Huang Zheng founded Fanxing Fund for food and life science research

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The sudden outbreak of the new crown in early 2020 has brought troubles to the lives of global residents.
Like most people, Huang Zheng stayed at home for a while, read some philosophy books, and gained some insights into life.

He wrote in his letter to shareholders in 2020, “A whole new human world is coming, and new species will be bred and grown in new soil in a completely different way from before.
We will invest more firmly in the future and work hard.
Build the new world in front of you.
”

In the past six years, because of differentiated choices, Pinduoduo has focused on the agricultural sector, and has benefited farmers and consumers by improving the efficiency of the circulation sector and replenishing the two ends in the middle.

By linking supply and demand in the "cloud", small farmers can directly face the numerous consumers on the platform, creating a big market for small and scattered agricultural products.
This model integrates scattered agricultural products from various places on the platform, uses the agricultural product intelligent system to predict the maturity cycle of agricultural products, and pre-sells seasonal fruits and vegetables and flowers in advance, and accurately recommends them to users according to category prices.

In the past, small-scale agricultural products such as yacon and ginseng fruit were difficult to achieve large-scale circulation.
But with a platform like Pinduoduo, one package can be shipped, and the market opens up all at once.

However, the improvement of circulation efficiency cannot qualitatively increase the added value of agricultural products, nor can it substantially increase the level of health in nature.
At the same time, a more profound reality is rarely mentioned by the technology media.
In the "2020 Global Food Safety Index" released by The Economist, China ranks 35th.
The ranking has risen compared to the past, but it is still only at the upper middle level.

In 2018, the income of urban residents was nearly three times higher than that of rural residents, which was roughly the same as the gap at the beginning of the economic reform in 1978.
When more and more migrant workers appear in express delivery, Didi, the Internet, and even urban manufacturing, agricultural production is backward and inefficient, and China's food supply exceeds supply and the gap becomes larger.
It will also be worrying.

Go deeper, step by step, what can we do? Regarding the solution to the "food problem" of human beings, the agricultural revolution in a small country gave another possibility.

The natural arable land in Israel is only 20% of the country's area, the climate is drought and water shortage, and agricultural employment accounts for only 1.
2% of the total labor force.
However, their agricultural products can not only meet most of the domestic demand, but also can be exported.

Thanks to the water system and organizational system, it is also inseparable from technological innovation (for example, drip irrigation, cultivating plants that require less water), which makes Israeli agriculture quite innovative.
Agriculture is no longer the primary industry in the traditional sense, but A compound strategic emerging industry that integrates technology, industry and even service industries.

"The increasingly fierce and even alienation of industry competition has made them realize that traditional scale and efficiency-oriented competition has its inevitable problems.
To change, it must find answers based on core technology and its basic theories.
" Huang Zheng will The goal for the future is to "enhance the added value of agricultural products qualitatively, and substantially improve the level of physical health.
"

In this open letter in 2021, we have also seen several possible samples, all of which are closely related to human well-being.
For example, can we effectively control the content of harmful heavy metals in agricultural products while increasing the level of beneficial trace elements (and vitamins); can we stabilize the supply of healthier vegetable protein "Vegetarian 2.
0"; continue the 2016 Nobel Prize "Molecular Robot" research , Can we develop a protein robot to dredge human brain blood vessels?

2.
A sample: the bottom revolution of meat eating

Finless Food, located in Berkeley, California, wants to use artificial methods to "grow" fish for people to eat.

They will sample a small piece of fish from a healthy and delicious marine fish and isolate the cells they need.
As long as the conditions are right and sufficient nutrients are provided, this cell will divide, multiply, and grow into fish flesh.
All these processes take place in an expensive device called a bioreactor.

Finless Foods held a tasting event to grow fish from cells in September 2017.

Nowadays, in addition to artificial fish, there are artificial beef, pork, chicken, and artificial milk.
It is said that Huang Zheng was invited to taste the artificial beef, which was developed by the artificial meat company invested by Bill Gates.
For this meal, he also bought real beef for comparison.
As a result, Huang Zheng couldn't distinguish the two kinds of meat at all, and was shocked.

From the perspective of biological evolution, humans are an omnivorous animal.
Since most people need to consume animal protein to sustain life, we have no freedom of choice when it comes to eating meat.

Over the past half century, global meat consumption has increased rapidly.
Today's daily meat and meat protein intake per capita has doubled compared to the 1960s, with an average annual growth rate of 1.
9%, and total production is five times as much as 50 years ago.

"National Geographic" statistics further support the trend of humans to eat more meat: from 1961 to 2011, people's daily calorie intake increased from 2,194 to 2,870 calories, of which the proportion obtained from meat increased from 6%.
Increase to 9%.

Statistics show that livestock account for 18% of human greenhouse gas emissions, 40% of methane, and 65% of nitrous oxide.
Animal husbandry also takes up a lot of resources on the earth.
Agriculture accounts for 92% of human freshwater footprint.
To feed the future tens of billions of people (the current global population is nearly 8 billion), it is necessary to breed more pigs, sheep, cattle and other livestock, which will cause tremendous pressure on the planet.

"Agriculture and animal husbandry occupy too much land, excessive fertilization, extensive irrigation patterns.
.
.
We need to rethink how to produce food.
" Researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and other institutions in the UK "Nature·Sustainable Development" magazine (2020) It was mentioned in the published paper.

Fortunately, synthetic biotechnology and culture allow humans to have choices in what to eat and how to eat.

"No matter how much Homo sapiens has put in, how many achievements he has made, there is still no way to break the limits of biological factors.
However, at the dawn of the 21st century, the situation has changed: Homo sapiens began to transcend these boundaries.
Naturally.
The law of choice is beginning to be broken and replaced by the law of intelligent design.
” In the "Sapiens Doomsday" chapter of "A Brief History of Mankind", the author Yuval Harari wrote.

Li Ka-shing and Bill Gates have endorsed synthetic biotechnology one after another.
The former once said, "The era of synthetic biology is now in sight and it will disrupt many industries.
This is a big opportunity.

There are roughly two kinds of artificial meat technology routes-cell culture and soybean culture.
Finless Food's artificial fish meat belongs to the former one, and the artificial beef from the star company Impossible Foods belongs to the latter one.
They combined soy protein, potato protein, coconut oil and sunflower oil, and extracted heme from the nodules of the roots of soybean plants, and injected them into Impossible meat to give beef the original bloody taste.

Impossible Singapore's

Heme is extracted from the nodules of soybean plant roots and injected into Impossible meat to give the original bloody taste of beef.

Tyson, Nestle and other food giants and capital are all eyeing artificial meat.
Behind the star artificial meat company is crowded with prominent investors (Impossible foods investors include Li Ka-shing and Bill Gates).
As these star companies began to conquer the Asian table, a question arose spontaneously:

Why should the Chinese, who have a long-standing civilization and never eat enough, leave it to the "meat" of the West to conquer cities? What's more, there are also fundamental issues related to the country's sustainable development and national health.

Statistics show that developing countries and regions have contributed most of the growth in global meat consumption.
China is particularly prominent among them.
Since the 1960s, China's per capita disposable income has increased from less than US$500 to about US$9,000.
The daily calories obtained from meat have jumped from 29 kcal to 483 kcal, an increase of about 16 times.
The annual per capita meat consumption has risen from 4 kg to 62 kg.
It is 13 times as much as 50 years ago.

In the trend of increasing human consumption of meat, developing countries and regions have contributed most of the growth.
Overall consumption in Asia has doubled sevenfold in 50 years.
Source: Curiosity Daily

China's meat consumption has made outstanding contributions.
In all the changes, the consumption growth of pork in China has left all the remaining categories behind.
The Chinese are equivalent to eating more than half of the world's pork every year.
Source: Curiosity Daily

At present, the biggest challenge facing artificial meat companies is how to reduce costs.
Caixin reporters have conducted investigations.
The price of a piece of Beyond Meat's artificial meat is US$3, which is almost twice the price of ground beef patties.
The unit price of Impossible Foods in Burger King in the United States is US$5.
79, which is US$1 more expensive than ordinary burgers; in Hong Kong and Macau The burger chain’s Triple O's is priced at 88 Hong Kong dollars, and the traditional beef burger in the store is only 58 Hong Kong dollars.

As far as animal-derived artificial meat is concerned, culture media, bioreactors, and well-trained technicians cause meat prices to remain high.
However, cost and efficiency are problems that artificial meat scientists are working hard to solve.
"In the next two to three years, impossible foods for plant-based meat burgers may be priced higher than cost.
Within five years, I am confident that artificial meat will be cheaper.
" In 2019, Impossible Foods CEO Patrick Brown was interviewed by Caixin reporters.
Zeng said.

Compared to four years ago, the cost of artificial meat has now fallen a lot, and it can be at least 50% more expensive than existing beef.
But the least fear of technology is to reduce costs.
When the problem is cost, it means that the breakthrough is only a matter of time.
These all herald disruptive changes.

3.
"Fanxing": Feed back life sciences with public welfare

The research on artificial fish meat also happened to appear in the first batch of funding projects from the Star Science Foundation of Shanghai Institute for Advanced Study of Zhejiang University.

On March 17, 2021, Zhejiang University Education Foundation and Fanxing Charity Fund signed a donation agreement to establish the "Star Science Fund of Zhejiang University Shanghai Institute for Advanced Study" to support the construction of the "computing +" innovation laboratory and promote the school’s Carry out basic research and cutting-edge exploration in intersecting fields such as, medical, agriculture, and food.

As the first phase of funding, Fanxing Charity Fund will donate US$100 million to the Zhejiang University Education Foundation in the next 3-5 years for the three innovative experiments of "computing + biomedicine", "computing + agricultural food" and "advanced computing" Scientific research projects in the laboratory.

At present, more than 90% of the world's fish species are over-predated, causing ecological imbalances, but it also means that the number of wild fish is difficult to increase, and fishing grounds often use large amounts of pesticides and antibiotics.
On the way to the dining table, fish meat faces a much smaller ethical dilemma than artificial beef.
The fetal bovine serum required by the former is extremely difficult or even cruel to obtain.
It is necessary to slaughter pregnant cows to take out the undeveloped fetal cows, and perform cardiac puncture and blood collection on their hearts.

In addition, the first batch of projects to be carried out include "super large-scale real-time graph inference engine research", "research on closed-loop regulation of cognitive impairment in the brain", "research on neoantigens of tumor immunity" and so on.

The "super-large-scale real-time graph inference engine research" focuses on the newly generated "hot data", which can process the data more accurately in a shorter time, such as using milliseconds to determine whether a credit card has been stolen.

The World Health Organization estimates that there are approximately 340 million people suffering from depression worldwide.
It is estimated that by 2020, depression will become the second largest source of disease burden after coronary heart disease.

".
.
.
If we cannot prolong our lives, then let us reduce the pain as much as possible.
The pain I am talking about is chronic, including depression and anxiety.
" Chen Tianqiao, chairman and CEO of Shanda Networks, was talking about donations He said when he founded the Chen Tianqiaoluoqianqian Institute of Neuroscience at the California Institute of Technology to focus on brain science.

The main cause of depression in the medical profession is the monoamine hypothesis, which is mainly related to low monoamines, such as norepinephrine and dopamine.
Although some drugs have been proven to have antidepressant effects, they also have obvious side effects.

In 2021, the team of Professor Edward F.
Chang from the University of California, San Francisco, proposed a novel and personalized neuromodulation method for the treatment of refractory depression, and found that there are differences in the three deep brain stimulation (DBS) target locations.
The stimulation method can improve the patient's symptoms in a short time.

In fact, with the development of biological sciences, non-invasive techniques can provide a deeper understanding of neuropsychiatric diseases (such as depression).
New technologies provide key questions for the study of pathological mechanisms based on disease animal models, and the use of comprehensive technologies to study pathological mechanisms provides great opportunities for the discovery of new drug targets and the development of new therapies.
"Closed-loop regulation of cognitive impairment in the brain" will deeply study the target mechanism of depression and anxiety.
If this technology achieves breakthrough results, it will become a gospel for patients with depression and other affective disorders.

"Tumor immune neoantigen design and application" focuses on the latest tumor immunotherapy mechanism, which targets and attacks cunning cancer cells by stimulating the innate ability of the body's immune system.

Neoantigen (neoantigen) refers to the antigen presented by tumor cells that can activate T cells.
As long as the number of tumor mutations is large enough, there will always be some mutations that will become new antigens.
Neoantigens derived from mutations have become the most ideal target for immunotherapy.

The neoantigen therapy is mainly through high-throughput gene sequencing and data analysis, discovering many individualized somatic mutations of the patient’s tumor, screening out mutations that may become neoantigens as targets, and loading them on antigen-producing cells (APC).
Thereby it has the effect of activating T cells to recognize a variety of neoantigens, thereby killing tumors.

Compared with targeted drugs that fix a single target, neoantigen therapy does not require a fixed target and can target multiple individual targets for patients.
If a targeted drug with a fixed single target is compared to a certain fixed method of martial arts practice, the neoantigen therapy is "seeing tricks" and "no tricks for winning.
"

The early method of screening new antigens through cDNA libraries is time-consuming and labor-intensive and difficult to promote.
At present, with the development of sequencing technology and bioinformatics, it is possible to quickly and effectively perform individual sequencing and neoantigen screening for each patient, laying the foundation for the clinical application of neoantigen vaccines.

As early as 2020, in accordance with the promise made at the IPO, Huang Zheng, together with the founding team, donated approximately 2.
37% of the company's shares and formally donated the establishment of the "Fanxing Charity Fund" to promote social responsibility construction and scientific research.
The fund is an irrevocable charity fund, managed by an independent trustee, to ensure that all the assets of the charity fund are used for public welfare purposes.

Research in the field of life sciences is very expensive and often returns without success, but Huang Zheng still chooses to use charity to feed back, which is rare among the rich in China.

"For the brain and thought, I think a non-profit approach must be used, because humans currently lack an understanding of some basic aspects of the brain.
All these studies are still in universities or research institutes.
" Chen Tianqiao answered why Public welfare way to do brain science research.

Huang Zheng's choice may be related to his realization of wealth freedom when he was 27 years old.
His experience at that time made him realize that the role of money also has two sides.
It is said that the name of Fanxing Charity Fund was inspired by Vincent Van Gogh's words, "I don't know what is certain in the world, but I only know that as soon as I see the stars, I will start dreaming.
"

If Fanxing "asked" the question, but the research method might be wrong, in a sense, it doesn't matter if a lot of money is lost, because once you get both of them right, you will change the world.

Source: Heart of the Machine

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