Yuki Hanyu won't put a time frame on it, but believes the day will come when the world's burgeoning population will be able to eat its fill of meat — and all without a single animal being slaughtered.
It was with this bold vision that Hanyu, co-founder and CEO of startup IntegriCulture Inc., quit his job as a corporate researcher five years ago to join the ranks of entrepreneurs around the world taking on the still formidable challenge of moving synthetic meat from the lab to the dinner table.
"Cultured meat has been appearing in a lot of sci-fi animation series, but it doesn't exist in our daily lives. So I thought I would take it on," said Hanyu, 34, who has a doctorate in chemistry from Oxford University.