Speaker 1: fat cells in there too to get the marbling of meat.
Speaker 1: And that's it. This is the stuff of burgers and
Speaker 1: sausages and nuggets. This is real meat, just without the
Speaker 1: animal who had to be raised and then killed. In
Speaker 1: this case, the animal is still walking around out there,
Speaker 1: totally unaware that it is a donor to the future
Speaker 1: of human food consumption. In theory, with the right setup,
Speaker 1: you'd never have to return to that animal again. You
Speaker 1: could just keep those cells dividing, growing batch after batch,
Speaker 1: a potentially infinite supply of burgers without killing a single animal.
Speaker 1: Now that's pretty revolutionary. Part of the benefit is the ethics,
Speaker 1: no more slaughterhouses, no more factory farms. And there's also
Speaker 1: the environment too. Livestock is what gives fifteen percent of
Speaker 1: greenhouse gas emissions. A cow is basically a methane factory
Speaker 1: on four legs, and over a lifetime, a cow's water
Speaker 1: usage is astronomical. So growing meat in a lab could
Speaker 1: dramatically reduce our ecological footprint. Okay, so that all sounds great,
Speaker 1: but the wrinkle for now is that it's very expensive.
Speaker 1: The first lab grown burger was grown in twenty thirteen
Speaker 1: and it cost over three hundred thousand dollars. Now prices
Speaker 1: have been dropping since then, but it's still not fast
Speaker 1: food cheap, and the energy requirements are huge. So for
Speaker 1: the foreseeable future, this remains a kind of botique technology
Speaker 1: with a lot of promise for the future. But what
Speaker 1: I want to do today is think about the implications.
Speaker 1: Because once you're growing meat from cells, you're not restricted
Speaker 1: to cows or chickens or pigs. You can pop off
Speaker 1: a cell and grow meat from anything. What if you
Speaker 1: wanted a zebra burger you could do that. What if
Speaker 1: you wanted a polar bear burger? Why not? What if
Speaker 1: you wanted a falcon burger? It might be gamy, but
Speaker 1: go for it. You could, without harming any animal, create
Speaker 1: a burger from the cells of a cheetah or a
Speaker 1: bald eagle or a panda bear. And that raises so
Speaker 1: many strange questions now that there's no ethical issues. For example,
Speaker 1: would you eat a burger made from an endangered animal
Speaker 1: like an orangutan burger or certain types of rhinoceros. Again,
Speaker 1: no animal is harmed here. You're not poaching a tiger
Speaker 1: or hunting an elephant. You're cultivating a few cells, and
Speaker 1: you could do this ethically and sustainably and harmlessly. So
Speaker 1: is that okay? Is it less offensive? If no animal
Speaker 1: is hurt? Does it change how we think about conservation
Speaker 1: or species sanctity? These are the opportunities that your grandchildren
Speaker 1: will have when they go into a restaurant. These will
Speaker 1: be their menu options. And then it gets even stranger
Speaker 1: because for the past few decades we've been unlocking ancient
Speaker 1: DNA from mammoths, from Neanderthals, from creatures that haven't walked
Speaker 1: the earth in tens of thousands or millions of years.
Speaker 1: So would you try a wooly mammoth meatball? How about
Speaker 1: a Jurassic barbecue like pterodactyl buffalo wings or a velociraptor steak.
Speaker 1: And then, because this line of reasoning has no natural endpoint,
Speaker 1: we reach the real question. Would you eat a human
Speaker 1: burger not carved from a human and not taken from
Speaker 1: anyone against their will? Just a few cells, a few
Speaker 1: muscle cells, and a few fat cells grown in a dish,
Speaker 1: No pain, no death, no victim. The question is is
Speaker 1: that or is that not cannibalism? If no one is harmed,
Speaker 1: no one dies, You're not desecrating a corpse. Will the
Speaker 1: taboo still apply in the future. Now, we're gonna ask
Speaker 1: ourselves some crazy questions to probe our sense of the
Speaker 1: morality and the weirdness here. And remember, while these questions
Speaker 1: seem insane to us, they're not going to for our
Speaker 1: near term descendants. Okay, So the first question is, how
Speaker 1: would you feel about eating the burger if it's your
Speaker 1: own cells? Would you eat a self burger? Would it
Speaker 1: be an active curiosity of narcissism, of culinary self knowledge,
Speaker 1: not just you are what you eat, but you eat
Speaker 1: who you are? Okay? Would you feel better eating a
Speaker 1: self burger or a stranger burger? Does it matter who
Speaker 1: the donor is? Would you feel different about eating a
Speaker 1: burger made from the cells of an Olympic athlete versus
Speaker 1: a person who is homeless. Keep in mind these are
Speaker 1: just muscle cells. The cells don't hold the properties of
Speaker 1: the larger person. But does it feel different if the
Speaker 1: burger comes from someone's society admires versus someone's society shuns.
Speaker 1: How about a burger made from your favorite movie star
Speaker 1: versus a prisoner? Because biologically it's the same. These are
Speaker 1: just hunks of marbled muscle fiber. There's no memory, there's
Speaker 1: no personality. These are just cells. I was recently bouncing
Speaker 1: this idea off my friend Kevin Kelly, and he was
Speaker 1: struck with an idea that lit him up. He imagined
Speaker 1: that in the not so distant future, married couples might
Speaker 1: celebrate their wedding not with a cake, but with a
Speaker 1: we burger. This is a combination of both partner cells
Speaker 1: grown and grilled and ceremoniously eaten together. Now, there's something
Speaker 1: loving and something disturbing about that idea. There's something sacred
Speaker 1: and something grotesque. And that's the point. Lab Drone meat
Speaker 1: is going to force us to confront the boundaries of
Speaker 1: our ethics and our imagination. It invites us to question
Speaker 1: why we draw lines exactly where we do, and whether
Speaker 1: those lines are drawn in ink or in pencil. Okay,
Speaker 1: so let's slow down to examine our physical responses to
Speaker 1: these questions. When I asked you if you would eat
Speaker 1: a human burger, even if you were nodding along with
Speaker 1: the science, following the logic and understanding that nobody is harmed,
Speaker 1: something else likely happened in your body, a little tightening
Speaker 1: in your stomach, maybe a physical recoil or a facial
Speaker 1: expression you didn't mean to make. That all comes from
Speaker 1: the neural circuitry of disgust. Disgust is a neurological alarm bell.
Speaker 1: It's a deeply wired signal, usually for survival. When you're disgusted,
Speaker 1: we see activation of a brain region called the insula,
Speaker 1: specifically the anterior insular cortex. This is a region that
Speaker 1: integrates information from your body like smells and tastes and
Speaker 1: gut sensations, and helps to generate the subjective feeling of revulsion.
Speaker 1: So if you're in a brain scanner like fMRI and
Speaker 1: you smell something rotten, or you see a gruesome injury,
Speaker 1: or sometimes if you even just watch someone else react
Speaker 1: and disgust, your insula lights up. But here's the thing.
Speaker 1: Your insula also responds to moral violations. If you read
Speaker 1: a story about someone betraying their friend, or cheating on
Speaker 1: a test or committing a cruel act, this same brain
Speaker 1: region is involved. Your body responds to moral pollution the
Speaker 1: same way it responds to physical contamination, and that gives
Speaker 1: us a clue that discussed is more than just an
Speaker 1: evolutionary tool. For avoiding spoiled meat or dirty water. It
Speaker 1: becomes the basis for our morality. It's how we police
Speaker 1: the boundaries of what is acceptable, what is clean and unclean,
Speaker 1: what is sacred and what is profane, or when it
Speaker 1: comes to the way that we have traditionally eaten animals,
Speaker 1: what has conscious feelings and experiences pain and what does not,
Speaker 1: And this brings us to the idea of purity. Disgust
Speaker 1: is most reactive not when something is dangerous, but when
Speaker 1: something violates a perceived natural order. It doesn't have to
Speaker 1: make sense logically, it just has to feel wrong. That's
Speaker 1: why we shudder at the idea of incest, even when
Speaker 1: it's hypothet me. This is why we gag at the
Speaker 1: idea of drinking sterilized urine, even if it's scientifically safe,
Speaker 1: and why for many people the idea of eating lab
Speaker 1: drown animal meat trips that same internal alarm. My colleague
Speaker 1: Jonathan Height did research on this some years ago and
Speaker 1: found that in some situations, we don't build our moral
Speaker 1: judgments from reason. We make snap decisions based on gut reactions,
Speaker 1: and then we backfill with logic afterward. It's like our
Speaker 1: brain has a courtroom, but the verdict is decided before
Speaker 1: the lawyers even speak. In other words, we feel first
Speaker 1: and we justify later. For example, in one study, Jonathan
Speaker 1: Height and his student Scott Murphy presented participants with harmless
Speaker 1: scenarios that were morally provocative, like a story about a
Speaker 1: brother and sister who choose to have consensual sex just
Speaker 1: once while on vacation, using birth control, telling no one,
Speaker 1: and never doing it again. There's no direct harm in
Speaker 1: the story, and yet most participants judged it to be
Speaker 1: deeply wrong. When asked why, they struggled to articulate clear reasons.
Speaker 1: They might mention genetic risk, which was controlled for by
Speaker 1: the birth control, or emotional damage, which the story ruled out,
Speaker 1: but these explanations were tacked on after the judgment had
Speaker 1: already been made. In other words, people feel something is wrong,
Speaker 1: but they can't explain why. In describing this, Height wrote, quote,
Speaker 1: judgments were based more on gut feelings than on reasoning,
Speaker 1: and participants more frequently laughed and directly stated that they
Speaker 1: had no reasons to support their judgments end quote. Now
Speaker 1: this is fascinating because that instinctive disgust, that gag reflex
Speaker 1: is not always aligned with harm. Consider this. Some cultures
Speaker 1: have rituals of reverend cannibalism, eating the flesh of a
Speaker 1: loved one as an act of mourning and remembrance and love.
Speaker 1: Most other cultures find that horrifying. So which is it?
Speaker 1: Is it honoring or violating? Obviously, disgust is in some
Speaker 1: part shaped by your culture. In some countries they eat dogs.
Speaker 1: I have a dog who I love, and that repulses me.
Speaker 1: Some places eat horses, some don't. Here in America we
Speaker 1: love to eat cows, but in the majority of states
Speaker 1: in India, killing a cow is revolting and illegal. So
Speaker 1: some amount of our reactions are culturally poured into us,
Speaker 1: and once they're baked in, they're hard to shake. We
Speaker 1: don't just say, well that food isn't for me. We
Speaker 1: say that's gross. We react with our whole bodies. And
Speaker 1: this brings us back to the human burger. No one
Speaker 1: is harm, no death, no trauma, just a few cells
Speaker 1: grown in a dish. And these are just mammalian cells,
Speaker 1: with very little difference between this and a McDonald's burger.
Speaker 1: But psychologically these are worlds apart, because the human body
Speaker 1: in almost all cultures is not just meat. It's a
Speaker 1: sacred vessel. To consume it feels like a transgression. And
Speaker 1: this is what lab grown meat forces us to confront
Speaker 1: our narratives and when they might or might not require
Speaker 1: an update. What is meat when it no longer comes
Speaker 1: from a death? What is identity when flesh can be
Speaker 1: copy pasted? What is taboo when the source of the
Speaker 1: taboo is no longer present? Like harm or suffering? When
Speaker 1: we think about the human burger, we find that we
Speaker 1: often end up like Jonathan Hight's participants, who laugh and
Speaker 1: shake their heads and can't articulate any reason why they
Speaker 1: thought something was disgusting or immoral. So discussed is a
Speaker 1: powerful emotion, but it's not always a reliable guide. It
Speaker 1: was honed to help us survive in the ancient savannah,
Speaker 1: but not really to navigate bioengineered futures. As the world changes,
Speaker 1: how flexible are our brains? Will we continue to have
Speaker 1: moral decisions dictated by ancient alarms? Or are we able
Speaker 1: to update the software running in our heads? I don't
Speaker 1: know the answer to this, but this is why I
Speaker 1: would love to freeze myself and come back in one
Speaker 1: hundred years, because it will be fascinating to see how
Speaker 1: generations down the line, born into a new world are
Speaker 1: going to see these issues and whether they're going to
Speaker 1: be issues at all, And maybe, just maybe we're going
Speaker 1: to have to learn to distinguish between what is gross
Speaker 1: and what is wrong. So let's return to the central question.
Speaker 1: Would you eat human meat without harmony? A human being
Speaker 1: just a few skin cells coaxed into becoming muscle tissue
Speaker 1: in a sterile dish. Why does something feel wrong? Well,
Speaker 1: let's zoom in on a notion from psychology, the notion
Speaker 1: of the ontological boundary. This is the invisible line that
Speaker 1: our minds draw between categories of being, between what is
Speaker 1: alive and what is not, or what is human and
Speaker 1: what is animal, or what is a person and what
Speaker 1: is an object. We are constantly sorting the world into
Speaker 1: these sorts of categories, and when something crosses those boundaries,
Speaker 1: we get a visceral reaction. For example, a corpse looks
Speaker 1: like a person, but it isn't one anymore, or a
Speaker 1: lab grown human burger is made of human flesh, but
Speaker 1: no one was harmed in taking it. These things sit
Speaker 1: in a kind of category limbo. They don't fit neatly
Speaker 1: into the boxes that our minds rely on, and when
Speaker 1: something violates an onto logical boundary, it tends to provoke
Speaker 1: a reaction like disgust, or fascination or fear. That's why
Speaker 1: lab grown human cells feel unsettling, because it blurs the
Speaker 1: line between food and person. Even if no harm is done,
Speaker 1: the categories we use to make sense of the world
Speaker 1: are being scrambled because, whether we're aware of it or not,
Speaker 1: most of us carry the belief deep in our psyches
Speaker 1: that the human body is special. It's more than just
Speaker 1: carbon and calcium and protein. That there's something about the
Speaker 1: body that shouldn't be violated or copied or consumed or commodified.
Speaker 1: The body, in all human cultures is more than a
Speaker 1: physical thing. It's a vessel of identity and memory and
Speaker 1: history and personhood, sometimes even divinity. So when we talk
Speaker 1: about lab grown human burgers, we're not just proposing a
Speaker 1: new food. We're poking at a sacred object. I mean,
Speaker 1: just zoom in on the way that every human culture
Speaker 1: has rituals around the body. Look at how cultures bury
Speaker 1: their dead or handle the remains. Some cultures wash and
Speaker 1: dress the body with reverence. Others burn it or freeze
Speaker 1: it or bury it or leave it for vultures. But
Speaker 1: what they all share is the sense that what we
Speaker 1: do with the body matters. It's more than just disposal.
Speaker 1: It's a final act of communication with the person or
Speaker 1: with the divine. That's what's being disrupted here. Lab grown
Speaker 1: human meat scrambles this signal. It's not a body. It
Speaker 1: never lived. But it feels like a violation because we're
Speaker 1: so used to equating the flesh with the person. Now,
Speaker 1: there are ways of getting around this category violation. Take
Speaker 1: as an example Catholicism, where you have this ritual of
Speaker 1: communion that involves eating bread and wine that's symbolically or
Speaker 1: depending on your theology, literally becomes the body and blood
Speaker 1: of Jesus Christ. It's an act of sacred consumption, and
Speaker 1: no one flinches at it. Why because it's ritualized and
Speaker 1: abstracted and sanctified. But what about eating the muscle tissue
Speaker 1: of a stranger from a bioreactor. Suddenly we're not so sure.
Speaker 1: The frame is gone. There's no ritual, there's no tradition,
Speaker 1: it's just raw novelty. It's not that the act is immoral,
Speaker 1: it's that it's unclassifiable. It steps all over this ontological boundary.
Speaker 1: It doesn't fit our mental boxes. So we find ourselves
Speaker 1: in this strange new territory where science gives us possibilities
Speaker 1: that culture hasn't caught up with. So we've been talking
Speaker 1: about how brains view bodies, but let's turn to the
Speaker 1: other half of it, how do brains view food? Because
Speaker 1: when you look across cultures, the thing that's clear is
Speaker 1: that food is deeply ingrained into our cultural identity. Food
Speaker 1: is how we say I love you without using words.
Speaker 1: It's how we connect across generations. It's the childhood recipe
Speaker 1: that your grandmother never wrote down but everyone remembers. It's
Speaker 1: the thing that your partner cooks when they know that
Speaker 1: you've had a hard day. It's birthdays, it's first dates,
Speaker 1: it's funerals. Food is how we mark time. But it's
Speaker 1: also how we define who we are and who we
Speaker 1: are not. From a cultural perspective, food gives one of
Speaker 1: the clearest examples of in group versus outgroup behavior. The
Speaker 1: human brain is intensely tribal. We're wired for group membership,
Speaker 1: for affiliation, for categorizing us and them. There have been
Speaker 1: lots of studies in my lab and others about the
Speaker 1: brain regions involved when we think about other people, especially
Speaker 1: when we assess whether they're in our group or not
Speaker 1: in our group, whether they are like us or not
Speaker 1: like us. Please check out episodes sixteen and twenty for
Speaker 1: much more on that. Anyway, what someone eats is one
Speaker 1: of the first cues that we notice. Think about when
Speaker 1: someone tells you they are vegan or halal or paleo,
Speaker 1: or that they only eat locally sourced food. That's not
Speaker 1: just nutritional information. It's moral positioning. It's cultural identity, it's
Speaker 1: a worldview. Even among people with similar values, food becomes
Speaker 1: a way to fine tune social belonging. Think of the
Speaker 1: complex subtribes just inside the category of ethical eaters. There's
Speaker 1: the raw food movement, the regenerative agriculture crowd, the zero
Speaker 1: waste Lokovores, the flexitarians who only eat meat on weekends.
Speaker 1: Each group has different rules, different values, different aesthetics, and
Speaker 1: they can instantly recognize who is in and who is out.
Speaker 1: The neuroscientists Antonio Demasio talks about how somatic markers, which
Speaker 1: are bodily feelings linked to past experiences, how these guide
Speaker 1: are decisions. Our preferences around food are often somatic. In
Speaker 1: other words, they're not just tied to reason, but to
Speaker 1: emotion and memory and identity. So when lab grown meat
Speaker 1: enters the picture, it doesn't just disrupt the food system,
Speaker 1: it disrupts the identity system. Say that you're at a
Speaker 1: dinner party and everyone has their own plate, someone's got
Speaker 1: tofu someone else has grass fed steak, someone's trying oat
Speaker 1: milk for the first time, and then you you brought
Speaker 1: the lab grown koala bear sliders. Now what have you done.
Speaker 1: You've stepped outside the norm, You've broken the script. You
Speaker 1: haven't just introduced a new food, You've introduced a new category.
Speaker 1: Your koala bear slider isn't from the eucalyptus forest in Australia.
Speaker 1: It isn't from a factory. It isn't from tradition. It's
Speaker 1: from the future. It's synthetic. It happens to be ethical,
Speaker 1: but it's deeply weird. And that changes how people see you.
Speaker 1: Because we don't just eat for ourselves. We eat with
Speaker 1: an audience in mind. Even when no one's watching, your
Speaker 1: meal is part of your internal narrative. Your brain is
Speaker 1: constantly simulating how others will perceive you. This involves a
Speaker 1: process called mentalizing, which is about understanding yourself in terms
Speaker 1: of other people's mental states. This kind of mentalizing is
Speaker 1: what allows us to predict social reactions or to feel
Speaker 1: embarrassment or pride. It's why people carefully curate what they
Speaker 1: order on a first date. So now I ask yourself,
Speaker 1: what are people mentally simulating when you bite into a
Speaker 1: zebra burger or a lab grown nugget of Albert Einstein.
Speaker 1: It's not about the nutrients, It's about the narrative. Something
Speaker 1: else to note is that food is also ritualized. So
Speaker 1: birthdays mean cake, Thanksgiving means turkey, Sunday dinner might mean pasta.
Speaker 1: We have particular things we do, and we have particular
Speaker 1: things we don't do. You don't serve sushi at a
Speaker 1: funeral or scrambled eggs at a wedding. We eat in
Speaker 1: patterns because it gives us structure, and because repetition gives
Speaker 1: us meaning. These food rituals are encoded in your brain's
Speaker 1: memory systems, like the hippocampus, but also more deeply, like
Speaker 1: in the basal ganglia, which governs habit formation. In other words,
Speaker 1: meal are engraved deeply in the system. They become part
Speaker 1: of how we structure time, how we mark transition, sometimes,
Speaker 1: how we know where we are in the week or
Speaker 1: the year or the life cycle. So what happens when
Speaker 1: you introduce a food that has no ritual context? What
Speaker 1: happens when you show up with a we Burger to
Speaker 1: your wedding or serve a lab grown Neanderthal brisket at
Speaker 1: your child's graduation? Presumably there's confusion and uncertainty because food
Speaker 1: carries symbolic gravity, and new symbols take time to stabilize.
Speaker 1: Until they do, they're going to feel strange. That doesn't
Speaker 1: mean they won't catch on. It just means our neural
Speaker 1: maps for meaning haven't yet caught up. So here we are.
Speaker 1: Scientific progress is handing us away to eat meat without death,
Speaker 1: a way to separate flesh from suffering, a way to
Speaker 1: pull burgers from a bio reactor instead of a body.
Speaker 1: And we've looked at disgust and culture and food. But
Speaker 1: now the societal questions begin, because even if something is
Speaker 1: physically safe, and even if it's technically possible, who gets
Speaker 1: to decide if it's okay? Who decides what you're allowed
Speaker 1: to eat, what cells can be used, whose body is
Speaker 1: off limits, what it means to own a piece of yourself,
Speaker 1: because in this future world of lab grown meat, we
Speaker 1: need to consider the implications through the lenses of law
Speaker 1: and power. So start with a basic question. If somebody
Speaker 1: swabs your cheek and grows a burger from it, do
Speaker 1: you own it? It's your DNA, your biological signature, but
Speaker 1: is it your property? Legally speaking? This isn't hypothetical. There
Speaker 1: have been many court cases where people's cells were taken
Speaker 1: without consent and used in research or commercial products. The
Speaker 1: most famous case is from Henrietta Las nineteen fifty one.
Speaker 1: She was a woman whose cancer cells were biop seed
Speaker 1: and then used without her knowledge. Those cells became the
Speaker 1: first immortal human cell line, known as HeLa cells, and
Speaker 1: ever since they've been used in everything from polio vaccines
Speaker 1: to cancer research to biotech patents. Her family didn't learn
Speaker 1: about this until decades later, but she and they had
Speaker 1: never given permission. So if a company today takes one
Speaker 1: of your cells, just one, and turns it into a
Speaker 1: thousand steaks, is that exploitation? Is it theft or is
Speaker 1: it fair game? Biologically cells are cheap, but ethically they
Speaker 1: are loaded, and when food enters the picture, the lines
Speaker 1: blur even more so. Here's the scenario. Let's say a
Speaker 1: startup offers you a contract, you donate a cell, and
Speaker 1: in exchange, they create a line of you burgers. You
Speaker 1: get royalties, they get a product. Everyone wins. Now, flip it.
Speaker 1: What if they did? Ask? What if someone scraped your
Speaker 1: DNA from a coffee cup and cultured it and released
Speaker 1: it as a new product. Let's say you found out
Speaker 1: that someone is marketing you stakes in your name. Would
Speaker 1: that feel like an honor or a violation? In many jurisdictions.
Speaker 1: Once your cells leave your body, you no longer legally
Speaker 1: control them. They become discarded tissue. They are trash. They
Speaker 1: are not yours. But what if that trash becomes a
Speaker 1: million dollar food item? What if a celebrity's skin cells
Speaker 1: are pirated and sold as premium cuts. Now this is
Speaker 1: not impossible. We already have the infrastructure, we already have
Speaker 1: the appetite for novelty, and we already live in an
Speaker 1: AI world where increasingly your identity can be commodified your voice,
Speaker 1: your face, your data. So maybe the next frontier is
Speaker 1: your flesh. Of course, when things get murky, the law
Speaker 1: eventually steps in. It always does, just slower than the technology.
Speaker 1: So just think about the new legal landscape. Do we
Speaker 1: need flesh copyrights? Can you trademark your DNA? Will we
Speaker 1: need consent agreements before anyone can pick up your coffee cup?
Speaker 1: Will there be legal lists of people whose cells can
Speaker 1: never be grown, like saints or Nobel laureates or political leaders?
Speaker 1: What about cultural boundaries? Would a lab grown burger made
Speaker 1: from the cells of a historical figure be illegal? What
Speaker 1: about someone from an indigenous community? What if the cells
Speaker 1: came from a culture that considers the body untouchable after death.
Speaker 1: Pretty soon, if you squint in your eyes and look
Speaker 1: into the future, you'll see this becomes not about burgers,
Speaker 1: but about cultural sovereignty, about biopolitics, about the strange new
Speaker 1: terrain where bodies and identities and technologies collide. There's even
Speaker 1: another factor that's going to be a play here, which
Speaker 1: is intent attribution. Our brains are hyper tuned to detect intention,
Speaker 1: even in abstract patterns like dots moving on a screen.
Speaker 1: We tend to assign agency and purpose and will. This
Speaker 1: means we don't just react to what someone does. We
Speaker 1: react to why we think they did it. So if
Speaker 1: someone eats a burger, grown from Nelson Mandela's cells. As
Speaker 1: a political statement, that gets one reaction. If they do
Speaker 1: it for shock value, that's a different one. If they
Speaker 1: do it reverently as part of a memorial, that's something else. Entirely,
Speaker 1: the mental model we construct around the act changes our
Speaker 1: judgment of the act itself. So really the legality is
Speaker 1: just the surface, because underneath is our brain's endless attempt
Speaker 1: to infer motive and assign blame and detect disrespect. That's
Speaker 1: why this issue will become so much more than just
Speaker 1: a binary law, going to require individual analysis in each case.
Speaker 1: And this brings us to another question, which is who
Speaker 1: gets to eat whom? Because for all of human history,
Speaker 1: food has mapped onto power. The rich eat the rare,
Speaker 1: the poor eat the scraps. Colonial powers brought their own animals,
Speaker 1: their own foods, their own values, and they imposed them.
Speaker 1: So what happens in the future where meat is biologically democratized,
Speaker 1: where anyone can eat panda or pope or pangle in.
Speaker 1: Is that going to flatten social hierarchies or is it
Speaker 1: going to deepen them? Will food become a playground for
Speaker 1: the powerful, where celebrities sell edible versions of themselves or
Speaker 1: billionaires hold exclusive rights to exotic cell lines. So will
Speaker 1: this technology actually liberate us in undo centuries of inequality?
Speaker 1: Or will it export the same dynamics under new names
Speaker 1: with different packaging, and return to the original question, not
Speaker 1: what's possible, but what's permissible? In this new world, flesh
Speaker 1: is no longer finite, pain is no longer required, death
Speaker 1: is no longer the entry ticket to dinner. But the
Speaker 1: steaks are higher than ever because now we're deciding something
Speaker 1: much bigger than dinner. We're deciding the future of personhood,
Speaker 1: of consent and of meaning, and the laws we write
Speaker 1: today will shape the menus of tomorrow. So let's put
Speaker 1: ourselves some decades in the future and imagine that this
Speaker 1: all becomes normal. The awkwardness has faded, the novelties worn off,
Speaker 1: the headlines have moved on. Lab grown meat is now
Speaker 1: just meat. Your grocery store sells everything from urd varc
Speaker 1: to zebra. You can order a heritage steak cultured from
Speaker 1: cells of extinct cattle, or a Dali Lama burgher. Or
Speaker 1: you can order a me loaf grown from your own
Speaker 1: cells and pan seared your children's children. They don't find
Speaker 1: this strange. They've grown up in a world where meat
Speaker 1: doesn't come from ranches but from labs, and maybe where
Speaker 1: meals are tailored to your genetic deficiencies, and your kitchen
Speaker 1: knows your microbiome and your mood. And now perhaps something
Speaker 1: unexpected happens. As suffering is removed from the equation, the
Speaker 1: meaning of eating comes back in because now that you
Speaker 1: can eat without harm, you begin to choose with intent.
Speaker 1: You eat not just to consume, but to connect. And
Speaker 1: so in the future you might find that people are
Speaker 1: not just eating for pleasure and nutrition, but they're eating
Speaker 1: to remember a loved one, to honor a hero of theirs,
Speaker 1: to merge with their bride or groom. Burgers in this
Speaker 1: future are more than fast food, but a medium of
Speaker 1: emotional exchange. So maybe in the end, the real question
Speaker 1: isn't would you eat a human burger? The question is
Speaker 1: what would you want that meal to mean? Because that
Speaker 1: future is coming fast, The bioreactors are humming, the boundaries
Speaker 1: are blurring, and we'll each have to decide when every
Speaker 1: cell is quickly reproducible, when what was previously sacred can
Speaker 1: be commoditized. What is the table we're going to set
Speaker 1: for ourselves. If anyone is miraculously listening to this old,
Speaker 1: archived podcast in one hundred years from now, please let
Speaker 1: my descendants know if any of today's predictions panned out
Speaker 1: or not, And if so, I hope you'll raise a
Speaker 1: toast and celebrate at one of your weird futuristic barbecues.
Speaker 2: You know to.
Speaker 1: Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to
Speaker 1: find further reading. Join the weekly discussions on my substack
Speaker 1: and check out some ribed Inner Cosmos on YouTube for
Speaker 1: videos of each episode and to leave comments. Until next time,
Speaker 1: I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos