until 2019, the business had collected $396 million from investors like Bill Gates, Google Ventures and Li Ka-shing’s Horizons Ventures. Brown and his team then spent five years researching and developing the Impossible Burger, which launched in restaurants in 2016. Impossible Foods is also working on plant-based pork, chicken, fish and dairy products made without any animals. The soy leghemoglobin produced by genetically engineered yeast had raised regulatory questions at the FDA by 2015. However, in 2018 the FDA stated that it had “no questions” regarding the safety or regulatory compliance of Impossible Foods’ soy leghemoglobin, a decision which has since been upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Brown strongly supports labeling Impossible Foods’ products as “meat,” regardless of its source. In a 2018 interview with Quartz, he noted, “animals have just been the technology we have used up until now to produce meat... What consumers value about meat has nothing to do with how it’s made. They just live with the fact that it’s made from animals. If we’re producing a product that is delivering everything that is of value in meat for consumers, it’s filling that niche.” This assessment, according to Brown, appropriately categorizes meat by “what functional role it plays,” rather than its source of origin. These statements have put Brown at odds with the meat industry, which by mid-2019 had successfully pressured state legislatures in Missouri and Arkansas to pass laws barring plant-based protein manufacturers such as Impossible Foods and competitor Beyond Meat from labeling their products as “meat.” The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change strongly endorses Brown's venture and vision, saying that animal-based meat is a "problem" and that in order to "achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the global food system must undergo transformative change... By replacing animal products, consumers have enormous power to spare land for biodiversity and carbon capture, halt greenhouse gas emissions at the source, and alleviate demand on fresh water needed for healthy ecosystems." Research on meats and no-meat substitutes suggests that no-meat products offer substantial benefits over the production of beef, and to a lesser extent pork and chicken, in terms of greenhouse gas production, water and land use. Awards In 2000, Brown received the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology. In 2002 he received a Takeda award, recognizing his work in "the development of DNA microarrays with pre-synthesized DNA probes and