Talking Points
- Deforestation rose to 12-year high in the Brazilian Amazon
- Nigerians questioned their security after yet another massacre
- Tensions soared in the Gulf after assassination of Iranian scientist
- Thousands of desperate farmers blockaded Delhi with trucks
- Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, father of the European Council, died
- Trump ranted about fraud; his Communications Director quit
- The Georgia run-offs loomed large over Joe Biden's inauguration
- Facebook sued by the Feds; Google pinged by US Labor Board
- Tony Hsieh, billionaire entrepreneur and visionary, died at 46
- China's Chang'e-5 probe collected samples of moon rocks
Deep Dive
The “dirty birds’” shadows stretch the whole way across the human culinary experience. We eat so very many of them. From those reared in conscience-appeasing organic environs to those making a fatal, final escape from a cruelty-maximising factory farm, millions of these avian prisoners are roasted, fried, stewed, boiled, and pulped into nuggets every single day. Now imagine a scenario in which the second-most widely eaten meat on the planet no longer comes from something that clucks.
Winner winner
Singapore is a comfortable nest for biotech startups. The city-state is home to a number of companies working in the Fish-Tech space (that are going swimmingly). It also boasts its own lab-grown meat manufacturer. Shiok Meats ('Shiok' being the classic local exclamation of delight after a tasty morsel) has already created prawn meat from stem-cells, and is now working on crab and lobster. But this week the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) tapped a foreign entrant, and in doing so catapulted itself further into the future. It approved the sale of lab-grown chicken nuggets.
The chicken flesh, which has now been deemed fit for human consumption, is developed by American billion-dollar biotechnology startup Just Eat. The edible flesh is grown in a ‘bio-reactor’. We’ll have to assume that every other possible name for this device was already taken. The reactor is a 1,200-litre tank pumped full of (hopefully non-radioactive) growth medium. The process involved starts with stem cells being extracted from biopsies of live chickens, isolated, and grown in a foetal bovine serum – don't ask. These are then mixed with plant-based ingredients in the reactor. And voila. The end result is chicken flesh that has escaped the biological constraints of the natural world. And the most recognisable dilemmas of our dietary choices - drugs, hormones, cruelty, and factory-farms.
The reactor chicken will soon be sold through a restaurant in Singapore under the Good Meat brand. And, at least for now, the price will make you squawk. (The cost of production is still significant.) But Just Eat believes that at scale 'cell-cultured meat' will be cheaper to produce than the old-fashioned stuff.
The implications are manifold – dizzyingly so.There are more than 24 billion chickens in the world (a number that has doubled since 2000) and the bloody truth is that 130 million are slaughtered every day. They are reared on colossal reserves of soy beans, corn, and grain. Livestock feed accounts for a third of all crop land. Roughly 13 billion hectares of forests are razed every year for livestock grazing and crops. The Amazon is being put to torch to make space for the soybeans that fatten your Christmas chicken. It is, in every sense, a cost our species can no longer bear.
Peter Singer, the Australian moral philosopher and godfather of the animal liberation movement, may have just been put out of a job. Western religious and philosophical orthodoxies rely on the premise that the moral universe begins and ends with humans. Singer, and others that followed him in the animal liberation movement, contend that personhood can be extended to animals, and that their experience of pleasure and suffering must be included in our calculations. This expansionary moral view (your chicken dinner is the product of suffering) is a burden that most people prefer not to think about. Especially during the holiday season. But if quesadillas de pollo, karaage, murgh tikka, or simple roast chook could be made without causing suffering to a bird, the central ethical argument against eating chicken would be plucked off. That though, does still leave us with one problem – if it doesn’t look like, walk like, or talk like a chicken, is it still chicken?
On second thought, Singer might still have a gig for a few more years.
Folding the envelope
Out of the frying pan now, and into the microscope, for the other big story in proteins this week. Alphabet's artificial intelligence unit DeepMind (again, we must stop STEM professionals from naming things) has made a breakthrough comparable to the mapping of the genome.
The London-based team entered its artificial intelligence program, AlphaFold, into the biennial CASP (Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction) competition. In short, CASP is an opportunity for scientists around the world to test their chops in predicting the 3d structure of proteins from individual amino acid sequences. These predictions are hard because proteins are famously flexible, and the problem has been aggravating scientists for half a century. According to one Nobel Prize winning biochemist’s estimation, the number of possible structures is in the order of 10 to the power of 300!
Two years ago AlphaFold won the competition. In its first attempt. This year, it simply blew everyone out of the water. While most teams predicted the structure of 10% of the proteins on offer, the DeepMind AI nailed two-thirds. The scientific community is agog at the accuracy of the program.
Predicting protein structures kicks open the door to better understanding how diseases interact at a molecular level, and the development of bespoke medicines. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said, "these algorithms are now becoming mature enough and powerful enough to be applicable to really challenging scientific problems." His AI programs have gone from beating the world's best computer players to revolutionising science - in less than a decade.
Worldlywise
The luck of the English
In Britain, the question of when a vaccine will emerge has been superseded by another: will you get the jab next week? The national drug and medicine regulator gave Pfizer and BioNTech's vaccine the tick of approval this week and the first doses have already landed and been taken to a secure location. A coup for Boris Johnson, yes, but one that has raised concerns about 'vaccine nationalism'.
The European Medicine Agency – the bloc regulator – raised eyebrows with its suggestion that Britain may have forsaken safety in the name of speed . The strongly-worded statement raised hackles in Britain, but it can't be ignored that healthcare regulators of several countries don’t expect to have a decision on the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine until mid January or later. The criticism was also echoed by America’s Dr Anthony Fauci. The concern is that Britain is rushing so that it can get to the head of the queue in anticipation of there being not enough doses to go around to all countries. If this is indeed the beginning of a nationalist scramble for medicine, Covid-19 will likely persist longer, and kill more people, while costing the global economy up to $1.2tr per year.
Back in Britain, it was expected that frontline hospital staff would receive priority access to the vaccine. However, a last-minute decision has rearranged the order. This week, it was announced that aged-care workers, hospital in-patients, and hospital outpatients aged over 80 should receive the first doses. While this reflects a new perspective on where the work risk lies, it has come as a disappointment for many frontline healthcare workers who face a spike in cases over January after the planned unfastening of rules for Christmas.
And once this first batch has been exhausted, there are no guarantees on the timeline for the rest of the country. 800,000 doses are on their way to Britain from the Pfizer lab in Belgium, but it is unknown when more will be dispatched. Indeed, the pharma giant has walked back its projection of shipping 100m doses this year – it will instead get half that number out the door. The halting production line will exert greater pressure on the manufacturers as wealthier countries compete for the allotted doses.
Diversity training wheels
The Nasdaq is unlike America's other major indices. It was the first digital exchange, and it has become home to the most cutting-edge technology companies on the planet. The Nasdaq 100 are the cherry-picked best (non-financial) performers: Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Netflix, eBay, PayPal, JD.com, Qualcomm... You get the point. These companies make up most of the hitting power of the larger Nasdaq Composite, which comprises 3,300 companies. They include commercial giants from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen, and the handful of tech companies that run just about everything. But what the Nasdaq doesn't have, is companies with diverse boardrooms. In fact, 66% of the board members in America are white men.
Adena Friedman is the first woman to receive the top job at the Nasdaq. Eyeing the glacial pace of diversification at a board level, she has decided to expedite the process. This week, Nasdaq applied to the Securities and Exchange Commission for the authority to require that its listed companies diversify their boards. Companies would have to have at least one female, and one member of an underrepresented minority community (racial or LGBT+). Right now even this low bar would be too high for three quarters of the companies on the Nasdaq. And companies that fail to meet this rock-bottom standard will have to explain why they didn't meet it. But unlike California and Germany, there won’t (as yet) be legislated or enforceable quotas.
It's long been recognised that companies with diverse boards and executive teams perform just as well or even outperform those dominated by white men. And companies with strong leadership make this a priority – there's just far fewer of them than you might think.
The Best of Times
The future is clean hydrogen
In a world first, 300 Scottish homes will be fully powered by clean, green hydrogen . The switch is part of an experiment to gauge how the gold standard of renewables can help push the United Kingdom to and beyond its emissions targets. Scotland has truly harnessed the power of the wind – it expects to meet its entire electricity needs with wind-turbines by the end of the year. Because the energy drawn to create the hydrogen comes from renewables, the homes’ energy supply will be completely emissions free. On top of that it's cheaper than electricity, and can be stored when demand exceeds supply. Now we’re cooking with (clean) gas.
Dam fine news
For the first time in 400 years, beavers have dammed a river in Somerset, UK. The rodent engineers were released by the country’s National Trust in January — a first in the organisation’s 125-year history. Beavers were hunted to extinction in the UK four centuries ago for their fur, meat, and scent glands. Already, the area is seeing the recuperative effects of slowing waterways: kingfishers have been spotted at the site, and more wildlife is expected.
The Worst of Times
A worsening situation in Tigray
Conflict in Tigray has doubled the amount of Ethiopians in need of aid to 2 million. Half that number have been displaced by the conflict and some 45,000 who have fled across the Sudanese border. With transport links and communication to the region still cut off, food supplies ran out for 96,000 Eritrean refugees on Wednesday. Later in the week, the UN reached a deal to be given access to the region, but those stuck there are left waiting for supplies.
Student leaders jailed
Prominent Hong Kong pro-democracy activists Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow, and Ivan Lam were arrested on Wednesday for their participation in last year’s protests . The arrests are part of a wider crackdown on the movement: in November, 19 pro-democracy lawmakers resigned from parliament (4 of which were ousted), and in August, media tycoon Jimmy Lai was arrested. The slow slide into Mainland rule will be measured by how political prisoners are treated along the way .
Weekend Reading
The image
The quote
"Nestle and Cargill abhor slavery. This case isn't about that."
– Lawyer Neal Katyal is acting on behalf of the two American food giants in their bid to throw out a fascinating Supreme Court case. Both companies bought cocoa from Ivorian farms which made use to child slaves in their work force. Six Malians who were abducted as children and worked on these farms (to make your favourite chocolate bars) have used the obscure 200-year-old Alien Tort statute to argue that the companies both knew about the conditions and ought be held accountable . Chew slowly on this one.
The numbers
$27.7b
- Salesforce pays overs (several times over in fact) for the ubiquitous business communications platform Slack. Marc Benioff is clearly willing to throw cash around as he muscles in on Microsoft's turf, although he may have kicked the anti-trust tripwire on the way to collect his purchase.
$428m
- The other business platform de jure, Zoom, has been raking in profits since its going public last year. In fact, while Slack has racked up three quarters of a billion dollars in losses, the video-conferencing platform has made half a billion in profit . It would be an attractive purchase for a company trying to make a name for itself in collaborative business software (any suggestions?), but would command an even steeper price.
The headline
"A 4-Day Workweek for 5 Days' Pay? Unilever New Zealand Is the Latest to Try" – The New York Times . There's a novel idea: rewarding people for the work they produce rather than for how long they can sit still.
The special mention
This 81-year-old midnight snapper (not a euphemism), which is the oldest tropical reef fish in the world by two decades. Don't bother breaking out the candles and cake, apparently the only way to gauge how many years a fish has lived is to pull it out of the water, which is not exactly conducive to the fish's chances of reaching its next birthday.
A few choice long-reads
- He's the Vicar of Christ on Earth and the only infallible human. So why can't Pope Francis get his way with the coin-counters in his own curia? Bloomberg Businessweek looks at a temporal fight in a holy place.
- Joe Biden has placed John Kerry in charge of leading America's return to the world of climate action. It's time all the machinery of the US government is turned to this most-pressing challenge. Foreign Policy outlines a new type of international relations.
- The CEO of McDonalds eats the fare every day (and twice on weekdays). He also runs 50 miles every week. Enjoy this salty, umami profile from Financial Times – we promise it won't make you feel ill about half an hour hence.
Tom Wharton
