Biology and One-Way Doors
your Saturday roundup
Professionally, I focus on creating social benefit startups. In my Saturday morning emails I share what I’m learning and thinking. Topics range from better living and parenting to business and philosophy.
Cultivated Meat. Wow! The US government approved selling lab-grown meat. I got excited about the space in 2016. I spent time with Good Food Institute and New Harvest. I toured one company’s lab, heard the pitch from others and talked with experts. I came away with the impression that there was high technical risk and perhaps fundamental science risk. I wasn’t sure how to evaluate it and I’m wondering now if I made the right decision to not invest in startups working on it. For many years I was a vegetarian, tried veganism and currently am a pescatarian. The original decision to not eat meat came for discipline, health and environmental reasons. I also was thinking about the ethical treatment of animals and did not have an emotional attachment to meat given how I was raised. My reasons have shifted in emphasis over time with more concern about factory farming and less certainty in my beliefs. If cultivated meat involves no factory farming, no killing of animals, and becomes more environmentally friendly, would you eat it? What do you call someone who eats only cultivated meat, not animal-grown meat? A “degan” (from death and vegan)? Also, for a while, people will want cultivated meat that is as close as possible to the animal-grown variety. What if someone engineers or breeds a healthier version? Would you eat that?
Embryo Genetics. IVF, while still expensive and no fun, is becoming more common. Genetic screening during pregnancy is widespread. As our genetic understanding advances, it seems inevitable that people will apply new genetic knowledge to choosing which embryo to implant. I was surprised to learn almost half of people surveyed were ready to use it for positive trait selection (see chart). Are they saying they would undergo elective IVF for this purpose? What are the ethics? Are the positive or negative externalities stronger? What are the unintended consequences? I tend to think reproductive freedom is important although don’t dismiss that there are questions with new technology. Read up on the pros and cons and let’s discuss.
One Way Doors. Jeff Bezos popularized the concept of dividing decisions into one-way doors and two-way doors. He wrote about it in business. It is also useful for life. I was explaining the concept to our daughter who I don’t think has much trouble with it. She bakes without a recipe and I was praising the experimentation while encouraging the understanding of underlying principles. The one/two way door is a more grown up way of encouraging experimentation than the picture book Beautiful Oops. And not dissimilar to Class Dojo’s growth mindset video series. After the talk with her, I think I was the one that walked away with a lesson. We should be giving our kids more room to experiment with two way doors. Which are the one way doors in a kid's life? On the frontiers of biology, where are the one way doors for society?
Until next week,
Miles