Unusual investments of Bill Gates: lab-grown meat and GMO mosquitoes

The founder of the legendary Microsoft Corporation, billionaire, philanthropist and investor Bill Gates is known not only for his charitable projects, but also for his extraordinary investments. Apart from the usual commercial investments in Walmart, Apple, Amazon, and Coca-Cola, Gates supports quite exotic ideas. We will tell you about some of them today.

Cultured food

At the beginning of this year, Memphis Meats reported that it had raised $161 million in investments for a project to grow experimental meat from animal cells. Bill Gates was in the list of investors. In the near future, the company is expected to put into operation its first plant and enter the Asian market.

The digital mogul also supports startups that produce meat from plant components. The billionaire invested $208 million in the developments of Impossible Foods, and $17 million - in Beyond Meat. Today, this company is the leader among the producers of plant-based meat substitutes. Prior to this, Gates financially supported a project aimed at creating eggs from special plant-based raw materials that include 12 plants. The product is called Beyond Eggs and has been sold in the States since 2013.

In the spring of 2020, the businessman invested in C16 Biosciences. The company has come up with a way of producing palm oil from synthetic components. At the moment, the production provides an output of 10 kg of experimental oil per week, but the investments will enable increasing the volume up to 1 ton and supplying the oil to large enterprises.

Artificial gene mosquitoes

This project has a noble goal: to reduce the overall incidence of malaria spread by mosquitoes. The UK company Oxitec wants to breed a new species of male insects that will pass on a gene that programs "self-restraint" to female mosquitoes. This will lead to the death of new generations of mosquitoes before reaching sexual maturity. The businessman has already invested $4.1 million in the project, but the tests have not yet produced the expected results: the insect population first decreased, but then grew again to its initial size.

"Super cow"

In 2018, Gates was inspired by the idea of breeding a new type of cows that produce record amounts of milk and are adapted to hot weather conditions. To do this, the British non-commercial organization GALVmed plans to crossbreed the European breed of cattle with the African one. Bill Gates invested $40 million in the project pursuing the lofty goal of successfully fighting world hunger.

How do you like that, Elon Musk?