Cellular agriculture

Cellular agriculture is an interdisciplinary branch of science at the intersection of medicine and farming. Cellular agriculture capitalizes on breakthroughs in tissue-engineering, material sciences, bioengineering, and synthetic biology to design new ways of producing existing agricultural products like milk, meat, fragrances, and rhino horn from cells and microorganisms.

The most famous example of a cellular agriculture product is Professor Mark Post's cultured burger from 2013, which demonstrated proof of concept for cultured meat.

Although cellular agriculture is a nascent scientific discipline, cellular agriculture products were first commercialized in the early 20th century with insulin and rennet.

In 1922, Frederick Banting, Charles Best, and James Collip treated the first diabetic patient with an insulin injection, which was originally collected from the ground-up pancreases of pigs or cattle. In 1978, Arthur Riggs, Keiichi Itakura, and Herbert Boyer inserted the gene carrying the blueprints for human insulin into an E. coli bacteria, prompting the bacteria to make insulin identical to the insulin made by humans. The vast majority of insulin currently used worldwide is now biosynthetic recombinant "human" insulin engineered by yeast or bacteria.

On March 24, 1990, the FDA approved a bacteria that had been genetically engineered to produce rennet, making it the first genetically engineered product for food. Rennet is a mixture of enzymes that turns milk into curds and whey in cheesemaking. Traditionally, rennet is extracted from the inner lining of the fourth stomach of calves. Today, the majority of cheesemaking uses rennet enzymes from genetically engineered bacteria, fungi, or yeasts because it is more pure and consistent and less expensive than animal-derived rennet.

Winston Churchill also predicted the advent of a mainstream cellular agriculture paradigm of meat production in his 1931 essay, Fifty Years Hence.

"Fifty years hence...we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium."

In 2004, Jason Matheny founded New Harvest which was first a cultured meat advocacy organization but whose mission is now to "accelerate breakthroughs in cellular agriculture."New Harvest is the only organization focused exclusively on advancing the field of cellular agriculture, and are funding the first cellular agriculture PhD at Tufts University.

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