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As part of ������ϲʹ���’s strategic partnership with The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU), we’re interviewing researchers from a whole range of disciplines about their experiences of creating societal impact through research.

In this interview, we speak to , professor of vascular physiology at Maastricht University and – famously – the man who. Alongside his academic work, Professor Post is chief scientific officer at – the company he founded to bring ‘clean meat’ to the world.

He tells us how he became involved in lab-grown meat research, how he set up his company, and what advice he would give to researchers looking to do something similar.

You started your career as a medical doctor and now your research exclusively focuses on cultured or ‘clean’ meat. How did that transition happen?

It was a winding path! I did a medical degree and started off in patient care. But I very quickly realised that patient care was not my ‘thing’. I’m somebody who’s more excited by developing new knowledge, looking at barriers and frontiers and trying to follow the hard path. And I didn't really find that in patient care. So, I quit and went on to do research and teaching. 

From then on I felt I was in the place I needed to be – academic research has allowed me to pursue all sorts of ideas that make me look at what is beyond what we're currently seeing and observing. I think that curiosity is a necessary attribute for every scientist. I loved the fact that I could essentially study whatever I wanted and renew myself and reinvent myself every now and then. 

Eventually, I started doing tissue engineering for cardiovascular purposes, making blood vessels for bypass surgery. My inclination has always been a little more towards applied research than very fundamental research, which I think comes from having been a medical doctor – I wanted  to do something that I could see patients benefiting from. In that regard, the societal impact of my research has always been important to me.

While I was working on that, I got acquainted – completely by coincidence –  with someone who said, "Well, you can use the same technology to create meat." And that immediately had an appeal to me, although I didn't quite understand back then how large the societal impact could be. 

So I decided to participate in that project, learnt more about it and got more and more hooked by its huge potential societal impact. And also by the fact that this is a research subject which is much more tangible to the public.

The combination of those two factors were the driving force behind me continuing to pursue this line of research. To the point that I’ve now completely converted away from medical applications to cultured meat applications.

After your initial project, you received funding from Google co-founder Sergei Brin to create the world’s first lab grown hamburger. How did that come about?

A big part of the reason this happened was due to media attention. My work was covered pretty extensively by the media because it was of such interest to the public – it captured the public imagination. So if you googled ‘cultured meat’, my name was right there. 

At some point, Sergey Brin told his investment manager that he wanted to do something about animal suffering and they quickly came to the subject of cultured meat. From there, they saw that only three or four people in the world were doing research into this – they approached me and asked me what my plans were for the work.

I’d already spent some time with a colleague trying to figure out funding pitches, because our initial project hadn’t received further funding at that time. So I had a prepared answer. I said, "What if we make a sausage from cells from a pig and present it to the public with the pig oinking around on the stage and happily still alive." And of course, I also presented a serious set of research and development goals to actually make it happen. 

Being from Google and Silicon Valley, I think the idea of the ‘display’ – the sausage and the pig – really caught their imagination. Within half an hour, the person I was speaking to said, "Well, give me a two pager and we will give you two million Euros to make it happen." So that’s what happened. And of course, along the way it became a burger instead of a sausage, but we still put on a bit of a ‘show’ to display what we had done and capture public attention.

You unveiled the cultured meat burger in 2013 and not long after set up Mosa Meat which is now focused on scaling up the production of cultured meat and getting products on the market. Why did you decide to found a company? And what was that process like?

The first burger cost about 250,000 Euros to make, so obviously that’s not commercially viable. The next step with cultured meat was always going to be to try to bring it to market – to make it a product people could go and buy in the shops, thereby realising the environmental impact. 

From the very beginning, we’ve seen the company as a means to achieve that goal and benefit society. Setti