Why I did this interview
I did not go to Arizona to talk about lettuce.
I went because of one exchange I knew we would eventually get to, and when we got there it was the most important five minutes of the conversation.
The Alzheimer’s drugs that exist right now, lecanemab and donanemab, are monoclonal antibodies. They clear amyloid from the brain. They are also expensive, they are administered by infusion, and they carry a real risk of brain swelling and microhemorrhage. Most people who could theoretically benefit from them will never receive one, and the reason is not scientific. The reason is that monoclonal antibodies are grown in mammalian cell culture, and mammalian cell culture is extraordinarily expensive.
I have written before about what I call the cognitive class war: the growing gap between people who can buy access to brain health and people who cannot. Drug manufacturing cost is one of the load-bearing walls of that gap.
Sam Bertram claims he can knock that wall down by growing the molecules inside plants.
He is not a pharmacologist. He is a mechanical engineer from Victoria, Australia who co-founded OnePointOne with his brother John in 2017, after reading that 1.1 billion people began this millennium malnourished. The company nearly died. Several of its better-funded competitors did die. What survived is a farm built inside a warehouse robotics system, growing greens for every Whole Foods in Arizona, harvest-ready in fifteen days.
And in partnership with UC Davis, they have already grown rituximab, a monoclonal antibody used in non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, inside their plants.
This is not as exotic as it sounds. Plant-made pharmaceuticals are already real. Taliglucerase alfa, approved by the FDA in 2012 for Gaucher disease, is produced in carrot cell culture. The experimental Ebola therapy ZMapp was grown in tobacco plants. The science exists. What has not existed is the manufacturing scale.
So the question I brought to Arizona was simple. If the molecule can be grown in a plant, and the plant can be grown in a box next to a distribution center, what happens to the price of a brain?
TOPICS DISCUSSED
00:00 – Cold open: bold claims & who is Sam Bertram
00:51 – Why vertical farms collapse (Bowery) & how OnePointOne survived
05:49 – The number that started it all: 1.1 billion malnourished
07:30 – Why micronutrient deficiency is the real killer
08:21 – What OnePointOne actually is: "a box that grows plants"
10:03 – Training plants with light & water to boost nutrients
11:00 – Closing the loop: food matched to your body's data
12:28 – The plan for 1,000 farms & the AutoStore partnership
15:46 – Plant biology 101: growing with no soil, no sun
18:11 – The robots — and why humans are still essential
21:27 – Pesticides, washing produce & disease clusters
23:53 – Beet greens for cancer patients & the Whole Foods deal
24:42 – A 13-person company run on AI
25:15 – The 15-day crop & cracking the cost code
27:11 – Biology vs. software: what really makes it work
28:01 – Humanoid robots, ~5 years away
30:27 – Why raise $80M and not $500M
33:56 – What they do to a plant that nature never would
36:28 – Expanding crops: strawberries, cannabis, mushrooms
38:05 – Growing food & materials in space (Elon, text back)
39:38 – Personalized food grown from your blood test
40:24 – Food as medicine & the truth about Western medicine
41:11 – Sam's mystery illness: 8 years without exercise
44:23 – Plants as medicine — who "fed and dosed" the world?
49:32 – Manufacturing pharmaceutical molecules inside plants
50:18 – Replicating $30–40k drugs cheaply (Rituximab, Lecanemab)
54:21 – Why the Middle East may beat the US, RFK Jr & MAHA
55:11 – Genetics, cancer & the healthy 80–90%
57:35 – Taste: beating junk food at its own game
58:27 – Why good food got so expensive (money printing)
59:14 – A world without hunger — how far away?
1:00:24 – Tasting the farm: microgreens, bok choy, mizuna & kale
Thank you for listening.
Louisa
