As a child, Kate Rubins dreamed of being an astronaut and a scientist. During the past four months aboard the International Space Station, that dream came full circle. She became the first person to sequence DNA in space, among other research during her recent mission, adding to her already impressive experience. She holds a doctorate in molecular biology, and previously led a lab of 14 researchers studying viruses, including Ebola.
Here’s a look back at Rubins in her element, conducting research aboard your orbiting laboratory.
Kate inside Destiny, the U.S. Laboratory Module
Destiny houses the Microgravity Science Glovebox (MSG), in which Kate worked on the Heart Cells experiment.
The U.S. national laboratory, called Destiny, is the primary research laboratory for U.S. payloads, supporting a wide range of experiments and studies contributing to health, safety, and quality of life for people all over the world.
Swabbing for Surface Samples
Microbes that can cause illness could present problems for current and future long duration space missions.
Understanding what microbe communities thrive in space habitats could help researchers design antimicrobial technology. Here, Kate is sampling various surfaces of the Kibo module for the Microbe-IV investigation.
Culturing Beating Heart Cells in Space
The Heart Cells investigation uses human skin cells that are induced to become stem cells, which can then differentiate into any type of cell.
Researchers forced the stem cells to grow into human heart cells, which Rubins cultured aboard the space station for one month.
Rubins described seeing the heart cells beat for the first time as “pretty amazing. First of all, there’s a few things that have made me gasp out loud up on board the [space] station. Seeing the planet was one of them, but I gotta say, getting these cells in focus and watching heart cells actually beat has been another pretty big one.”
Innovative Applied Research Experiment from Eli Lilly
The Hard to Wet Surfaces investigation from Eli Lilly, and sponsored by the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), looks at liquid-solid interactions and how certain pharmaceuticals dissolve, which may lead to more potent and effective medicines in space and on Earth.
Rubins set up vials into which she injected buffer solutions and then set up photography to track how tablets dissolved in the solution in microgravity.
Biological samples and additional research were returned on the Dragon spacecraft more than a month later.
Sliding Science Outside the Station
Science doesn’t just happen inside the space station. External Earth and space science hardware platforms are located at various places along the outside of the orbiting laboratory.
The Japanese Experiment Module airlock can be used to access the JEM Exposed Facility. Rubins installed the JEM ORU Transfer Interface (JOTI) on the JEM airlock sliding table used to install investigations on the exterior of the orbiting laboratory.
Installing Optical Diagnostic Instrument in the MSG
Rubins installed an optical diagnostic instrument in the Microgravity Science Glovebox (MSG) as part of the Selective Optical Diagnostics Instrument (SODI-DCMIX) investigation. Molecules in fluids and gases constantly move and collide.
When temperature differences cause that movement, called the Soret effect, scientists can track it by measuring changes in the temperature and movement of mass in the absence of gravity. Because the Soret effect occurs in underground oil reservoirs, the results of this investigation could help us better understand such reservoirs.
The Sequencing of DNA in Space
When Rubins’ expedition began, DNA had never been sequenced in space. Within just a few weeks, she and the Biomolecule Sequencer team had sequenced their one billionth “base” – the unit of DNA - aboard the orbiting laboratory.
The Biomolecule Sequencer investigation seeks to demonstrate that DNA sequencing in microgravity is possible, and adds to the suite of genomics capabilities aboard the space station.
The MinION™ DNA sequencer from Oxford Nanopore Technologies fits in the palm of a hand. Credits: Oxford Nanopore Technologies
Studying Fluidic Dynamics with SPHERES
The SPHERES-Slosh investigation examines the way liquids move inside containers in a microgravity environment. The phenomena and mechanics associated with such liquid movement are still not well understood and are very different than our common experiences with a cup of coffee on Earth.
Rockets deliver satellites to space using liquid fuels as a power source, and this investigation plans to improve our understanding of how propellants within rockets behave in order to increase the safety and efficiency of future vehicle designs. Rubins conducted a series of SPHERES-Slosh runs during her mission.
Retrieving Science Samples for Their Return to Earth
Precious science samples like blood, urine and saliva are collected from crew members throughout their missions aboard the orbiting laboratory.
They are stored in the Minus Eighty-Degree Laboratory Freezer for ISS (MELFI) until they are ready to return to Earth aboard a Soyuz or SpaceX Dragon vehicle.
Measuring Gene Expression of Biological Specimens in Space
Rubins ran several WetLab-2 RNA SmartCycler sessions during her mission.
Our WetLab-2 hardware system is bringing to the space station the technology to measure gene expression of biological specimens in space, and to transmit the results to researchers on Earth at the speed of light.
Studying the First Expandable Habitat Module on the Space Station
The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) is the first expandable habitat to be installed on the space station. It was expanded on May 28, 2016.
Expandable habitats are designed to take up less room on a spacecraft, but provide greater volume for living and working in space once expanded. Rubins conducted several evaluations inside BEAM, including air and surface sampling.
Better Breathing in Space and Back on Earth
Airway Monitoring, an investigation from ESA (the European Space Agency), uses the U.S. airlock as a hypobaric facility for performing science. Utilizing the U.S. airlock allows unique opportunities for the study of gravity, ambient pressure interactions, and their effect on the human body.
This investigation studies the occurrence and indicators of airway inflammation in crew members, using ultra-sensitive gas analyzers to evaluate exhaled air. This could not only help in spaceflight diagnostics, but that also hold applications on earth within diagnostics of similar conditions, for example monitoring of asthma.
Hot Science with Cool Flames
Fire behaves differently in space, where buoyant forces are removed. Studying combustion in microgravity can increase scientists’ fundamental understanding of the process, which could lead to improvement of fire detection and suppression systems in space and on Earth.
Many combustion experiments are performed in the Combustion Integration Rack (CIR) aboard the space station. Rubins replaced two Multi-user Droplet Combustion Apparatus (MDCA) Igniter Tips as part of the CIR igniter replacement operations.
Though Rubins is back on Earth, science aboard the space station continues, and innovative investigations that seek to benefit humans on Earth and further our exploration of the solar system are ongoing. Follow @ISS_Research to keep up with the science happening aboard your orbiting laboratory.
Researchers took the Chemical Laptop to JPL's Mars Yard, where they placed the device on a test rover. This image shows the size comparison between the Chemical Laptop and a regular laptop.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
If you were looking for the signatures of life on another world, you would want to take something small and portable with you. That's the philosophy behind the "Chemical Laptop" being developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California: a miniaturized laboratory that analyzes samples for materials associated with life.
"If this instrument were to be sent to space, it would be the most sensitive device of its kind to leave Earth, and the first to be able to look for both amino acids and fatty acids," said Jessica Creamer, a NASA postdoctoral fellow based at JPL.
Like a tricorder from "Star Trek," the Chemical Laptop is a miniaturized on-the-go laboratory, which researchers hope to send one day to another planetary body such as Mars or Europa. It is roughly the size of a regular computing laptop, but much thicker to make room for chemical analysis components inside. But unlike a tricorder, it has to ingest a sample to analyze it.
"Our device is a chemical analyzer that can be reprogrammed like a laptop to perform different functions," said Fernanda Mora, a JPL technologist who is developing the instrument with JPL's Peter Willis, the project's principal investigator. "As on a regular laptop, we have different apps for different analyses like amino acids and fatty acids."
Amino acids are building blocks of proteins, while fatty acids are key components of cell membranes. Both are essential to life, but can also be found in non-life sources. The Chemical Laptop may be able to tell the difference.
JPL researchers Jessica Creamer, Fernanda Mora and Peter Willis (left to right) pose with the Chemical Laptop, a device designed to detect amino acids and fatty acids. At left is a near-identical copy of the Curiosity rover, which has been on Mars since 2012. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
What it's looking for
Amino acids come in two types: Left-handed and right-handed. Like the left and right hands of a person, these amino acids are mirror images of each other but contain the same components. Some scientists hypothesize that life on Earth evolved to use just left-handed amino acids because that standard was adopted early in life's history, sort of like the way VHS became the standard for video instead of Betamax in the 1980s. It's possible that life on other worlds might use the right-handed kind.
"If a test found a 50-50 mixture of left-handed and right-handed amino acids, we could conclude that the sample was probably not of biological origin," Creamer said. "But if we were to find an excess of either left or right, that would be the golden ticket. That would be the best evidence so far that life exists on other planets."
The analysis of amino acids is particularly challenging because the left- and right-handed versions are equal in size and electric charge. Even more challenging is developing a method that can look for all the amino acids in a single analysis.
When the laptop is set to look for fatty acids, scientists are most interested in the length of the acids' carbon chain. This is an indication of what organisms are or were present.
How it works
The battery-powered Chemical Laptop needs a liquid sample to analyze, which is more difficult to obtain on a planetary body such as Mars. The group collaborated with JPL's Luther Beegle to incorporate an "espresso machine" technology, in which the sample is put into a tube with liquid water and heated to above 212 degrees Fahrenheit (100 degrees Celsius). The water then comes out carrying the organic molecules with it. The Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite on NASA's Mars Curiosity rover utilizes a similar principle, but it uses heat without water.
Once the water sample is fed into the Chemical Laptop, the device prepares the sample by mixing it with a fluorescent dye, which attaches the dye to the amino acids or fatty acids. The sample then flows into a microchip inside the device, where the amino acids or fatty acids can be separated from one another. At the end of the separation channel is a detection laser. The dye allows researchers see a signal corresponding to the amino acids or fatty acids when they pass the laser.
Inside a "separation channel" of the microchip, there are already chemical additives that mix with the sample. Some of these species will only interact with right-handed amino acids, and some will only interact with the left-handed variety. These additives will change the relative amount of time the left and right-handed amino acids are in the separation channel, allowing scientists to determine the "handedness" of amino acids in the sample.
The Chemical Laptop, developed at JPL, analyzes liquid samples and detects amino acids and fatty acids. These are both chemicals that are essential to life.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Testing for future uses
Last year the researchers did a field test at JPL's Mars Yard, where they placed the Chemical Laptop on a test rover.
"This was the first time we showed the instrument works outside of the laboratory setting. This is the first step toward demonstrating a totally portable and automated instrument that can operate in the field," said Mora.
For this test, the laptop analyzed a sample of "green rust," a mineral that absorbs organic molecules in its layers and may be significant in the origin of life, said JPL's Michael Russell, who helped provide the sample.
"One ultimate goal is to put a detector like this on a spacecraft such as a Mars rover, so for our first test outside the lab we literally did that," said Willis.
Since then, Mora has been working to improve the sensitivity of the Chemical Laptop so it can detect even smaller amounts of amino acids or fatty acids. Currently, the instrument can detect concentrations as low as parts per trillion. Mora is currently testing a new laser and detector technology.
Coming up is a test in the Atacama Desert in Chile, with collaboration from NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California, through a grant from NASA's Planetary Science & Technology Through Analog Research (PSTAR) program.
"This could also be an especially useful tool for icy-worlds targets such as Enceladus and Europa. All you would need to do is melt a little bit of the ice, and you could sample it and analyze it directly," Creamer said.
The Chemical Laptop technology has applications for Earth, too. It could be used for environmental monitoring -- analyzing samples directly in the field, rather than taking them back to a laboratory. Uses for medicine could include testing whether the contents of drugs are legitimate or counterfeit.
Creamer recently won an award for her work in this area at JPL's Postdoc Research Day Poster Session.
NASA's PICASSO program, part of the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, supported this research. The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.
LONDON — How do you respond to sexist comments if you're a female scientist who has been told that you should be in a single-sex lab because male scientists might fall in love with you? You mock them on Twitter, of course.
Female scientists have been tweeting photos of themselves (and some historical figures) with the hashtag #distractinglysexy in response to Sir Tim Hunt's comments on Tuesday. He told a conference in South Korea that the "trouble with girls" is they fall in love with you, you fall in love with them and that then when they're criticised, they cry.
British biochemist Hunt, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2001, resigned from his role at University College London following the controversy.
After news of his comments spread, they sparked outrage in the science community in Britain and beyond.
Here are 16 of the best #distractinglysexy tweets:
The University of Technology Sydney’s (UTS) new science building has already made headlines for its green roof, six-star sustainability rating and colourful design, but down in the basement is something even more exciting - a super lab poised to revolutionise the way science is taught.
The lab is the first of its kind in Australia, and is capable of holding 220 students and 12 different classes all at once. It also looks totally different to the uni lab benches we’re used to - each work area features headphones and a computer screen, as well as a display area for demonstrators to work with students one-on-one.
The design was based on the Super Lab at the London Metropolitan University, which is touted as the most advanced science teaching facility in Europe.
According to UTS, being able to watch detailed demonstrations on screen, while students perform the experiments themselves, offers a better learning experience. And having several classes running in the lab at once also means that students can start thinking collaboratively and get an insight into the subjects they might want to take in the future.
In fact, the entire science building is set up with this collaborative approach in mind, after UTS:Science decided to get rid of its many separate schools and simply break down the faculty into the School of Life Sciences and the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, both of which are housed together in the new building. They hope this will help prepare their students for the real, cross-disciplinary world of science.
"Our research efforts focus on delivering impact – results that effectively tackle the problems we now face in health and the environment, and here also cross-disciplinary collaboration has a big role to play," UTS’s Dean of Science, Bruce Milthorpe, told the press. "Our two new science schools will break down old discipline silos, offering researchers and students alike the chance to broaden their experiences."
The building also features a cool-looking forensic crime scene simulation lab (complete with "dead body" mannequins) and a psychology clinic that services members of the community to give students hands-on experience. The green roof features a tree nursery and saltwater tank, where researchers can grow seagrass, algae, and saltmarsh plants, in order to understand how they store carbon dioxide.
Darren Bradley/UTS
By 2020, UTS is aiming to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent based on 2007 levels, while also doubling its floor space, and this building is an important first step.
Seeing as the same old lab layouts have dominated science education for the past century, we’re pretty excited that teaching is finally starting to catch up with today’s technology. And if it leads to more collaboration in science in the process, that’s a bonus.
Find out more about the new building and super lab in the video below, and check out the study options available at UTS:Science here.
You all must know by now that I’m a sucker for excellent science music video parodies. This one, by the folks at UCSD Neuroscience, is my latest favourite. Set to the tune of Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’, this video captures the (sometimes) desperate journey to fill your conference poster before the deadline looms. It’s full of fun references to graduate school, academia and publishing – and the production value is awesome. The video was created as a party invitation for the UCSD Neurosciences Graduate Program Social, and if the party is anything like the video I’m sorry that I won’t be there.
Enjoy!
Carin Bondar
About the Author:
Carin Bondar is a biologist, writer and film-maker with a PhD in population ecology from the University of British Columbia. Find Dr. Bondar online at www.carinbondar.com, on twitter @drbondar or on her facebook page: Dr. Carin Bondar – Biologist With a Twist. Follow on Twitter @drbondar.
Scientists are pushing to perfect a genetically identical meat that would be better for the environment than cows are.
Cultured beef developed by professor Mark Post of Maastricht University in the Netherlands. (Photo: David Parry/PA)
MAASTRICHT, Netherlands—Selling the merits of an all-beef burger to a crowd of vegans and vegetarians is never easy. After all, as any of its proponents might tell you, a meatless diet is a slaughter-free way to eat healthy foods that cause less environmental damage.
Yet, Tobias Leenaert, the cofounder of Europe’s second-largest vegetarian organization, Ethical Vegetarian Alternative, found himself making a surprising argument at an April meeting in Belgium.
Sometime after the all-vegan potluck brunch and workshops about low-waste living and how to be a good ambassador of the meat-free lifestyle, Leenaert sang the praises of a particular kind of burger: one with a patty made of the lab-grown meat being developed at professor Mark Post’s lab at Maastricht University. The lab-grown meat is made of cells harmlessly drawn from a cow and then cultured to grow and form muscle fibers—which means there aren’t cows producing vast clouds of methane in the process, and there's no slaughter to atone for.
Theoretically, the harm-free, low-impact meat poses a challenge to some ethical qualms of vegetarians. Leenaert tried to persuade the crowd of more than 150 people to start eating cultured meat once it becomes available, in no small part because it will pull vegetarianism and veganism out of its cult status and prove that the community is interested in solving the overarching problems with meat production.
Vegans “often believe that we need to use moral arguments only, like ‘Thou shalt not kill animals,’ that attitude change can follow behavior change. So the cultured meat revolution could be the technological revolution that precedes a moral revolution,” Leenaert later told TakePart. “I think it could be the most important food revolution since the invention of farming.”
Professor Mark Post. (Photo: David Parry/Press Association)
The crowd didn’t make any promises, and even the creator of the meat isn’t too interested in converting vegetarians to eating cultured beef.
“I rather that they not touch it,” Post told TakePart, adding that he is on good terms with the Belgian vegetarian community and attends similar meetings several times a year, but “we have slightly different perspectives.”
In the quaint city of Maastricht, Post is hard at work with MosaMeat, the start-up newly launched to replace conventional beef with lab-grown ground beef. Before the product begins showing up on menus, the company is less worried about whether vegans or vegetarians will gobble up the beef with zeal and more focused on perfecting the product prior to an anticipated clash between mighty meat lobby groups and regulatory agencies. Taking a satisfying bite out of a tasty cultured beef burger is not that far away, and the product might be very competitively priced against conventional meat.
TakePart caught up with the pioneering MosaMeat team of Post and food technologist and consultant Peter Verstrate, who is MosaMeat’s CEO. We interviewed them for our "Design and Innovation" series, which highlights the people and cutting edge technology working to solve the world's most pressing problems.
Converting vegetarians to cultured beef is not the priority, confirmed Verstrate.
“I just don’t believe that the majority of consumers will step away from meat,” he told TakePart. “I can see why they say it, but it's not realistic. But that’s OK—it’s not our target group. Our target group is meat eaters.”
For Post, the science behind lab-grown meat is better used to address food security and the environmental impacts of traditional meat production—particularly raising cattle, which requires lots of land, water, and feed that could be used to grow food for humans. By the United Nations’ estimate, more than two-thirds of all farmland is used to grow feed for livestock, compared with only 8 percent that is used to grow food for people to eat. Add to that the environmental damage of manure and methane from livestock—of which cattle are the most prolific producers—and lab-grown meat can be especially appealing.
(Infographic: Marc Fusco)
MosaMeat is finalizing plans and funding it needs to scale up operation from a petri dish to a 25,000-liter bioreactor that would produce 882,000 pounds of meat a year—enough for more than 10,000 people who eat an average amount of beef.
In 2013, when the cultured meat burger was unveiled in London, the price tag was more than $300,000. Nowadays, Post’s best estimate is that an early retail price could be set at $29.50 per pound, but as production scales up, if the research holds, that price could come down to approximately $3.60 per pound.
“At first it will likely be aimed at high-end restaurants or specialty stores where people are willing to pay a premium for a product,” Post said.
To make a cultured beef burger patty, a harmless biopsy of muscle cells is taken from a cow. The cells are nurtured in the lab, multiplying and merging to create strands that grow into muscle tissue. It takes 20,000 strands of muscle tissue for one beef burger. Version 1.0 was pure protein and colored with beetroot.
“It was just muscle fiber, but meat is also fat, connective tissue, myoglobin—which is the stuff that makes meat red, gives it taste. So the burger wasn’t finished. It was a very ‘single-cell’ product, you might say,” Verstrate told TakePart.
Two experts tasted the very pricey burger in London in 2013, with food writer Josh Schonwald saying “the general bite feels like hamburger” and nutrition researcher Hanni Rützler noting the absence of fat, adding that “there is quite some intense taste; it’s close to meat, but it’s not that juicy,” the BBC reported. Fat may not sound desirable, but as chef Julia Child is known for saying, “Fat is flavor.” Besides, MosaMeat knows that to have a viable contender against traditional beef mince for version 2.0, it needs to add those missing ingredients. That means growing cultured fat in the lab and having a serum-free medium. The current method of growing cultured cells dates back more than 100 years and has depended on adding blood (serum) derived from cows to the cell-culture medium. Post pointed out that the 2013 burger also contained serum, but that won’t cut it for the next version.
Back at the lab, the current method for cultured fat comes from the medical industry. Research from Duke University, for example, indicates cells taken from fat deposits can be “reprogrammed” into replacement cells. But there hasn’t been much incentive to experiment with growing fat tissue—and the existing methods for producing fat cells are not compatible with food production.
“We had to redesign that method,” Post explained, “so the next version will have cultured fat added to the cultured muscle.”
They also want to perfect extra ingredients to improve the shelf life of the product, as well as taste and color: a sustainable hamburger that tastes great and is comparable to a traditional hamburger. When version 2.0 of the cultured beef mince is ready, it will be submitted to formal regulatory processes as soon as 2018, though “talking to EU and FDA/USDA representatives informally will probably start much earlier,” Verstrate said. Once the product is formally submitted, the process takes about a year and a half.
(Photo: David Parry/Press Association)
Under EU food guidelines, cultured meat is classified as a “novel food,” a “food that has not been consumed to a significant degree by humans in the EU prior to 1997,” and will need to be approved by a branch of the medical evaluation board. It’s comparable to getting a medicine approved: You have to prove you can feed it, safely, to people.
MosaMeat’s research has met with a variety of reactions from farmers, the meat industry, food corporations, and supermarket industry executives. Farmers are skeptical—many openly assume cultured meat isn’t something they have to worry about in their lifetime. Post thinks the beef industry is waiting and watching for the product to be launched and marketed before showing interest, though he has some early indication that he’s the subject of conversation around some important kitchen tables.
“I heard from a chief executive at Cargill who realized that her [negative] perspective may be skewed when she asked her eight-year-old son, and his response was, ‘I’d eat it!’ ” Post said.
In the U.S., in terms of governmental support, or lack thereof, for sustainable alternatives, the five-year update on the USDA Dietary Guidelines announced at the end of 2015 did not take sustainability into consideration. “We do not believe that the 2015 DGAs are the appropriate vehicle for this important policy conversation about sustainability,” the USDA blog announced.
In April of this year, powerful lobby groups including the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association sent a letter to Congress petitioning it to propose a change in the Freedom of Information Act that would prevent the public from accessing interactions between lobby groups and boards that are overseen by the USDA, according to Fortune, which obtained the letter. The move came just a few months after the CEO of the American Egg Board stepped down when emails came to light revealing his attempt to exert pressure on Whole Foods to drop Just Mayo, an egg-free mayonnaise product.
MosaMeat says, however, that it isn’t worried about possible negative influence from the beef industry lobby groups.
“I know how powerful they are, but I’m not worried, and it’s not because I’m naive,” Post told TakePart. “It’s because in the Netherlands and the U.K., the governments actually approach me to ask, ‘How can we make sure that the meat lobby doesn’t kill this at the regulatory level?’ ”
Although MosaMeat has not approached supermarkets yet, it has heard positive feedback from those within the industry. Harvard Business School professor and former Stop & Shop CEO José B. Alvarez told MosaMeat that cultured beef could be a big hit if it could be a consistent product for consumers.
“That is something that supermarkets seem to like—that you can produce something that consumers know is completely predictable,” Post said. “I use that argument myself because I feel strongly about it as a consumer, but nobody ever said it was a great characteristic until the supermarket guy said, ‘That’s going to be a killer thing.’ ”
With funding, MosaMeat hopes to work on cultured steak alongside its continued work on cultured ground beef.
“If you want to solve the meat problem, you need to make steaks as well. A lot of meat is consumed that way,” Verstrate said.
The big difference between steak and hamburger is size. The hamburger is limited in size, because if the muscle strands become too big, the center will die when it doesn’t get enough oxygen or nutrients. That’s why we have blood vessels—to carry oxygen and nutrients to cells and remove waste. To make a steak, you have to provide that channel system, lots of oxygen and nutrients to keep everything alive. You need to create an organ type of structure in which you have not only the tissue but also the blood-vessel-type system.
But cultured steak will likely be a lot more complicated and might require 3-D technology—or perhaps something beyond current imagination. Verstrate told TakePart steak might be developed through another process that doesn’t involve printing but that gives the 3-D result. MosaMeat is in talks with 3-D experts and says there might be a simpler solution. Verstrate refrained from elaborating further. In the meantime, while the company applies for more funding, its main focus is on cultured mincemeat.
Post stressed, “My primary concern and the reason why I'm doing this is food security and environmental impact.” The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations describes food security as “access of all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life.”
A large cattle stockyard near Yuma, Arizona, like many livestock facilities, contributes to an excess use of energy, concentrated greenhouse gas emissions, and an exorbitant use of water. (Photo: Pete Mcbride/Getty Images/National Geographic)
By 2050, FAO says, the global population is expected to grow by more than 2 billion people, with most of that growth taking place in developing countries. To keep up with feeding an additional 2 billion people, food production will have to rise by 70 percent. However, current meat industry practices—from greenhouse gas emissions to water pollution to land usage—are just not sustainable.
In the U.S., agricultural soil management alone accounts for 79 percent of nitrous oxide, which feeds greenhouse gases, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Methane gas, water pollution caused when fertilizers run off into lakes and rivers, and large amounts of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide—emitted from soil when nitrogen is added through the use of synthetic fertilizers—are all due to traditional agriculture and could be avoided with cultured meat.
Estimates vary, but the 2006 United Nations report Livestock’s Long Shadow made an assessment that livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gases globally, which is a larger percentage than that produced by transport. Cultured beef could produce up to 98 percent less greenhouse gas emissions compared with the way meat is produced through traditional agriculture, according to a study on the environmental impact of cultured beef that was funded by New Harvest, a previous financial backer of cultured meat research. Researcher Hanna Tuomisto’s 2011 study sets conventionally produced European meat as the standard for impacts on energy, greenhouse gases, and water and land use. The comparison results are stark:
Cultured meat could lead to
45 percent less energy use (except in the case of poultry),
up to 96 percent less greenhouse gas emissions,
up to 99 percent less land use, and
up to 96 percent less water use.
Tuomisto also pointed to the difficulty of persuading people to stop eating meat altogether.
“It’s difficult to change behavior. There’s a long tradition in many cultures to eat meat, so it might be easier to change the way we produce meat rather than try to convince people to eat vegetarian products,” she told TakePart.
Cultured meat, however, is not without drawbacks. Energy use could be one of them—and perhaps points to a need for cultured meat producers to team with solar power engineers. An Arizona State Universitystudy published in 2015 proposed that despite the lower risk of greenhouse gas contributions, the production of cultured meat could require more industrial energy than livestock production does, heralding “a new phase of industrialization with inherently complex and challenging trade-offs.”
Researcher Carolyn Mattick told TakePart a solar power plant could be built to power the cultured meat facility, or a low-carbon electricity source installed on its grid, but also notes this undertaking falls largely outside the purview of cultured meat producers.
“There are a number of ways that cultured meat producers could reduce their products’ carbon footprints," Mattick said. “Constructing new solar power plants could certainly be one, but another could simply be to improve the efficiency of their production process and reduce the energy required per serving.”
That doesn’t sound bad to Post.
“What I would love to do is to somehow design a system to make it very socially responsible,” Post said, “so that we calculate what resources we save and somehow distribute those resources to people who need it.”
Once that responsible technology is perfected, Post sees a powerful demand for it around the world, and also promises broad accessibility.
“I talked to a minister of agriculture in Zambia who said, ‘This [cultured meat] will never happen in Africa because we don’t have the skilled personnel,’ but I told him it’s a relatively simple process. You could train people. I see the technology going global.”
“We’re not there yet,” Post went on to say, “but it has to be an important part of this company to be very outspoken in its social responsibility.”
Elizabeth Rushe is a writer and photographer from Ireland who is based in Berlin. Her work has been published by NPR, Paste Magazine, Vice, and Marie Claire.
