S7. E7: Natalie Rubio is the First Person in the World to Complete a Ph.D. in Cellular Agriculture

“… a lot of the platform technologies do not make sense from a food perspective, and there's just never been a reason to do things a different way. So, for example, cell culture is very expensive and very resource-intensive because the medical field doesn't really need those things to be done in a very cost-effective manner - because people, have a high cost thresh hold when it comes to paying for their own healthcare and drugs… But it's totally different when we're thinking about food.”

– Natalie Rubio

 
 

Natalie Rubio recently made history as the first person on the planet to complete a Ph.D. in cellular agriculture, which is the production of animal-sourced foods from cell culture or meat that is grown in a lab without using animals.

Her thesis: Entomoculture: Insect Cell Cultivation for Cellular Agriculture, makes the case for growing meat from insect cells. (Natalie also coined the term "entomoculture.")

All of the above is beyond exciting for 8 million reasons, for Natalie and for all of humanity. Every milestone in the world of cellular agriculture, academically or as an industry, is a massive step toward building a food system that is sustainable and humane, a food system that does not involve factory farms, slaughterhouses, cruelty, and suffering.

Learn More About New Harvest

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Transcript:

Natalie: [00:00:15] One of the most interesting experiences is when me and one of my colleagues at Tufts presented our research at the Reciprocal Meet Science Conference in Fort Collins. We went to give this presentation to a room full of animal science, meat science people, and it was the most beneficial conference that I've been to, just because the questions we got were so nuanced and from this perspective that we hadn't thought of, like we were talking about there won't be any microbes and this will be pure muscle fat cells or whatever. One of the questions we got was, there are some good bacteria in the food we eat, so you're not getting the bad bacteria, but you're also not getting the good bacteria. So how will that affect people's microbiomes and health? And we were like, I don't, I don't know.

Elizabeth: [00:01:13] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask if you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. This conversation is with Natalie Rubio. Natalie recently made history as the first person on the planet to complete a Ph.D. in cellular agriculture. Her thesis was on insect cellular agriculture. This is exciting for about eight million reasons for Natalie and for humanity. Cellular agriculture as a field of study is a massive step toward building a food system that is sustainable and humane. Hi Natalie. 

Natalie: [00:02:22] Hi. 

Elizabeth: [00:02:23] How are you? 

Natalie: [00:02:26] I'm good. Nice to meet you.

Elizabeth: [00:02:26] It's so nice to meet you. Congratulations, Natalie, on being the first Ph.D. in the world in cellular agriculture. You're a real pioneer and somebody that people will be talking about for generations to come. In that sense, I want to talk about how that even happens when it has never existed before. How that even becomes what you want to do and how you got here. Can we go back and start there with kind of the road to today?

Natalie: [00:02:54] Sure. Basically, in high school, I became a vegetarian and it was a really interesting moment for me because I remember this. It was a moment of epiphany. I had never really thought about it much, and suddenly I was like, I am never eating meat again. I was at my high school boyfriend's house, and his dad was setting up a trap to trap a raccoon that was on their roof. And I was like, “oh, are you sending the raccoon to a sanctuary?” They kind of laughed and made it clear that you know, animal control would probably come and euthanize it. I just remember for some reason that made me so angry, and I was like, “why do we have the right to literally take something’s life away because it's presenting a minor inconvenience to us?” That was the moment, and I remember being really angry and then having this moment of looking internally and I'm like, Well, I eat meat. You know, I'm contributing to the deaths of many animals for something that is just a mild pleasure in my life. So I put two and two together and was like, I'm just never going to eat meat again. My family definitely thought it was a phase, but it has stuck with me since. So in high school, for a few months or maybe a year, I was very intense about animal activism. I think looking back in a very self-righteous way, I had this epiphany. I just have to tell other people and they will go through the same process. And obviously, that's not how it works. So definitely a learning curve for me and my approach to things.

Elizabeth : [00:04:44] So many people have this realization and they want to scream it from the rooftops and with this thought that if you show everybody these horrible photos or talk about it, they'll be like, “aha, oh my gosh.” It's almost the opposite effect, right?

Natalie: [00:05:01] The moment I had was not even direct. It was a very indirect thing that spoke to me. So for everyone, I'm sure it's something different that kind of catches their attention. I remember Googling statistics and emailing people and probably being very annoying, and I remember I did not influence a single other person's behavior. So I really lost steam for that approach. Until college, I was studying chemical and biological engineering at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where I'm from. I just was not passionate about any of the career prospects. Most people who have that major will go into the oil and gas industry or the pharmaceutical industry, and my heart was not in that.

Elizabeth: [00:05:51]  Why were you studying it? 

Natalie: [00:05:52] I was good at chemistry and I was good at math in high school, and my father was in computer science. He really encouraged me to go into engineering. He told me my job prospects would be very good and I thought I would figure it out along the way. And you know, not everybody is super passionate about their career. Sometimes it's just something you do for money. So I was probably following that path until my junior year of college. I took a bioethics course and one of the segments was on animals, both for factory farming and for animal experimentation and research. At the same time, I was working in a lab that used animals and that bothered me deeply, but I just assumed it's the way it was. But I knew I was very bothered and I didn't want to become desensitized to it. I didn't want to interact with the animals in that way and then just learn about it in that class. I think having a direct experience rather than thinking about it is more abstract. It was another pivotal moment.

Elizabeth : [00:06:58] Having both happening at the exact same time to just the paradox of being, you know, like being in those classes and working in a lab with animals must have done a lot to your head.

Natalie: [00:07:08] Exactly. So that was such a powerful time in my life where I was like, I need to rethink everything. It just reinvigorated that passion that I had, that I developed in high school and then kind of forgot about. So I was very set on, OK, how can I use engineering, my background, to do something that helps animals? So initially I came across the field of tissue engineering, which is growing tissues from cells, and that's an existing field. Part of that field is you can develop human tissues so that you can develop drugs using those human tissues instead of testing on animals. So I was initially interested in developing in vitro systems for drug screening cosmetics, anything that animals were being used for in the lab in order to address that concern. Then very quickly, I came across the concept of cell-cultured meat and was like, “wow, this could help way more animals. This is way more new, novel, exciting, futuristic.” The second I came across this, I just fell in love with the concept and knew there is no turning back and that has been my life ever since.

Elizabeth : [00:08:27] So what do you do then? So you say, oh wait, I could work on this, but this doesn't really exist as something to be studying, right? I mean, did it?

Natalie: [00:08:37] No, it was such a small field. You know, I discovered this. I read this. I would talk to other people about it. Nobody had heard of it ever. It was very, very small. It still kind of is today, but much smaller back then. So I just googled it, found every single person on the internet that was connected to this field, and just wrote a lot of emails. I think I even wrote like a letter to someone who I couldn’t find the email address for, I just reached out to everybody at the time.

Elizabeth : [00:09:11] Did they write you back?

Natalie: [00:09:12] Most of them did not, but one person did. His name is Ben David, and he had, I think, four and maybe a PETA blog or an animal rights blog or website. He wrote an essay about cultured meat. He was the person who responded. When he responded, he connected me directly to Nick Genovese, who was one of the co-founders of Upside Foods, and Isha Dieter, the executive director of New Harvest. Through that introduction, I started talking with both of them and they helped me get further involved.

Elizabeth : [00:09:44] The one guy, the PETA blog, or whatever, that was the life-changer in terms of the emails? That’s pretty cool.

Natalie: [00:09:49] Yeah, definitely, I should reach back out to him to thank him.

Elizabeth : [00:09:53] To tell him that you now have your Ph.D. in this, I mean, that's nuts. So now you know, Isha and you know, Nick.

Natalie: [00:10:00] Yeah. So I asked, how can I get involved? I think the advice Nick gave me was go get experience in a tissue engineering lab. Then Isha was telling me, hey, New Harvest is a really small organization, but we could always use help from volunteers. So feel free to help us out with a bunch of our small grassroots efforts. So I just started volunteering for New Harvest remotely. I was still in Colorado. Each show was based out of Toronto. I had never met her in person, but we started talking all the time and she saw how passionate I was and how dedicated I was, and that I was really following through with those volunteer commitments while I was still full time in college. So she asked me if I wanted to come on board for New Harvest's first internship over the summer. That opened the door for all these other opportunities. We traveled to the Animal Rights Conference in 2014 in Los Angeles and gave a talk on cell-cultured meat, which was another big moment because I think that really connected this small community with the animal rights community more. There was a lot of skepticism from the animal rights community that I saw before the conference, and it seemed Isha’s talk really made a big difference than having people understand where we were coming from and that we weren't just trying to exploit this technology for profit, it was really coming from a pure intentions of thinking that this is a better way to do things.

Elizabeth : [00:11:36] Well in a way to hopefully eventually end animal agriculture as we know it.

Natalie: [00:11:40] Right? That's for sure the goal. New Harvest really was the organization that gave me all these opportunities. New Harvest basically recognized that this technology had kind of leapfrogged from a concept that people were you know speculating about what the benefits could be and very, very early small-scale research was being done. Then suddenly, there were a lot of companies that were founding and raising money, and it seemed to kind of miss the academic public research phase. There wasn't a lot of information about how to actually do this.

Elizabeth : [00:12:26] So there's somewhere around 80 companies doing this right now, right? So everybody who has been kind of doing it, have they kind of been just like learning as they go? I mean, it's a lot of scientists and sharing information, but there's not really any path, is that right?

Natalie: [00:12:40] Exactly. So the scientists are coming from the pharmaceutical space or the tissue engineering space. All these medical fields that use, you know. You have the right science background if you come from those fields and then you're just kind of adapting your techniques towards food rather than medicine. So there are a lot of people who are very ready to help the field and in this technology without going through a formal career path. Specified on tissue engineering for food. But now we are building that because we're starting to realize what those nuances are between food and medicine and what needs to be approached differently.

Elizabeth : [00:13:33] Things went really, really fast. Like five years ago, no one had even heard of this stuff. Well, maybe in your circle. Last week I was at Upside Foods' new factory. For people who don't know, Uma Valeni and his company Upside Foods recently opened a factory in Northern California. It's called Epic, Engineering Production and Innovation Center. They will produce over 50 thousand pounds of cultivated meat a year. Yes, that is meat grown in a lab and seriously walking in there felt like one of the most exciting moments of my life. I felt like I was standing at the beginning of the end of factory farming and slaughterhouses. I was like, “This is real.” And yes, it's crazy fast for a technology that will literally, hopefully change our entire food system.

Natalie: [00:14:19] Right Yeah. So besides New Harvest starting this fellowship program, I basically was looking for jobs in the industry after I graduated college and there were so few companies and they didn't have a lot of money yet. So I basically went to graduate school because there weren't many opportunities. Now, five years later, there are more opportunities than I could have ever imagined. The field you know is relatively small compared to other industries, but to me is just absolutely massive. The number of companies and the progress that they've made while I've been doing my Ph.D. is truly crazy.

Elizabeth : [00:15:03] I saw the USDA just gave the first grant to Tufts. For $10 million?

Natalie: [00:15:11] Yes, it'll be $10 million over the course of five years. To Tufts and a network of collaborators, we're going to develop the National Institute of Cellular Agriculture to help develop the workforce and answer these fundamental questions.

Elizabeth : [00:15:28] It's a pretty big deal that that was from the USDA, right?

Natalie: [00:15:30] Yeah, yeah. We have written USDA grants before, and so having this one be successful is remarkable. I really think it speaks to the strength of the collaborations we felt over the years because this is not something that one discipline can really take on. It's so interdisciplinary.

Elizabeth : [00:15:52] That's awesome. That's huge. So now can people say like, oh, I'm going to get my Ph.D. in cellular agriculture or, is that a thing?

Natalie: [00:16:00] Almost. I mean, so technically, technically on paper, my degree is in biomedical engineering, but I never touched the medical side. The reason that I'm the first Ph.D. in cellular agriculture is because of the New Harvest grant because there had never been funding to allow students to focus only on this technology. Because New Harvest started this fellowship, my entire Ph.D., I was able to focus on cultured meat research. So that's and that was the first time that has been done in the past. There might have been funding for skeletal muscle research, and you could kind of say this might apply to food, but the funding was to focus on medical applications.

Elizabeth: [00:16:50] Ok. 

Natalie: [00:16:51] But we are working to take those steps to build this as a discipline. So Tufts started the first university course on the subject. So we did it as a trial course in spring of 2020, and it was really successful. We had overwhelming interest from students. The waitlist is filled up every single semester, and so now it's a permanent course. So every fall we have a lecture course just introducing students to the basic concepts. Then every spring we have a lab course where they actually get to come into the lab, isolate cells, and grow their own meat and then work on other cellular agriculture techniques. So we're starting to build this as an official discipline. It's definitely a dream of mine to have this at multiple universities where you can go and major in cellular agriculture specifically.

Elizabeth : [00:17:46] I agree with you that we need this. We need a lot of people doing this, but talk a little bit more about the why the things that really aren't being focused on right now, in the same way, that nutrition and safety, like things that are going to be hurdles when all this is regulated.

Natalie: [00:18:01] So the most of the approach to date has been starting with what we know about tissue engineering for medicine and then tweaking it towards food. So, a lot of the platform technologies do not make sense from a food perspective, and there has just never been a reason to do things a different way. So, for example, cell culture is very expensive and very resource-intensive because the medical field doesn't really need those things to be done in a very cost-effective manner because people have a high-cost threshold when it comes to paying for their own health care and drugs and everything, right? But it's totally different when we're thinking about food.

Elizabeth : [00:18:49] Those questions come up a lot in nutrition and safety. So that's kind of why I wanted to get to them, like, how is this being worked on, looked at and there has to be real answers before anything's regulated and out there. But this industry is in its infancy in a lot of ways, right? Like, it's still a baby. Everything's kind of working as it goes.

Natalie: [00:19:10] Like once the company is ready to think about going to market, it's like, OK, I guess we should figure out what to do with the FDA. So every time you're ready to make a next step like, OK, who do we need to involve? It’s just very much figuring it out as you go. There's no roadmap for how to build a solid company, that's for sure.

Elizabeth : [00:19:30] The part of having like the academic part of it all will have more of a, it'll kind of create more of a roadmap, right?

Natalie: [00:19:40] Yeah.

Elizabeth : [00:19:41] For these companies. So will you talk about the need for this in academia and for people to really be studying this aside from the medical side of it, talk about the food side a little bit more, just the safety and nutrition.

Natalie: [00:19:53] Yeah, it's really important to bring in other disciplines because so far I think we've been answering these questions from that tissue engineering from the perspective of my field because that has been the first field to really start pioneering this. So when people ask, “Is this safe?” We think from our perspective, OK, what could safety problems be? It could be food-borne illness pathogens. So we know when you're producing meat via cell culture, it needs to be in a completely sterile environment. So just by way of production, there will not be any pathogens and any microorganism organisms that could make someone sick. But there might be other safety concerns that we just haven't been able to think of. One of the most interesting experiences is when me and one of my colleagues at Tufts presented our research at the Reciprocal Meat Science Conference in Fort Collins and I think 2019. So we went to give this presentation to a room full of animal science, meat science people. It was the most beneficial conference that I've been to, just because the questions we got were so nuanced and from this perspective that we hadn't thought of, like when we were talking about there won't be any microbes and this will be pure muscle fat cells or whatever. One of the questions we got was, there are some good bacteria in the food we eat. So you're not getting the bad bacteria, but you're also not getting the good bacteria. So how will that affect people's microbiomes and health? We were like, “I don't know. That's a great question. We hadn't thought about that.” Just having these new perspectives, I think, are so important because people from my field, we know how to grow cells and we can get them to look and behave in a certain way. But we're not the experts to comment on safety or nutrition. Another example on the nutrition side of things is in the early days of this technology, and when I was talking about it as a volunteer at New Harvest, people would ask about what will the nutrition of cell-cultured meat be like compared to conventional meat? We would say, oh, it would be exactly the same because it's chemically equivalent to meat. That's not the case. It's not. It is a little bit different. So, for example, meat is a good source of vitamin B12, and that's something that you know, vegans and vegetarians can be deficient in. But that is actually not produced by muscle cells or fat cells. It's produced by bacteria in animals. So if we don't have that bacteria, the meat is not going to have that, so that would have to be supplemented. So there's definitely a way to make sure that the nutrition is equivalent, but not. But we have to check those things and make sure that they're there, yeah.

Elizabeth : [00:23:12] That makes sense. Ok, I didn't even think about that. That makes a lot of sense because I always tell people that it's the exact same.

Natalie: [00:23:19] It can be. I add a lot of caveats to everything now I've noticed, I add a lot of caveats. I'm like, this has the potential to be and I really do believe in the potential of this technology but it's not just like naturally there, it does take a lot of effort and people really, you know, intentionally meet these goals. So it's really important to state what we want this to be. What nutritional profile do we want it to be? Maybe we don't even want it to be the exact same as conventional meat. 

Elizabeth : [00:23:50] Is the biggest hurdle really to all of this. Is it scaling? Is that like the number one? Once all these other things are kind of worked out.

Natalie: [00:23:58] Yeah, scale-up and cost reduction for sure. I'm really excited that larger players are getting involved, people who know how to deal with supply chains. At the Cultured Meat Symposium conference a few weeks ago, there was a cultured meat expert from Merck, which is a very large company, and they talked about how they're going to focus on formulating the media to be food grade rather than pharma great, and that is a very obvious way to bring down costs, and those are the people to do it. So that's very exciting to me and gives me a lot of hope that scale-up and cost reduction is possible. We just can't really speculate, I guess, on the timeline.

Elizabeth : [00:24:50] That's the other question, right? You can't really answer like, when? The one question?

Natalie: [00:24:54] I think being in academia for the past five years, I have a more skeptical eye. So I probably tend to underestimate, I guess, how quickly things are moving. But I'm always very excited to see the milestones that the companies keep achieving, so I'm optimistic.

Elizabeth : [00:25:13] The coolest part, I mean, going into Upside’s plant was incredible, but the coolest part, I think, was he brought us into the USDA inspector’s office because in all slaughterhouses, you have to have a USDA inspector's office and they made this really beautiful office for the USDA inspector. I was like, wow, he's going to want to hang out here a lot more than anywhere else on his list.

Natalie: [00:25:38] Wow. Oh, I haven't heard that. That's really cool.

Elizabeth : [00:25:40] It's really cool. Ok, I want to talk about insects as well, because a lot of your research was focused on insects. Is it still?

Natalie: [00:25:48] Yes. My entire Ph.D. thesis was on cultured meat from insect cells.

Elizabeth : [00:25:55] Ok, before we even get into it, how did this come about? I know people eat insects in all other parts, in many other parts of the world.

Natalie: [00:26:08] So before starting my Ph.D., I was working at a software startup. So I was very comfortable in the startup space and how quickly things move, and you just think about, OK, what needs to be done today so that we can roll this out tomorrow to our users. So I was very much in that mindset. So when I came to tufts, I was like, OK, what do we need to do so that cultured meat can be a possibility you don't like tomorrow and over time? Over the first year, I really learned to adapt to the academic mindset, which is not, we don't play the same roles as companies. Companies with a lot of money are kind of answering the more obvious questions. That's their job. So I learned our job is to kind of innovate across longer time frames. We're assuming that companies are the ones who are going to answer these basic questions. Then we're kind of looking 10 years down the line or trying to think outside the box to inspire other people one day or just present these new perspectives. So the insect idea was really the head of my lab, Dr. David Kaplan. It was something that he told me he wanted me to focus on, and I was not excited about it at all because I'm not, like, super excited to hang out with insects, and I wanted to focus on something that felt really relevant to me from a consumer perspective. So it was a side project for a long time. I was, you know, working with turkey cells and cow cells, and then I'd be like, OK, like, you know, to placate my advisor, I'm going to make a little progress on the insect side. The way this idea came up for him was that we have had a collaboration with another lab. My co-advisor, Dr. Barry Trimmer, runs a biomimicry lab. They actually design robots that are inspired by the way that caterpillars move. They also have this small collaboration to make robots that were powered by insect muscle tissue. Because if you grow muscle tissue, insect or not, it actually contracts in vitro. So the muscle will move on its own. Yeah, a little. 

Elizabeth : [00:28:34] It does.

Natalie: [00:28:35] Yes. Yeah.

Elizabeth : [00:28:36] That's nuts.

Natalie: [00:28:37] I can show you some videos. It's really cool. But the idea was you could have robots that are powered by muscle instead of electrical actuators. Maybe this could be more sustainable. They could heal themselves. So from that project, my advisor had the idea that you can grow cow muscle, or maybe you could grow insect muscle. But the real motivation behind using insect cells instead of cells from more conventional species is because they actually address a lot of problems surrounding scale-up and cost reduction. So, for example, one of the largest contributors to cost is growth media, so cells consume a lot of growth media and the media itself is very expensive

Elizabeth : [00:29:31] Just for people who don't know, can we explain what growth media is?

Natalie: [00:29:34] Yeah, the growth media is like a soup for cells, so cells float around in this liquid and they are eating everything in the liquid. So it's composed of amino acids, sugars, vitamins, everything that a cell would need to survive. Then cells also have waste products, and so they'll secrete their waste products back into the media. So it needs to be changed out to give them fresh nutrients and to take away their waste products and so there's a lot of turnover of this liquid, and it's very expensive. There are very specialized ingredients inside of it that the cells need. One of the most costly components of growth media are these specialized proteins called growth factors that are found in animal blood, in our blood, but there aren't necessarily plant-based sources or these other sources of them that we could get without taking it from, you know, animal blood, and so we actually have to produce those proteins through fermentation, which itself is a very intensive process, so basically you have to have a whole other industry to make this very specific ingredient or list of ingredients to go into this media that has been feeding things to the cell. So that's very, very expensive right now. But insect cells don't need those proteins. So right off the bat, a huge cost is cut out of the equation. One of the other things that make them easier to work with and less expensive to work with is they grow near room temperature, so you don't have to put energy into heating your system. You could really, just like we say, leave them next to your kitchen sink and they'll grow because insects are cold-blooded. They don't regulate their temperature in the same way that warm-blooded animals do. So that's a couple of examples, and there's other reasons that insect cells are just basically easier and cheaper to grow.

Elizabeth : [00:31:50] Ok, so I understand when you're growing like, say, you're growing cow cells and you're growing muscle and you put it in scaffolding and all of a sudden you have like a state, right? But when you're growing insect cells, what are they like? What is it? 

Natalie: [00:32:05 Yes. So insects also have muscle, in fact. So usually when people think about food and insects, you're thinking about like cricket powder. Right, that's how people in our culture have come into contact with edible insect food. It's hard to imagine crickets having muscle and fat, right? But they do have muscle. That's what's making their limbs move, and they do have small amounts of fat. But we actually use caterpillar cells. So if you think about a caterpillar. Caterpillar’s are mainly muscle and fat, and you can imagine that you know, tasting similar to conventional meat if you didn't have the other part.

Elizabeth : [00:32:48] I can't imagine a caterpillar tasting like anything, but that's just because I've never tasted caterpillars.

Natalie: [00:32:57] So people who have tried edible insects, there are blogs and really interesting posts from people who eat a whole bunch of different insects and kind of say how they taste, and a lot of the flavors are described as similar to seafood or chicken. It makes sense that they might taste similar to lobster or crab because insects are linked through evolution to crustaceans, crustaceans are basically giant water insects. 

Elizabeth : [00:33:29] Right. People elsewhere in the world probably don't have as much a problem as here because people eat insects in other parts of the world. But for here, would it be the protein that's mixed in with something, or you really, is a caterpillar that you - you know what I mean?

Natalie: [00:33:46] Yeah, I think the two answers are exactly, yes we could. This could be a market for other cultures. So, you know, 80 percent of the countries around the world, I think, consume insects. So there are markets.

Elizabeth : [00:34:04] Yeah, for sure.

Natalie: [00:33:05] But I guess I've always thought about it from the perspective of, we're making, you know sushi, crab, lobster analogs, yeah, and the cell sauce is just different, so we could make it look and taste similar to products that people are comfortable with, and then we're just saying, “hey, like the cell sauce is a little bit different”, and so that might take some education and some novel approaches to branding or something to have people get over that ick factor.

Elizabeth : [00:34:35] I see all the benefits for not eating cows and having cell agriculture, but are there other benefits with insects that I'm not thinking of that are just like instead of using insects?

Natalie: [00:34:46] If we can get the taste profile to be the same as some meat that we're more familiar with, but maybe use the tissues that have these healthier nutrient profiles that could definitely be an advantage. We have seen through early results that when we are growing caterpillar fat cells, the nutrition actually seems to kind of match up with whole insects. We do see healthier fat profiles, which is really interesting because it's not obvious that that would translate between whole insects and what we're growing in the lab.

Elizabeth : [00:35:25] I'm sure you've tasted this, right?

Natalie: [00:35:27] Not really, actually, because we work in a lab with other people working on non-food applications. So we'd love to transition to some sort of food-grade research lab where we had good protocols for like, OK, this is safe to eat. We also probably require some approval from our internal review boards and things.

Elizabeth : [00:35:57] Right.

Natalie: [00:35:58] So we're hoping to figure out how we can be approved to actually taste what we're making and make sure that it is food-grade because some of the things we use during research, you know, we're not really making sure that their food-grade since it's just from a research perspective. But it should be possible for sure.

Elizabeth : [00:36:12] It's pretty awesome. So you're continuing this?

Natalie: [00:36:16] I just defended my thesis. So now I'm thinking about what my next steps are. But I do have three students who are taking over this research in different directions. So we actually just got awarded a small grant from NASA to create insect cell cultivation systems for long-term space travel. So that's a new direction. 

Elizabeth : [00:36:40] That's a huge direction. I'm really excited about your next phase. Natalie, it's awesome what you're doing. Thank you so much for today, and thank you so much for seriously pioneering this whole next generation of people studying cellular agriculture. Hopefully, we have a whole new food system because of people like you.

Natalie: [00:37:05] Yeah, I hope so. Thank you. Thank you so much for hosting me.

Elizabeth : [00:37:16] To learn more about Natalie and to learn about New Harvest, go to our website, SpeciesUnite.com. We have links to everything. We are on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare moment and could do us a favor, please subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you'd like to support the podcast, we would greatly appreciate it. Go to our website and click Become a member. I would like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santina Polk, Bethany Jones, and Anna Conner, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day!


You can listen to our podcast via our website or you can subscribe and listen on Apple, Spotify, or Google Play. If you enjoy listening to the Species Unite podcast, we’d love to hear from you! You can rate and review via Apple Podcast here. If you support our mission to change the narrative toward a world of co-existence, we would love for you to make a donation or become an official Species Unite member!

As always, thank you for tuning in - we truly believe that stories have the power to change the way the world treats animals and it’s a pleasure to have you with us on this.

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S7. E8: Sonalie Figueiras: Green Queen

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S7. E6: Casey Dworkin: Apple Leather Boots