THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019 51
tor at the Howard Hughes Medical In-
stitute. They had three children and
brought them up as vegetarians.
They still live in the cedar-shingled
faculty-housing condominium they
moved into more than thirty years ago,
now accompanied by a deaf, senile res-
cue mutt named Sebastian. The rooms,
a riot of wooden and ceramic animals,
call to mind Kafka’s observation as he
admired fish at an aquarium: “Now I can
look at you in peace; I don’t eat you any-
more.” Brown seems almost angry that
when Impossible Foods goes public he’ll
likely become a billionaire. “We’ve got it
so good here,” he told me one morning,
as he sat with Klapholz in their back gar-
den over bagels and blackberries, watch-
ing juncos flit overhead. “Why would we
want to change the way we live?”
Every other arrangement, though,
has always been up for grabs. “I don’t
know anyone more passionate than
Pat—and it’s hurt him,” Suzanne Pfeffer,
his former department chair at Stan-
ford, said. “We’d tease him about not
hitting the Send button on e-mails to
the dean or the N.I.H.” Joe DeRisi, a
leading malaria researcher who once
worked in Brown’s lab, showed me a
photo he keeps on his phone from those
days: the first slide in a presentation
Brown gave at Howard Hughes, which
said “Eating meat, publishing in Na-
ture, and other asinine things you dumb
f***s keep doing.” “I thought, Man, do
I admire that,” DeRisi said. “What I
learned from Pat was ‘You have a cer-
tain amount of time on the planet—
you should work on important stuff.’”
In 1995, Brown’s lab published pio-
neering work on the microarray, a method
of determining which genes are being
expressed in a given cell. The technique
proved hugely useful in distinguishing
normal tissue from cancerous tissue and
identifying a given cancer; it established,
for instance, that there isn’t one kind of
breast cancer but six. In 2001, he co-
founded the Public Library of Science,
a nonprofit publisher of open-access sci-
ence journals that competed, with some
success, with the commercial journals
that offended his principles by limiting
access to their trove of knowledge.
At Impossible, Brown second-guesses
himself in ways he never had to as a sci-
entist. He loves the office—“It gives me
a burst of happiness when I come in”—
but hates having to compartmentalize
information and to suppress his instinct
for combat. “My favorite thing to do is
to get into an argument, but my super-
ego can’t snooze through the day the
way it used to,” he told me. Still, he can’t
resist interrogating norms that strike
him as defective. At a recent meeting
to consider promotions for ten staffers,
Brown derailed the agenda by question-
ing the whole idea of tiered titles. After
half an hour, Impossible’s new presi-
dent, Dennis Woodside, the former
C.O.O. of Dropbox, said, in gentle dis-
belief, “Last week, we were very close
to promoting eight or nine people, and
now we’re going to take everyone’s ti-
tles away?” Unruffled, Brown said, “Is
there a way to have a more sensible sys-
tem that wasn’t invented for I.B.M.?”
Brown’s brother Richard said, “Pat
optimistically holds to the belief that
people are rational and can be convinced
by evidence. Some of the frustration he
feels is that food is different—there’s so
much subjectivity to it.” Brown remains
mystified, for instance, by Americans’
eagerness to add protein to their diets
when they already consume far more
than is necessary. Nonetheless, he beefed
up the protein in his burgers. “There
are things we do that are effectively just
acknowledging widespread erroneous
beliefs about nutrition,” he said. “For
the same reasons, we initially used only
non-G.M.O. crops, which was essen-
tially pandering. We’re not trying to win
arguments but to achieve the mission.”
He is equally baffled by challenges
from people who agree with his goals
but question his methods. In 2017, the
environmentalist organizations ETC
Group and Friends of the Earth at-
tacked Impossible, claiming that heme
was potentially unsafe and that its patty
“implicates the extreme genetic engi-
neering field of synthetic biology, par-
ticularly the new high-tech investor
trend of ‘vat-itarian’ foods.” Brown pub-
lished a comprehensive response, in
which he pointed out that “your own
bloodstream right now contains about
as much heme as 300 pounds of Im-
possible Burgers.”
When Impossible undertook the re-
quired animal testing to get F.D.A. ap-
proval of heme as a color additive, Peo-
ple for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
promptly strafed the company for feed-ing soy leghemoglobin “to a total of 188
rats in three separate tests, killing them,
and cutting them up.” PETA spitefully
added that “the Impossible Burger is
probably the unhealthiest veggie burger
on the market.” Brown told me he was
wounded by the attacks: “With a lot of
fundamentalist religious groups, it’s bad
if you’re a nonbeliever. But if you’re a her-
etic—that’s a capital crime.”
The spread of livestock is largely re-
sponsible for the ultimate in the uneth-
ical treatment of animals; since 1970, the
world’s wild animal populations have
diminished by an average of sixty per
cent. But PETA, in its zeal, often fails to
grapple with the nuances of means and
ends. For instance, it opposes eating
chicken, pointing to the abuses of fac-
tory farming. American broilers, chick-
ens raised for meat, are bred and confined
in ways that make them more than four
times larger than broilers were in the
nineteen-sixties; as a result, they often
collapse from their own weight. Jacy
Reese, in “The End of Animal Farm-
ing,” noted that “consuming smaller an-
imals leads to far more suffering per cal-
orie because it takes far more animals.”
By comparing the number of days that
various kinds of livestock spend in fac-
tory-farm conditions, Reese determined
that eating chicken is nineteen times
worse than eating beef. But it’s vastly
better for the environment—poultry
production has about one-eighth the
climate impact of beef production.
Believing you’re right doesn’t salve
the bruises from these ethical struggles.
Sue Klapholz told me, “Our mission
was too important not to do the animal
testing, but Pat and I would never want
to do it again. Our youngest son had a
pet rat, and they’re very smart animals
that like to have toys. I wouldn’t even
swat a mosquito—I’m that kind of vegan.
The protest was personally shattering
to me, as a longtime PETA supporter.”
She looked out the window. “I feel like
I lost a friend.”I
n Stockholm, Pat Brown had break-
fast with Solina Chau, an energetic
Hong Konger who is the co-founder
of Horizons Ventures. The firm, under-
written by one of Asia’s richest men, Li
Ka-shing, has led two rounds of invest-
ment in Impossible. Over coffee and
avocado toast at the Grand Hotel, Chau