On Tech Ethics Podcast – Understanding Cellular Agriculture

To easily navigate through our podcast, simply click on the ☰ icon on the player. This will take you straight to the chapter timestamps, allowing you to jump to specific segments and enjoy the parts you’re most interested in.

1. Definition of Cellular Agriculture (00:03:18) Natalie defines cellular agriculture as producing goods from cells instead of whole organisms.
2. Global Issues Addressed by Cellular Agriculture (00:06:19) Discussion on how cellular agriculture can tackle environmental sustainability, animal welfare, and human health.
3. Technologies in Cellular Agriculture (00:11:12) Overview of the two leading technologies: precision fermentation and cell cultivation.
4. Precision Fermentation Explained (00:12:03) Natalie details how precision fermentation uses engineered microbes to produce proteins.
5. Cell Cultivation Process (00:14:34) Explanation of how animal cells are cultivated to produce cultured meat and other products.
6. Challenges in Scaling Cultured Products (00:19:03) Natalie discusses the technological and logistical challenges in scaling cultured meat production.
7. Ethical Considerations in Cultured Products (00:23:55) The need for ethical considerations in the development of cultured products is introduced.
8. The Use of Animal Products in Cultured Meat (00:24:00) Discussion on the ethical implications of using animal-derived ingredients in cultured meat production.
9. Consumer Perception and Communication (00:25:18) Exploring how consumer aversion to science in food affects communication strategies for cultured meat.
10. Advancing Cellular Agriculture (00:27:10) Insights on the need for collaboration and shared resources in the cellular agriculture industry.
11. Resources for Learning and Getting Involved (00:29:21) Recommendations for nonprofits and educational programs related to cellular agriculture.
12. Ethical Considerations in Transitioning Industries (00:33:06) Discussion on the social impacts of transitioning to cellular agriculture and the importance of a just process.

Daniel Smith: Welcome to On Tech Ethics with CITI Program. Our guest today is Natalie Rubio, who is the Executive Director of the Cellular Agriculture Commercialization Laboratory at Tufts University, working to convert early-stage innovations to impactful technologies to reduce the cost, increase the scale, and improve the quality of cellular agriculture products. Today we’re going to discuss cellular agriculture.

Before we get started, I want to quickly note that this podcast is for educational purposes only. It is not designed to provide legal advice or legal guidance. You should consult with your organization’s attorneys if you have questions or concerns about the relevant laws and regulations that may be discussed in this podcast. In addition, the views expressed in this podcast are solely those of our guests.

And on that note, welcome to the podcast, Natalie.

Natalie Rubio: Thank you for having me.

Daniel Smith: It’s wonderful to have you and I’m looking forward to learning more about cellular agriculture. So to get started, can you tell us more about yourself and your work at Tufts?

Natalie Rubio: Yeah, of course. I did my bachelor’s degree in chemical and biological engineering, and I really chose that major before I knew what it meant to be a chemical engineer. So I found myself, part of the way through college, really unenthused with the traditional career paths, and I ended up taking a bioethics course actually that introduced me to the concept of lab-grown meat, which is one of the products produced from cellular agriculture. And I really fell in love with the concept of lab-grown meat, which today, we call cultured meat, and that’s really when my career started. I decided to devote my working life to advancing cultured meat. And so that brought me to start working with a nonprofit called New Harvest, and that nonprofit actually ended up funding my PhD, which is what brought me to Tufts originally back in 2016.

So I started research at Tufts in 2016, specifically to focus on using tissue engineering for food instead of medical applications, so my PhD was on cultured meat. I graduated in 2021 from Tufts, went to go work for a startup for a year that was also in the same field, and then about a year ago, came back to Tufts to help lead the commercialization efforts.

So today at Tufts, I work with a small research team and we’re focused on commercializing cellular agriculture technologies that mainly originate from Tufts University. Tufts University is a really strong leading academic institution in the field of cellular agriculture and cultured meat, and they’re really giving rise to a lot of cool innovations that could really drive the entire field forward. And so what we do is look at technologies that might be really impactful to the rest of the industry and figure out how we get them from the lab into the hands of people that can make them useful.

Daniel Smith: I think you kind of alluded to this a bit already, but just so we’re all on the same page, can you briefly define what cellular agriculture is?

Natalie Rubio: Cellular agriculture, as I define it, is making stuff with cells. So cellular agriculture is a newish term, but the technology has been around for much longer.

One of the historic examples of something that’s been produced via cellular agriculture for a very long time and has been in our food system for a very long time is rennet. So rennet is an enzyme that’s used in cheese production, and it used to be obtained from the pancreatic tissue of livestock animals. That’s the native source of that enzyme of rennet, and so that used to be harvested from livestock and used in cheese production. And then I think maybe back in the ’80s, I’m actually not sure of the timeline, but people were able to produce this enzyme rennet using cells, so recombinant protein production, and then we didn’t need to get it from the livestock anymore. So I think 99% of the rennet that’s used in cheese production today actually comes from cells, even though it originally came from animals.

And then this field kind of got built and became more popular and more of a focused effort when there was a lot of realization that a lot of products that we today get from animals could instead be produced from cells, and this is really any animal product that you can think of. So meat is a really prominent part of the field because of the environmental and human health and animal welfare concerns that surround conventional meat production, but you can also produce leather from cellular agriculture, and milk proteins, and egg proteins, and gelatin. Really anything that you can think of that comes from an animal, we could produce from animal cells instead.

The scope of cellular agriculture is also beyond animal products, anything that’s biological, so plants as well. You could grow plant products from plant cell culture instead of getting it from whole plants. So the way I define cellular agriculture is a little vague, but it’s making stuff from cells as opposed to whole organisms.

Daniel Smith: That’s really interesting, and I want to hear more about the technology used in cellular agriculture, but first, to keep it at a higher-level perspective, what are some of the current global issues that developing these types of products via cellular agriculture could help alleviate?

Natalie Rubio: Yeah. A lot of the motivation for developing products from cellular agriculture as opposed to conventional agriculture is around environmental sustainability. I know the most about meat, so I’ll speak specifically to meat, but raising animals to feed humans is incredibly resource-intensive. I think a statistic or a fact or way of thinking that really blew my mind was thinking that there are way more livestock animals on Earth than there are humans because we eat so many of them. So I think the numbers are if you weighed all the land animals, including humans, on Earth, 60% of that weight would be livestock animals and only 30% would be humans and then a much smaller percentage is wildlife and other animals.

And so I think that kind of puts into perspective of course it’s not sustainable to raise and slaughter billions of animals every single year, of course that has a toll on the environment, and it really impacts the environment in every way that you could think of. It’s a lot of land degradation, deforestation, water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions. So both on a local and a global level, intensive and livestock farming for meat production is not sustainable, and we need to find other ways to produce food.

And plant-based meats and plant-based foods is one potential solution to combat the negative externalities of conventional meat, but it hasn’t been able to meaningfully transition people’s diets away from conventional meat to plant-based foods because they just don’t really capture the consumer’s taste and price and convenience, just matching what they want when they go to the grocery store and are preparing for dinner. So cultured meat and cellular agriculture is a way to produce the exact same products that people know and love and eat today, but just produce them in a different way, in a much more efficient way, to have a positive impact on the environment.

That’s, I think, probably the most prominent issue that people in the field are looking to combat, but there’s also the issue of animal welfare, which is particularly why I’m involved, why I’m really passionate about this field. Not only is slaughtering them not great, but they tend to live really, really low-quality lives, and so removing the role of animals from our food system is what’s really important to me.

So the environment, animal welfare, and then there’s also human health issues, a whole number of them, that could also be addressed via cellular agriculture technology. For example, foodborne illness, animals are not sanitary, and so it’s like a breeding ground for pathogens and those can make our way into our food system if we get food and products from animals. So if we remove animals from the equation and change the production process and grow meat from cells in a sterile environment instead, there’s no risk of foodborne illness because those pathogens don’t enter the supply chain at all.

Similarly, with zoonotic disease, the avian flu, bird flu, swine flu, these pandemics that originate in livestock-intensive farming environments, those again are because of the animals, and if we remove the animals from the equation, those zoonotic diseases also will be removed from the equation.

So those are the three main categories of the motivations behind developing products from cellular agriculture.

Ed Butch: I hope you are enjoying this episode of On Tech Ethics. If you’re interested in important and diverse topics, the latest trends in the ever-changing landscape of universities, join me, Ed Butch, for CITI Program’s original podcast, On Campus. New episodes released monthly.

Now, back to your episode.

Daniel Smith: I think that gives us a really good understanding of what cellular agriculture is, some of the products that can be developed using cellular agriculture, and some of the issues that we’re looking to alleviate through this technology.

So on that note, and to get a little bit more specific regarding how cellular agriculture works, can you talk a bit about the technology used to make these products?

Natalie Rubio: Yeah, so there’s two main buckets of technologies that fall under the cellular agriculture umbrella. The first is more established, and the second is a little bit earlier-stage and more new to the entire world.

So the first subcategory is precision fermentation, and the category of products we’re talking about are products that are made by cells, and usually we’re talking about proteins. So the rennet example that I mentioned earlier is an example of a protein that’s made from cells via precision fermentation. So you would take a microorganism, bacteria or yeast or sometimes an animal cell, but usually it’s bacteria or yeast, and you would use synthetic biology to engineer that microbe to produce a protein that maybe it doesn’t normally produce, but we can give it the instructions to produce this new protein, and then these cells are used as a factory to produce this protein that is valuable in some way.

So you put those engineered microbes in a tank, stir them around, give them food, and they will grow, and they’ll produce this protein that you want. And then you separate the protein from the cells that produced it, and maybe clean it up a little bit, and then you have this protein that maybe, originally, you got from animals and now you’re getting it from this fermentation process. And it is the same protein as the protein that you would normally get from animals.

So one of the first, I guess, more modern examples of this technology, post when we defined the field of cellular agriculture and precision fermentation, is a milk protein. There’s a company called Perfect Day foods that was one of the first cellular agriculture precision fermentation companies, and they produce milk proteins through precision fermentation. And these milk proteins act and function just like the proteins you would get from cow’s milk, and so they’re able to make ice cream and milk and cake batter and cream cheese and all these products that normally use cow’s milk from this precision fermentation protein. So same products, just a different way of making the ingredients that go into them.

And like I said, there’s a lot of products that fall under this category. So there’s companies and researchers that are looking at gelatin, there’s people who are producing egg white proteins, and you could look at an ingredient list and probably point out a couple that could be produced via cellular agriculture. It’s a pretty expansive technology that could be applied to many different things. That’s one subcategory.

The other subcategory that falls under the cellular agriculture umbrella is cell cultivation. So precision fermentation is making products using cells as factories; cell cultivation is different from that because cells themselves are part of the end product, so you’re not separating anything, it’s not something that the cell is making that’s the product, it’s the cell itself. So this is where meat comes in. Meat is composed of muscle cells and fat cells and some other cell types, and so it’s the cells themselves that we’re producing. And it’s a more novel technology because fermentation growing microorganisms has been around for a long time. Beer is made from fermentation obviously. So it’s a more established technology that people know a little bit more how to create and scale that process.

Cell cultivation and also tissue engineering is a newer field of study and application. It was really developed in the medical field for medical research. So people have been able to grow animal cells for a long time, sometimes they’re also used in the pharmaceutical industry in biotech to produce proteins and things, but the idea of having the cells themselves be the product is new. So this technology is a little less advanced and people are really still figuring out how to scale it in a way that we can produce products that are affordable. So the cultured meat and other cellular cell-based products are very expensive to produce right now. The main thing in this category is meat, but also, for example, leather might fall in this product since leather is the animal skin cells.

So for this, the process of tissue engineering for cultured meat is first, you take a cell from an animal. So the starting source of material still originally comes from an animal. You just need one animal one time instead of relying on the animal as the factory for production. So for example, in my lab and in my PhD, what we do is we go to a farm and we get a tissue biopsy from a farm animal, a really small amount of tissue. It’s like the size of a jelly bean, so very small. We can do it without hurting the animal. And then we take this sample of tissue back to the lab and we tease out the cells that are inside of that tissue. We call them proliferative, so they want to grow more. Some of the cells in that tissue have already grown, they’re mature, they’re not going to grow anymore, but there are some cells that have the potential to grow and turn into more cells and more tissues.

So we look for those cells, we feed them, again, nutrients. It’s called cell culture media. The cells float around in this liquid bath, sometimes we call it “Gatorade for cells.” It’s glucose, amino acids, and stuff you could honestly drink yourself and would probably be nutritious. So the cells float around in the cell culture media, it’s their food, so they’re eating the nutrients, they’re dividing exponentially, creating more and more and more and more cells, but like I said earlier, we’re usually either growing muscle cells or fat cells. And once you have enough muscle cells and fat cells, we induce a process called differentiation, which is where the cells that are dividing and growing stop growing because you have enough, and now they’re turning into muscle tissue and fat tissue so that it would resemble meat.

Muscle cells fuse together, they get really long, they can contract, they have all these special properties. Fat cells are filled with lipids. So differentiation causes the cell to go from this growth state into this differentiation state where it’s turning into these tissues, and then there’s different ways of combining and post-processing those tissues so it turns into the specific meat product that you’re looking to produce. The process would look different if you’re producing a burger versus a steak that has more structure and things like that.

So that’s the general process is you take a cell, you feed it this Gatorade for cells, they grow, you trigger them to turn into meat tissues, and then you form your meat product.

Daniel Smith: That’s really interesting. So going off of that a bit, what are some of the technological and other challenges associated with developing and scaling these cultured products?

Natalie Rubio: To sum up the challenge in an obvious way, we’ve just never done this before, so of course it’s going to take a while to figure out the puzzle pieces that we have to put together to create an entire ecosystem of supply chains, and companies, and even a workforce who knows how to do this, to come together to be able to produce products on the scale that we need to feed the world.

I think it’s interesting because cultured meat popped up in the media cycle and the news cycle when the first companies were getting off the ground, and then a few years later, everyone was like, “You said you were going to do this. Where is it? Why don’t we have cultured meat yet?” And the answer is just because to produce enough food to combat animal agriculture, which has been around for 10,000 years or whatever, it’s just going to take some time to figure it out.

So there’s the very big answer, but specifically, another way to describe the set of challenges we face is the technologies that made cultured meat possible were developed, like I said, for the medical field. So people were originally growing human tissues and creating little disease models so that they could maybe test drugs on them or just study them and see how human tissues work in order to inform the medical field or even potentially to create tissue-engineered organs so people could maybe have a tissue-engineered organ instead of getting a transplant. So that is the birthplace of this technology.

And the medical field is the opposite from the food industry in that price isn’t really an issue, so there’s no reason to really focus on bringing down the cost of tissue engineering for medical applications because you don’t need to produce as many cells and it doesn’t need to be as cheap. And then when you think about the food industry, you need to be able to produce a lot of volume of your product, and it needs to be incredibly cheap to compete with current foods on the shelf. So we’re taking technologies that were originally developed for a low-volume, high-margin industry, and turning that on its head.

So for some specific examples, the cell culture media that we feed the cells, people have developed cell culture media, again, for the medical industry, for the pharmaceutical industry, and we can use that cell culture media that they’ve developed to grow cultured meat, but it’s really expensive. It has a lot of specialized ingredients, they’re very specific, they have really high purity, and it’s a really expensive food to feed the cells. There’s definitely ways to make it cheaper, but it just requires effort. So we’re looking at the ingredients in this cell culture media that are really expensive and seeing how we can reduce the cost. That was the number one issue maybe five years ago, and it’s something that the entire industry focused on, and we’ve come a long way at reducing that cost. So it used to be the number one cost driver of creating cultured meat, and now we’ve made a lot of progress and it’s less of a bottleneck.

The other main technical challenge when it comes to being able to produce these products at scale and at price parity is the equipment that you use to do this. The equipment just has never really needed to exist at a scale that we need for food production. So designing the tanks and the other equipment that you need to do this at really large scales is also a challenge.

So for example, again, to compare to the pharmaceutical industry, people have been growing cells in bioreactors. We call them bioreactors. Those are the stainless steel tanks that the cells swim around in. That’s something that’s been done in the pharmaceutical industry, and the maximum volume of these tanks is usually 25,000 liters, which is pretty big, but then when we do the math to figure out how many bioreactors, how large do they need to be to be able to produce food instead of pharmaceuticals, they need to be a lot bigger. And so the physics is just different when you’re designing equipment at 100X larger scale.

So that’s another challenge that’s becoming more prominent and people are working on scaling up the equipment used to do this.

Daniel Smith: So in addition to those technical and logistical challenges, are there certain ethical issues that researchers and other people involved in the development of cultured products need to consider?

Natalie Rubio: That’s a good question. I think there’s a lot of different ways you could think about that.

I think one thing people talk about a lot, and I think the whole industry is aligned on, is the use of animal products in the process to use cultured meat. So obviously, the entire motivation and the entire concept of cultured meat is to produce meat without animals. So that’s what we’re trying to do because of, like I said, the environmental and the human health and the animal welfare issues that surround using animals for food. But in the established technologies that we’re using to hit the ground running when we grow cultured meat, sometimes there are animal products that are used. So again, in the cell culture media, sometimes there’s proteins and ingredients in the media that were derived from animals, so some of the amino acids in there might be sourced from animals.

And so another key research area that, again, is driven by ethics, but also just the concept of the entire technology is making sure that we’re removing all animal products from the supply chain. And I think most of the industry is aligned on that. I think there are some groups that think it is okay to use maybe more sustainable animal products or maybe byproducts of animal agriculture to use as ingredients in this process, so it’s not as black-and-white as I think we initially thought when the field got started. So I think there’s some ethical concerns to talk about when we talk about the use of animal products in this supposedly animal-free process, so that’s an interesting thought experiment.

I think another conversation that maybe falls within the realm of ethics is just how we talk to consumers about this. I think consumers have a natural aversion to science and food mixing, which I totally understand, and people look at the photos that are on the packaging of the products they buy and they want to see farms and grass and things that look natural and organic, and that’s a very strong component of influencing consumers. And even though there’s not necessarily a logical reason to have an aversion to science being applied to food, it is a strong one.

So I think when we’re creating completely new food products that do incorporate a lot of science and technology and something that might look more like the pharmaceutical industry rather than a farm, I think it presents an interesting problem about how do we talk to consumers about this and present it in a way that is truthful and really does get at the benefits of this technology and of these products, but also not shying away from this science-plus-food aspect, if that makes sense.

Daniel Smith: Certainly. And going off of that and looking into the future, from your perspective, what needs to be done to advance the field of cellular agriculture and further the development of these products?

Natalie Rubio: I think we need more shared resources. So the first cultured meat company was founded in 2015, so not that long ago. Today, there’s, I think, 100, 150 companies worldwide that are all looking to bring different types of cultured meat products to market, and I think a lot of the challenges that they face are the same challenges. And I think in the private sector, it’s a bit hard to incentivize collaboration, and so I think there’s a lot of redundancy in solving these problems. There’s probably a lot of people doing the exact same thing within the silo of their companies, and this is, yeah, just a redundant use of time and effort and resources. So I think if we can make these resources that are being developed and the problems that are being solved more of a common good, I think that could go a long way in progressing the field.

Something that we’re actively talking about at Tufts is focused on the cells themselves. Like I said, the starting point when producing cultured meat is the cell. And today, I think most companies have each developed their own cells, which there’s some good reasons to do if they’re working on different species or different products, but a lot of companies are using similar cells, but developing them separately. And we think it could be a lot more impactful to have a centralized, open-access cell bank where there’s a library of different cells that are very high-quality, that you know would be validated for safety and regulatory compliance, and have that be a bank or a library that everyone can access.

So I think developing resources like that that are common goods will go a long way at advancing the whole field. And there’s also analogous examples in precision fermentation and the other aspects of cellular agriculture. I just tend to be more focused on the meat side.

Daniel Smith: So speaking of resources, are there any additional resources where our listeners can learn more about cellular agriculture and the issues we discussed today? And then as a second part of this question, do you have any advice for people who are looking to get into this emerging field?

Natalie Rubio: Yeah, definitely. There’s a lot of great resources out there. The nonprofit that I used to work for, and I’m still affiliated with, is called New Harvest. And that’s, like I said, a nonprofit that is trying to maximize the positive impact of cellular agriculture and so they have a lot of resources on their website. Sometimes they fund research. So that’s a great starting point.

And then there’s another nonprofit called The Good Food Institute, and they focus on promoting cultured meat and precision fermentation products as well as plant-based foods. So all alternative protein categories, they provide resources for. And they have so many resources on diving into the science, as well as surveys on how consumers perceive these technologies and how willing they are to accept these food products. And then one of the best resources that they put out is, every year, they put out a state of the industry report. So there’s a 2023 State of the Industry Report for cultured meat where they really quantify everything that’s happened over the last year, so that’s a really great resource.

And then for people who want to get involved in the field, first of all, I just highly encourage it. I’ve been working in this field for the last 10 years, and I’ve never been bored for a single day. It’s a fascinating field. The people who work in this field are very passionate and interesting. I think I’ll never do anything else. It’s really just the best career I could wish for, so highly encourage people who find this interesting to get involved. It can be a little hard to get your foot in the door because it’s a new industry, and so there’s not always a lot of opportunities and there’s not a clear path to get access to those opportunities. So persistence is definitely required, but I’d say it’s definitely worth it.

And specifically, I think engaging, again, with New Harvest and The Good Food Institute are great ways to get involved and get educated on what’s going on in the field. And then I also have to give a shout-out to Tufts specifically. Tufts is one of the leading institutions in the world for cellular agriculture education, research, and innovation, and Tufts actually developed the world’s first degree program in cellular agriculture. So you can get a minor degree in cellular agriculture if you study at Tufts, which is very new and completely unique. I believe similar programs are going to be replicated at other universities, and we have one of the strongest graduate research programs for cellular agriculture and cultured meat.

If you want to find out more about cellular agriculture at Tufts, there is the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture, TUCCA, T-U-C-C-A. They have a website with a lot of information about how you could get involved. So yeah, depending on how you want to get involved, but if it’s more on the science side, I’d encourage people to do a PhD in cultured meat or another area of technology at Tufts. That would be my number one piece of advice.

Daniel Smith: That’s wonderful. And I’ll certainly include links to those resources that you mentioned in our show notes so that people can learn more.

My final question for you is just do you have any final thoughts that we have not already touched on?

Natalie Rubio: I guess another potential, like you said, you asked about ethics, and I think there’s so many different ways to think about that. The motivation behind cellular agriculture is to disrupt a existing industry of animal agriculture. While we have compelling reasons to do that, it won’t be without consequence. There are a lot of people who work in existing agricultural practices, and so there is a question, if the industry transitions to this new way of food production, how are those farmers impacted?

I don’t have an answer. There are some researchers who are focused on this aspect and want to make sure that we’re empowering a just and fair transition. I also think it’ll be a very, very long, slow transition, so I don’t envision people going out of jobs overnight, it’ll be a very slow process, but I think that’s something to think about.

And then also, this is a technology. It’s not inherently good or inherently bad. There’s a lot of potential to make it something great, but it really is driven by the people who are involved. So if people are really interested in this, but also skeptical, I think those are the people that I really specifically encourage to get involved because this is just the start of the industry, and so the people involved and their intentions, their motivations will go a long way in shaping the technology and the benefit it has for the world.

Daniel Smith: I think that’s a wonderful place to leave our conversation for today. So thank you again, Natalie.

Natalie Rubio: Thank you.

Daniel Smith: I also invite everyone to visit CITIProgram.org to learn more about our courses, webinars, and other podcasts. Of note, I encourage you to check out our Technology, Ethics, and Regulations course, which covers various technologies and their associated ethical issues and governance approaches.

And with that, I look forward to bringing you all more conversations on all things tech ethics.