Photo by Joshua Kantarges

Recently, two notable cultivated-meat companies failed. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, cultivated meat is grown from livestock cells, without slaughter. These economic developments are dispiriting for those of us who have followed the nascent industry with a good deal of hope about the potential animal welfare, public health and environmental benefits it will offer. Still, the news reaffirms something I’ve long believed, which is that we need a massive infusion of public funding into cultivated-meat research to advance the science.

Believer Meats shut down after allegedly failing to pay a construction firm over $34 million to build a cellular-agriculture facility in North Carolina. The Israeli startup, formerly known as Future Meat Technologies, had just received approval from the United States Food and Drug Administration to produce and sell its cultivated chicken in America. Anne Schubert, a representative for the company, wrote on........

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