Isha Datar of New Harvest (NH@20)
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Thanks everybody for joining. This is a special edition of the Cultured Meat and Future Food Podcast. We’re really excited to have Isha guitar back on the show today. Isha, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Alex. So this is actually quite an exciting time and exciting very specific day.
Because today is actually a birthday. Isha, tell us what this milestone birthday is today. Sure. So today, New Harvest turns 20 years old, which I think a lot of people in cellular agriculture would think Is very old, indeed. So 20 years ago, New Harvest was incorporated as a nonprofit organization by its original founding directors, Jason Matheny, who is today a director of RAND Corporation in the USA, and Vladimir Mironov, who is a well known researcher in the kind of bioprinting, biofabrication world.
And they really set out this idea to create a [00:01:00] nonprofit organization that was focused exclusively on advancing the idea of in vitro meat which is exactly how it’s spelled out in the founding documents with this idea that by growing food from cells, especially meat from cells, we could have a more humane, safe and sustainable supply of food.
Great. And. 20 years is something where you look back and I think in any industry, large or small, that’s quite, quite an achievement, quite a amount of time. And for those that are, maybe not part of regular communications with New Harvest, we’re going to go into maybe a broader, more general perspective of what the organization does in just a second.
But. Isha, back in 2013 is when you officially got involved with New Harvest, is that correct? Yes. Yeah. Okay. And what was that story like? And I know there was a paper that you published that picked up some steam, what is that official story that you ended up becoming executive director?[00:02:00]
Yeah. I don’t know if it’s an official story. There’s this, there’s an, a background I tell all the time of, where I came from. What I did in university, how I learned about this idea and all that kind of stuff. But the story less told is how I actually got this role as executive director, which is maybe a fun one for this birthday podcast.
So I, I had already dug in to the idea of cultured me and wanting to be part of it in about 2008, 2009 when I did this meet science class. And that’s usually the story where I end my story on other podcasts and so on, but. What happened after that is I actually worked in policy and public affairs at a pharma company called GlaxoSmithKline, right after the H1N1 virus and vaccine manufactured by GSK.
And it was a really interesting role because I saw how, non profits, for profits, and academia have to come together to make biotech actually, have a positive impact on the world. That being said, I actually hated that job. After about three months into [00:03:00] the job, I was like, okay, I, I was looking around me, looking at the CEO, looking at the VPs being like, I don’t want to have that person’s life.
Like I, I want to be doing something more. And I always had this eye back to what was happening with new harvest. Cause new harvest was actually looking for an executive director for a couple of years at that point, or at least maybe one full year So I kept going back to the New Harvest website.
At this time it was like a one page website with links on it. I kept going back saying, oh, I wonder who’s that executive director is going to be refreshing it every, a couple weeks kind of thing. And then one day I was chatting about with someone online who I think was Nick Genovese, but I don’t, this is why the story is unofficial.
It’s based on my memory only. And I remember saying, oh, I can’t wait to find out who the executive director of New Harvest is going to be. And he was like, why don’t you just apply? And then as soon as that seed was planted in my mind, I was like, there’s nothing else I want to do. There’s no plan B.
That is exactly what I want to do. I actually said, I don’t know how to become executive director. I don’t know anything about nonprofits. I don’t know [00:04:00] anything about fundraising. There was no chat GPT back then to give you a fake answer. Yeah, exactly. He was like, you know what? No one knows any of those things.
You figure it out on the spot. Which is absolutely true. And so I went back to the people at GSK. I said, I like everyone here, I’m not going to be sticking around. They’re like, what are you going to do? And I was like, I don’t know yet. And I didn’t, I didn’t have anything really figured out, but I just knew I wasn’t going to stay in pharma.
And I think they were pretty shocked about that because. A lot of students would love to land a pharma job right out of school. But what happened is actually there is an opportunity to speak at TEDxToronto. And TEDxToronto was one of the largest TEDx’s in the world back in 2012. This was, it was about 5, 000 people would attend.
It was so highly produced. They had speaker coaches. They had content coaches, like all basically at the same level as TED more or less. And I applied to speak at that conference about In vitro [00:05:00] meat cultivated meat culture that back then we called it in vitro meat. And I just submitted application as like a regular person.
But a few days later, I hopped on a call with this guy named Andrew Hessel, who is. From Edmonton, where I’m from, we just, met at a cafe one day, randomly chatting through a friend and I caught up with Andrew and he’s an interesting guy because he worked at Amgen during this human genome project stuff.
And he’s influential in the biotech space and I was like, Hey, Andrew, how’s it going? Hey, what’s up? I said TEDx Toronto, but I don’t think I’ll get it. I’m just like some regular person and he. Oh, they asked me to speak, but actually I won’t be able to make it. So I’ll just ask you, ask them if you can take my spot.
And so they just subbed me in. They didn’t, there was no like interview process or who are you? Okay. They subbed me in. And so I was able to give that talk, which was awesome. But when I was, when I first met the team, I was like, I may seem like just a student now, but I’m going to be the executive director [00:06:00] of this organization called New Harvest.
Of course, I didn’t know that. I had just applied and then that was not known. Meanwhile, I told New Harvest, Jason at the time who was hiring the position, I was like, Jason, I’m gonna, I’m gonna be giving this TED Talk pretty soon to 5, 000 people. Of course, I had neither of those things really sorted out but by complete magic and luck they both worked out.
I was able to give the talk, and then Jason invited me to Washington DC for an interview and my talk went live the morning of the interview. So by the time I met Jason, we had, it was, it felt like a formality because he had seen the talk and it was yeah, you’d be a great director.
So I chalk a lot up to luck and just being a bit sneaky, when you’re a student, you have to do those kinds of things. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. And I think I remember that Ted talk. That’s the one where you , you start by saying that you love meat.
Is that the Yeah, that was the 20 12 1. Yeah. And so at that time you were not officially part of New Harvest, so that was not a New [00:07:00] Harvest branded talk? No. I see. No, that was a few months before. I think that was September, October and then my first saved New Harvest was a January 14th. Yeah.
Wow. Very cool. And so when you were at gsk, where, when did you actually first hear about New Harvest? Oh, I heard about New Harvest way before GSK when I was still an undergrad student. Maybe not way before in about, I think it was 2008, or very early 2009, when I did a meat science class. And that, this is a story I tell more often, I was doing this meat science class, I, my prof mentioned one day, hey, maybe we can grow meat from cells, and I thought, oh my god, that’s so obvious.
And when I googled it, I realized that this was an idea other people had, and I came across New Harvest. Very cool. And then we’ve talked a lot about new harvest, but there may be some folks on the call or listeners of the podcast that are now being introduced to new [00:08:00] harvest. So tell us about what new harvest is.
As an organization in general, in general, like on paper, we’re just a nonprofit organization that is tasked with advancing technology. So you could say we’re like a research organization, but I feel like the way that we behave as an organization is a little bit more than that, because I think that your average research organization basically just funds research.
And we’ve never had the luxury to just completely only outright fund research because we have no benefactor. Like we’re, I don’t know if I’d necessarily call us like a grassroots organization, but we are probably one of the more grassroots organizations in that we have, over a thousand donors and a lot of them are, Monthly donors who give us anywhere between one to a couple hundred dollars a month.
And so I have been using this word field building organization in the past couple years. And I think it’s an idea that’s starting to take hold with certain kind [00:09:00] of philanthropic funders and in that community a little bit. But the idea of field building is that, okay, if we want cultured meat to exist, We also want other products to exist that are similarly grown in cells.
So not just meat. So that was a change from those original founding documents. I thought meat was a little bit narrow and also a little bit specific and maybe far out. But if we actually connect the idea of growing, meat from cells to all the stuff that we already grow from cells today that also used to come from animals, then we’re already on a continuum, already on a path.
And the field building aspect is how do we build that science out so that it becomes an actual academic field, an actual industry, that there is talent and training programs built into it, that there’s all of these touchstones of an established field. And look at cell biology, look at oncology, look at ecology, these other spaces, they have academic societies, they have [00:10:00] conferences, they have all these different things that make that field work.
We, at the beginning when I started 11 years ago, we didn’t have any of those pieces. So I think of New Harvest as an organization that tries to plant those pieces one by one, but we’re also not an organization that’s trying to be centralized. We’re not trying to make it about us. We’re actually just trying to empower those things happening and then let it go and let it be natural and organic and grow on its own.
Now, I noticed in your definition, you didn’t say cellular agriculture. Is that, would you say that in the future, this kind of next generation of new harvest, you might be focusing on areas beyond cellular agriculture and into other industry building kind of areas, industry, building industries, maybe.
So I don’t know if I intentionally didn’t say cellular agriculture, but to me, that was. That was almost like part of the field building, was we had to name the fields. In our activity as [00:11:00] a field building organization, what, item number one or one of the items in there was actually naming the field cellular agriculture.
But, I still think, and in New Harvest we call it growing food from cells, but I still think that cellular agriculture kind of lacks definition. Out there in the world, people say cellular agriculture, precision fermentation as if they’re distinct, or they say cellular agriculture as a synonym for cultured meat, but not for the precision fermentation products.
And, there’s, it’s wishy washy out there right now, which is fine, because I think that’s kind of part of the process of finding what names will stick in the end. But to your point about will New Harvest branch out. I think that’s a little bit related to how we define cellular agriculture.
Some things that we’ve been thinking about a lot lately is you know, biomanufacturing, bioprocessing, these value added agriculture, these are words that are more established than cellular agriculture, are a little bit [00:12:00] more established as biotech for industrial purposes or biotech at scale.
So when I hear biomanufacturing, I’m not thinking so much about biopharma. It seems more like massive, like you’re processing. Sugarcane stocks or something like that. And I think that’s actually interesting to start incorporating into cellular agriculture, because we need to start thinking about that scale instead of defaulting to pharma scale or pharma context for cellular agriculture.
So to your point, I don’t know, the words are stretchy. New Harvest Mandate is like stretchy, but not that stretchy. But I actually think that the concepts of large scale bio manufacturing and bioprocessing of even super raw materials like, sugar beets, canola, these really agricultural inputs that come off the land.
That is part of the cell ag supply chain. And so we actually do need to incorporate that into our work. It’s another layer on that and going back to the definition of using cells to grow food. We’re [00:13:00] seeing cellular agriculture develop a lot of pharmaceuticals and materials and all these other kinds of areas.
These do fall within the scope of New Harvest as well. Would you say that’s true? I think that New Harvest is pretty focused on the food piece. Thanks. As opposed to the health piece, and that’s another kind of, not trend, but like definition box that we keep running into is, biotech has so much advocacy for health.
Like that in fact most people when you tell talk about biotech, they think we’re talking about health applications And there’s this bigger world. I don’t know if it’s bigger, but there’s this huge world of non health biotech I mean you could use biotech to grow absolutely anything in any application if you want But we almost have to steer the conversation away from health towards these other things.
And so I consider new harvest limitations to still very much be around food, even though, you could convince me that certain health products might be [00:14:00] considered cell egg. We tell the story of insulin a lot, for example, but we really need to be thinking about these contexts of food grade stuff, food grade facilities, food grade research, that, that’s really important and building out that aspect of the field is what’s most neglected.
Interesting. Yeah. And yeah, neglected is a good way to say it. We do need to put more focus area, more resources there. And I guess another thought for me personally is that a lot of what I learned about cellular agriculture in the first place was from the new harvest resources. And, the first time you’re hearing about, cellular agriculture could be used to create leather or things like that.
It might not have been the focus, but it also made me think, wow, this is the first time I’ve heard about these types of technologies. And so that’s why I would associate it with New Harvest, for example. Okay. Very cool. I want to just very briefly talk about culture because, the culture at New Harvest is very different than other organizations [00:15:00] that that are, typically seen as just research organizations.
There’s a really good culture amongst the families. Fellows, the different people that are involved with New Harvest, even the, those that are donors and in the New Harvest ecosystem is that something that has occurred naturally? Or is that something your team is focusing on saying, Hey, we need to develop a very certain type of culture.
And I’m just throwing this one out there. I think it’s important. Yeah. I would love to say it, it developed intentionally. But I think culture is created by the people at the table. And so the culture of New Harvest has always been the culture of the group of people who are on staff, and then the group of people that we’re funding.
And our culture has shifted as the story goes. As a staff has shifted and has as those kind of group dynamics have shifted a lot. So I feel like I specifically and personally don’t want to claim what the culture of new harvest, you know that I’m the origin of it or anything like [00:16:00] that, because it really is these other people who bring ideas and perspectives to the table and change the narrative and new harvest kind of narrative and culture has shifted a little bit.
In the very, very beginning, it was very much like we need to make something happen, whatever we can do, let’s make something happen. And then it. As the field started emerging, we had to become this critical. voice that was trying to still center the public good, trying to center a sense of less hype, more scientific basis, more, are we really able to achieve these things on these very short timelines?
And that was a culture shift. And that culture shift came from the people on our team and in reflection to the people who are Participants in cellular agriculture at the time. But I will say that one thing that I think New Harvest has kept pretty constant is this focus on what is really happening, like what is, what material progress is really happening and trying to separate hype and excitement from, general [00:17:00] optimism.
And some hype is. Good. I think we are all optimistic and we are motivated by good news and progress, but we also have to call out when we see things that are like, I don’t know about, I don’t know about that. I don’t know if we can actually, deliver a satellite product within one year, which is like things that companies have claimed throughout this 20 year process.
So I think that culture of, what’s really happening and how close are we to actually getting there is quite real and I think we also have a culture of trying not to be too top down in our approach and instead of trying to have more of a facilitative approach to our leadership, like, how do we just actually just help other people do the thing that they want to do?
And that isn’t always met with That isn’t always understood because I think a lot of people are used to being handed, this is what you’re going to do and this is how you do it. It’s actually a pretty unstructured free flowing participation being on new harvest staff and [00:18:00] probably being a fellow to you’re a little bit on your own.
And so you have to be comfortable with that environment and all the ambiguity that comes with it. This episode, the birthday episode is part of a Kind of a new series of episodes that we’re launching probably about one every month until the end of the year highlighting the new harvest 20 years and achievements.
And we’re going to get into that a little bit more. And so with that, let’s jump right back in. And there is. There’s one thing that I, I was doing a couple of days ago in terms of, registration and paperwork. And I had mentioned this to you earlier, but the website for the podcast, futurefoodshow.
com it was originally set up on a July 22nd, the day before the new harvest birthday happens to be my birthday. And also and you didn’t mention that to me. Also happy birthday to new harvest. But I remember it was new harvest 2018. [00:19:00] And, so many people want it, couldn’t come to the event.
This was in Boston. And you, we had some camera equipment from the podcast recording stuff and you came to our team and I think me, Cyrus and Anita were there that year. And you’re like, is there any way you guys can do a live stream? And I remember thinking, okay, for this, we’re gonna need a Twitter account.
Back then we, the podcast didn’t even have a Twitter account, so we created the Future Food Show Twitter account, , July 22nd, this is 2018. We set up the website, future food show.com, and it was the most kind of Jerry rigged, livestream, you could even imagine, for back in 2018, but so many people were tuning in, from the new harvest network.
And, those who couldn’t make it, they had some great feedback, great comments. And and it just made me think that, it’s moments like that where I think about new harvest and how everybody was like, really trying to scramble together to make something happen. Not for any type of personal benefit, but really for just, getting the [00:20:00] idea of cellular agriculture out to more people.
So that was a cool thing to see that. And I think it was part of the culture too. Yeah. I love that story, Alex. I actually remember myself, I was on the train from New York to Boston trying to call you when there was service being like, hey, can you do this podcast? So it was super last minute.
I guess it must have been the day of or the day before that you set all this up. But I think that maybe speaks a little bit to your question about the culture of new harvests is we try to just spark something, be that little thing that pushes someone into the field and. Maybe that phone call was the little thing that helped you get your podcast go, it isn’t and that’s what makes it awkward about New Harvest because I don’t like to always say, it’s because of New Harvest this person did this or changed their life.
And I honestly I wouldn’t do that if we didn’t have to fundraise at all I wouldn’t, I would be totally invisible in it. But I hope that people think of New Harvest as this kind of turning point or spark on their trajectory into the field. To [00:21:00] me, those are the stories that are the most exciting.
It definitely, and I’ll say those sparks definitely do work. And for me, I would say it was even before that, that, the New Harvest website explaining what cellular agriculture is in such a nice, nicely designed way, nice kind of experience to say, Hey, this is a cool technology.
This is interesting. That was the spark for me, which I think, happened even before, before the the, before that first new harvest 2018. But, we’ve talked a couple, we talked about a couple of these sparks, but I want to. I want to ask you, looking back on these 20 years, what are some of the achievements that, that you see that, new harvest has accomplished these past 20 years?
Yeah, I I think there, for people who have been following New Harvest for a while, I think there are the obvious things that I’m really proud of, and so I’ll just in chronological order, and I’ll actually even go back to [00:22:00] For when New Harvest was founded. For about nine years, New Harvest had no full time staff and it was Jason, the, executive director and, these board members just, trying to make things happen.
And so they helped. Plant the field in some ways by, convening an academic community. It seemed to be mostly in Europe and a lot centered in the Netherlands. But just getting together PIs to talk about cellular agriculture and various meetings and applying for grants together. And I think that really did lay a foundation for the field that a lot of us don’t talk about today because we think the field started 10 years ago, or we think the field started five years ago, depending on your point of view.
But, that laid the groundwork for the grants that went out in the Netherlands, which led to, this multi university consortium. It’s how Mark Post got involved in the field and how that burger was tasted and all that kind of stuff. So that was like a history from about 2004 to 20 I guess until I joined 2013.
[00:23:00] Also Hannah Tuomisto was funded to do the first life cycle assessment of cultured meat, which I thought was a really interesting point in time. We still go back and refer to those numbers, which I think sometimes shows us how little progress has been made on the manufacturing process that we can still be like, oh, look at these numbers.
But also Hannah’s paper really, took off into many other papers that were published about life cycle assessments since then. And I think that kind of planted a mini field within a field of life cycle assessments and projecting out what the impact of cellular agriculture and cultured meat would be.
And that paper was from 2011 or 2010. And then I published a paper in 2010, which was Actually riffing off of a paper that Jason and Vladimir Mironov had published about just how you would manufacture cultured meat. And I think that paper is also pretty relevant today in terms of just the kind of structural, what does it take?
Okay, cells, scaffolds. media, bioreactors, and then [00:24:00] all the many options within that. So that’s the prehistory, but then after I joined, I say the first thing I did in the, in that first year was really just manage a Facebook group. It was just who’s showing up to this Facebook group, and then I would beat them on a call.
A lot of people, I just, it was just like people who emailed New Harvest. I said, let’s get on a call and just find out something about them. Where did they come from? And I was amazed how many people thought they had invented the idea of in vitro meat themselves. And then they google it and then they’re like, okay, actually I didn’t invent that idea.
There’s other people who are interested in it. But it was, the culture of New Harvest, I think, is actually the culture of this group of people in the beginning. It was like, really well meaning and earnest people who are like excited about the technology. A lot of them didn’t have science backgrounds, but they were like doing what they can in the field.
So that meant, moderating a Facebook group or contributing papers to a website or like collecting links, stuff like that. And then, within that first year, I became really, I guess here’s like a more personal story. After that [00:25:00] first year of just managing the Facebook group, I posted on Facebook.
I was like, yeah, nothing’s getting done. I don’t want to be an advocacy organization. I don’t want to be an organization that just talks about a big idea. But doesn’t do anything like that’s not for me. And so I asked the Facebook group, should I go get a PhD or something?
And then just do this on the side. And I was amazed at how many people in that Facebook group said, no, do not get a PhD. They were like, other people in the world can get PhDs, but we need someone to be like the stake in the ground for this field. And. This idea is a field building all that kind of stuff like that didn’t even necessarily came from come from me that came from the people of this Facebook group over 10, 10 1112 years ago saying, we actually need to claim like what is cellular agriculture, what is, I’m saying in vitro weeks that we didn’t know what cellular agriculture was then.
So I was like, oh, being very empowered by the field. And for me, that was a spark. I talk about my story about getting the job and everything. But to me, that was the [00:26:00] spark of responsibility that It was not just me getting paid to do willy nilly things. There are actually people out there counting on this idea who I was felt accountable to in this Facebook group.
So then of course a big highlight is connecting people from that Facebook group to one another to start the company’s Perfect day foods and the every company those are big highlights because I think it really made the field feel like okay material stuff can happen And I will say I didn’t want to start companies.
I just, we co founded them because that was felt like the easiest way to get any money to do any science. We did not have enough money in the bank to support academic research back then. I did not really understand how we would ever get enough money to support academic research then.
And also it felt like academic research seems like looming and large and maybe inapproachable in how we were going to do it. Who would we find? How big would the proposal be? It’d be many years long. What would we [00:27:00] narrow into? But this idea of creating a startup around this idea Let’s say it about a perfect day’s milk seemed feasible because, milk, growing proteins in cell culture is decades old technology.
We’ve been doing it for all kinds of vitamins and ingredients and stuff like that. And we only had three months to do it. And I really didn’t believe that you could do anything meaningful with animal cell culture in three months. But I did think we maybe could create like a little sample of milk.
And I was like, if that’s all we do, like in my mind, The minimum viable thing is if all we do is create a little sample of milk, even if it’s doesn’t, if it’s gross or whatever, at least that’s okay, we stuff can happen in the material world and we’re not just doing advocacy anymore. But of course, perfect day turned out to be a lot more than I did taste little gross samples of milk though, but it turned out to be a lot more than that.
And I’m really excited about that today, but that again shows how new harvest just wanted to be a spark. We stepped away from that company. That the first sign of investment [00:28:00] really and said, we want to keep building the field like you guys hold down your thing with the company but we’re going to go out there and work on the other neglected aspects of the field.
Yeah, those two companies being founded were a spark. Sometimes I wonder if you know we created a monster because lots of people came up to us after that. thing. Can you connect me to a co founder? I’m an MBA student. I really want to start a company. Lots of investors said, Oh, could you repeat this a hundred times?
Oh, could you put, so sometimes I think, new harvest was a little bit part of this hype generation of Oh, we can create these unicorn companies, spin them out here and there. Here’s one for milk, one for eggs, one for beef, one for pork, so Anyway, we stepped it up that from early.
So I think I hope that we stepped away from that early enough But I think we really did see that as a trend in industry. Maybe we could talk about that later But then of course the next thing we went on to do was try to seed the academic field because we just had so Many founders coming to us who had absolutely no academic basis saying find us a scientist [00:29:00] And I was like, why would a scientist want to work with you?
They might be coming to the table with all the ideas and all the IP and all the ways to move things forward. But I also noted that a lot of the scientists just didn’t have experience in these kind of food contexts, or thinking about this kind of scale of food, or even the right cell types. In medicine, you’re working with Chinese hamster ovary, canine kidney cells, these are not relevant in food context, at least not today.
And so how do we get more people who are familiar with growing, avian, chicken cells, turkey cells, beef, etc. So the other thing I’m proud of is that. New Harvest funded 60 researchers at 37 institutions in nine countries around the world through various granting programs to trying to plant these kind of seeds of Entrepreneurial scientists in the field.
And when I say entrepreneur, I don’t mean people starting companies, but just [00:30:00] entrepreneurial in that they are scientists who are going to fight for a thing and move it forward. They’re not just looking for an easy grant they can apply to. They’re actually like really committed to this space and moving forward.
And we really wanted people who are going to do that because we didn’t think that in the span of one grant cycle, things would be easy on the other end. And. That approach to funding researchers, not funding their supervisors, really trying to empower them, but in a hands off way, like trying, in an entrepreneurial way, like here’s some resources, but you’re on your own.
We can provide some support connecting you to people and whatever, there you go. I feel has been pretty successful because, from those first researchers, we’ve seen so many institutes get started. We’ve seen like the foundations of the academic field. I don’t remember how many papers.
We’ve published now, but it’s well over 60 peer reviewed published papers, which I consider to be like the foundations of cellular agriculture in the academic sense. And of course, all those [00:31:00] papers, are used to apply for grants for further funding to establish, the Institute at Tufts, the Institute at UC Davis, the Institute at Bath University.
So the the work in New Zealand, like there’s all kinds of, oh, UCLA, there’s so many grantees out there that went on to receive government grants. It’s actually hard to keep track of them now. And so that’s our, there are other great success. And then the success that I’m, Proud of in the more recent term is how much we’ve moved the needle on safety And trying to do this kind of new work filling in because okay I think that the academic space I don’t I would not go so far as to say it is solved There’s lots of field building to happen, you know left to happen in academia but I think for how much money new harvest has it’s not where we can have the greatest Impact anymore.
I think we could advise to funders on how to find and where to find and direct funding from other sources. But we’re about a 2 million a year organization. And so we have to target that 2 million [00:32:00] on something extremely neglected, and extremely high impact. And that’s related to the field intelligence that we have.
And so safety felt like that. Really high impact, really neglected thing that only a group like ours could do, because we’ve, maintained our neutrality, never signed NDAs, stuff like that. So being able to bring together 87 individuals from 50 competing cultured meat companies to align on How cultured meat is manufactured was incredible because we were pulling out processes really from the private sector to try and put a publication in front of policymakers and regulators to say this is what we’re making and how it’s made.
And it was not like so prescriptive. It was meant to describe what was already happening. It wasn’t meant for us to be like, this is how it should be made. It was actually like, this is how people are approaching Making this thing. And then of course, from there, we brought in a whole bunch of regulators to reflect on that.
And so now our. Our work has shifted towards how can we be more of this [00:33:00] facilitative leader because there’s so much collective action and collaboration that needs to happen in this field for it to succeed, but that stuff is never funded. There’s no incentive for it. Investors don’t fund it.
Philanthropists do fund it once in a while, but you have to really make a case for why this. Intervention for this field at this time, that kind of thing. But that’s where we’re headed. And that’s the thing that I’m very proud of and very excited to amplify in the years. Yeah. And I think you make a good point that the fact that there are so many publications in the field really sets the baseline for then, folks to go to other funders and use those kind of piggyback off of those existing publications and say, Hey, I want to continue the research in this field or in this area.
There’s actually something to put in those kind of, references for the publications when you’re applying for it. Exactly. And we saw that with Hannah’s paper, that very early LCA, we’ve seen a lot of LCAs. since then that New Harvest has not funded [00:34:00] that have been independently supported.
So yeah, each of those papers can be a spark for, a field within a field. And I guess it could even be argued that, the state of California putting money into that type of research, which I think there was a small 5 million that was put in could be related to those as well.
Other states we won’t talk about right now, but okay, so that’s really exciting. And I think, as you told those stories, it made me think of a couple other OG individuals, I think Natalie Rubio is on the call, who is, I think, part of maybe the perfect day team.
Is that right? Yes, he was like an early intern or staff like the third one, or the fourth one, if I was involved. Yeah. And I think Andrew Stout was doing some work even as, as far back as maybe before 2013, I don’t want to name any dates and be incorrect, but and so these are just a few of the individuals that come to mind that kind of built up.
That history that kind of went on to to go beyond that [00:35:00] Facebook group. And, when I was speaking to Mark post, he was talking about the early days of the scientific conference he was hosting where it would be just maybe 20, 30 people in the room back in, in 2000 and I guess 2014 when they started that.
And I feel like those are some of those. original folks that were part of that Facebook group. Yeah, for sure. I need, now that you’ve opened the floodgates, there’s a lot of OG people in the, from what I can see in the attendees. Aaron Kim, of course, was a big influential comms person for New Harvest.
Mira Zassenhaus as well. Rosalyn Abbott was a grantee of New Harvest, but way before that, she was working with David Kaplan, even before I was even part of. The SELAG field. Tariqa helped with SELAG Canada. Zadira founded SELAG Canada. Kevin Chen was founded a company called Hyacinth, which was founded at the same time as Perfect Day.
So we went through the accelerator together and they were working on self cultured cannabinoids. So you’re nay [00:36:00] Freya. There’s a whole bunch of other people on here who are part of the community for a long time. Very cool. Yeah. And and thank you all for attending and we’re going to we’re going to keep it rolling, but if you do have any questions, definitely throw them in the Q and a okay.
So we learned about some of the achievements of new harvest over the last 20 years. And it’s crazy to say that. And it’s also funny that we’re talking about it in the term of in vitro meat because that’s what it used to be called. I guess, we are seeing some, and I want to briefly just talk about Just cover this topic, but we are seeing some, mergers and closures and that kind of thing.
Is that something as just natural progression in the industry? How does it look like from your viewpoint? Has it also made some of your donors say, Hey, is this. Is the industry going in the right direction or I should say, is the field going in the right direction, any thoughts on just the consolidation mergers closures, the few that we’ve seen.
I, so [00:37:00] since Aaron and mirror on the call, a long time ago, I guess not that long ago, maybe in 20. 15, 16 or so, I remember us just feeling so panicked. We’re like, there’s going to be, there’s a bubble. This is an investment bubble and the bubble is going to pop. And I remember talking to our board members being like, this is a bubble.
Like, how can you invest in something where the lead time for the technology is so long? And maybe that was like the fundamental difference between how we perceive the world and how these founders perceive the world. Or maybe it was, there was something that they know that I don’t know.
But. We just felt like there was so much to be done. Like we had not even established cell lines. We had, the first bovine stem cell was isolated in 2018, I think. Like we had that person speak at the conference that you were at. How is it possible that we could be putting Food products on the shelves within an investor timeline of 10 years.
Like it just was unfathomable to us. So when I see these like massive layoffs and all this kind of stuff, it’s hard, [00:38:00] like I keep inside the, I told you like we saw this come we knew that this was going to happen, but we also knew that this was, Maybe the only way that it was going to happen because Jason, long before I had started, had, was advocating for academic research to be done and was working on grant programs and that kind of stuff in Europe and they, and there were grants, but the grants did not lead to more grants.
And so they cut, they stalled. And I think to some degree, we have to be grateful, or whatever that the private sector did explode the way it did because it holds. the research that needs to happen along with it, which is the academic stuff. And we’re seeing these layoffs and so on.
Part of it is, I told you part of it is oh, the market’s not good. It’s true. The market is not good. We’re all seeing that. But also we did need to quell the hype language about, we’re going to have products in the market in one year, which was a claim made in 2017. Because we needed to make room to say this is actually a huge concept.[00:39:00]
That could completely change how food is eaten. It’s not going to happen by one company in a 10 years or even 20 years. It’s not going to happen by 10 companies or a hundred companies. This is a massive shift in subsistence strategy. So even trying to think about it in only a private context is like a disturbing prospect to me.
This is so huge. And so one thing that I’m, I want to see more of, and I don’t know if it will be related to these layoffs and so on is like the conversation about a food transition or a protein transition that is as big and as complex as the energy transition. I think people grasp what, how big and complex the energy transition is, how long it took.
How much technology was a part of it, but not all of it. How we still need oil and gas today, like it’s a true transition. We need to talk about that for the context of food. And Salag is just one thread in that thing. Like all the other movements towards a just food [00:40:00] future are part of that too.
So that’s where I’d like to see things go. But, Yeah, maybe, I hope the industry, I wouldn’t call it a collapse, but the industry kind of slowing just makes room for these other conversations a little bit more, because industry and the hype that comes out of it just takes up a lot of space and kind of makes it hard for these other voices to be out there.
It definitely allows people to look at other ways to either make things work or face the reality of the direction that they’ve gone. And before we move on to the next, I want to say that on a positive note, we are seeing more programs for different types of funding opportunities on the government level.
Come out, I believe Integra Culture secured a double digit millions non dilutive grant that was, really good for for everything that’s happening in Japan and those areas. And a lot of the companies are finding ways to monetize, even if it might be in their direct in the direct cultured [00:41:00] meat products lines.
And I think these are all No, we’re going to see We’re going to see a lot of those pivots to biopharma products or maybe plant based products, just like near term market things, which obviously make sense. And I think the other thing about, we’re seeing this non dilutive and grant funding, academic funding come in, but we also have to acknowledge that the university is very privatized, like they are excited about supporting the private sector.
So if there’s no private sector, it will be really hard to get that money. So that’s just the reality of, how things work right now. Yeah. And I don’t know if you would, would like to speak to it, but I personally am very happy that good meat three came out and actually gave us a number because for a long time, people were really asking, what percentages of, cultivated cells or cultured cells are actually going to be in these products.
I think, even though it might not have been a number that we all wanted, at least it’s a number that we can say, okay, this is, Yeah. This is what I’m eating where that might’ve been unclear before. So I think that also puts us, yeah, the 3 percent thing [00:42:00] is so good. Good. We put out a product that’s 3 percent cells.
And I think the tragedy of that is that we didn’t all think that was going to be the product. Like we should have expected. And I remember, we talked about this as new harvesting, the first products are going to be. veggie burgers with cell sprinkled on it. This is what, and we should be excited about that as a step forward, as a step towards progress.
Of course, we’re not going to come out with these highly textured hundred percent or even beyond 50. I throwing out the numbers is hard to do, but we should be excited about cell culture as an ingredient. That was the only way it was going to start. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
So we’ve talked about. We’ve talked about the ups and downs. We’ve talked about the amazing achievements of New Harvest over the last 20 years. What’s next for New Harvest? So I think when I did that huge rant about all the things New Harvest has done I talked about the, that facilitative leadership piece of we want [00:43:00] to be the group that helps people come together to figure out what our kind of collective actions are going to be.
And safety was a great example because it wasn’t like we were dictating an agenda. We want the safety, we want safety to look like this, we want the process to look like this. We were actually just trying to create an environment. That could pull as much information out of the participants as possible so that we could actually like inform the public and move forward on safety.
We want to do that for all the other aspects of the field where collective action is warranted because I think we’re incredibly well suited to do that, given. Our relationships and our history with so many of the individuals in the field, but also the trust building that we’ve been.
I don’t think we’ve been building trust. It’s more like we’ve been consistent. And so I hope that from that consistency people. See an organization they can trust. I think that’s part of the culture where you have developed this naturally this natural trust building that has come.
I’m glad you say that. Cause I think the culture is also like how other people perceive. It’s not really what [00:44:00] we say. New Harvest is not an organization. We’re like, we’re a family or we have some word to describe people who work here. I don’t like that kind of top down thing. It’s it should actually feel like a culture, otherwise there is none.
But we want to do more of that facilitative leadership stuff. And we think that there is just so much collaboration and collective action that needs to be done in the field for us to really unlock the idea of CELAG for the public good. And We can do that through facilitation and through really like empowering people, but in these group settings to be like, let’s actually work together.
Let’s actually divide and conquer. Now that we have so much more support in the academic public research spaces, how can we coordinate how can we facilitate, create guidelines, standards, and actually dare to talk about standardizing our field? Like these are the things that we think are incredibly important in ways we want to move forward.
And then on the practical money side. We’ve had a hard time raising money lately also, and I could ascribe that to [00:45:00] a lot of things. One thing I think is also like a shift in the funders that have entered the space and it’s all very positive. I think there’s like a lot of a lot of opportunity there.
But our shift has also been from. Just philanthropy towards securing more government support. So we’ve also benefited from government grants existing. And there are a lot of grants that are really well suited to a non profit organization managing or facilitating large collaborative grants.
So we’re going to keep doing that. And so I think the facilitation work will come from both philanthropy funded stuff, which I think is a little bit more flexible and lets us guide our own agenda, but also government funded stuff that does let us. get groups together and so on. The only problem with government is sometimes it’s limited to just nationalistic things like only, can only gather people in this region or whatever, when actually, this is a global, this is a global, everything is a global thing.
What regarding the safety approach you, there was a neutral voice. You pulled [00:46:00] everyone together. I think Vireo advisors was a third party. Yes. How much effort does it take to actually make sure you do have a neutral voice? unbiased kind of approach when you’re putting out these reports and let’s say the next projects that you’re going to be focused.
Yeah, that’s such a great question. So facilitative leadership is probably like the most work for zero recognition, and you actually have to not want to be recognized in order to do it successfully. Just as a little bit of background to what Vireo, and thank you for shouting out Vireo they’re incredibly, I mean they, they are the ones who put that idea on our table to for us to work with them, but Vireo, and New Harvest had to do an incredible amount of work to get those 50 competing companies to talk about their process.
As you imagine, this field is steeped in a lot of this kind of, I’m not going to share stuff if I don’t have to, because biotech and IP go so closely hand in hand. So what we had to do to get people [00:47:00] to come to the table was we had to talk to all of them one on one first to get them to want to come to the thing.
As a group, and then the groups would meet a couple times, but like those the one on one relationship was so critical and another aspect of facilitation is how do you create an environment where people actually want to share and that environment is that’s as nuances hosting a party. What’s the difference between a good party and a bad party?
It’s not it’s a combination of the food, the music, the venue, the volume, like all these kinds of things. And so that, those are all very conscious decisions that need to be made to successfully facilitate work of any kind. And I want to tell just a very quick story. I ran into a foundation in Calgary the other day called the Mary Gold Foundation.
They probably were like, don’t even say her name. And it was just two people and their whole thing was coordinating and doing facilitative [00:48:00] leadership for a very specific Orphan drug area called myotonic dystrophy. And I asked them for tips. I was like, how did you get this field to work? He said, we only spent maybe a million dollars a year on meetings and like getting people together in the same room to work together.
But because we were able to do that coordination, it helped direct like hundreds of millions of dollars of grant funding effectively so that there was not redundancy, there was not competition. And the academic field was actually operating as a cohesive field where people were connected and knew one another.
And they said, the most important things we ever did was get really nice hotels and feed people really well. And I was like, Oh, I wish we had the budget to get really nice hotels and feed people well. But they just highlighted how much that creating those comfortable environments is what gets the people wanting to work together.
Like you have to make that. It’s incredibly attractive. So yes, you have to make it great. Alex, you know this very well from all [00:49:00] of your conference throwing. Yeah, no it’s funny how, the, the WeWork model I think is, was, or is successful in many ways because of that, historically, if there’s a startup, they’re in some really small office that, might have a plant in there, versus for the same, you can have a shared space, but a super hipster, you have great coffee, it’s comfortable and it really changes the environment.
It’s one of those things that I think, people talk about, but it’s hard to talk about it without hitting The nail on the head with the hammer, but it is important. And I think, not to take too long, but, when it comes to hosting events, we ran surveys after hosting actually we hosted a couple hundred events before we even started hosting the cultured meters, so their agriculture events.
And when we would survey. Some of the attendees at these events we asked them how they would feel when they would attend these events. And we were shocked to see that over 70 percent [00:50:00] were nervous and scared all these words that we didn’t even think that they would even fill out on these forms, these second, standard tests and what we’ve found is that, the first kind of introduction and welcome, if you are warm and welcoming and have clear instructions on your wanted here, it totally changes the atmosphere of the entire event. And I think you could take that and apply that to other things of really creating a comfortable space allows people to think and work. In the most effective way and get them excited. Yeah, and I’ll spell out something that you alluded to earlier.
When you say we’re not gonna talk about the other states, I feel like that has been a failing of cellular agriculture is not creating that environment for agriculture as it exists today. We have not, when I say we, I mean as a field has not, has approached existing agriculture in this hostile way without acknowledging that these are the people who feed.
The world today and we have [00:51:00] to work together. So the facilitation In that connection is also so so critical and something that I want to focus on in these years ahead. I love that Okay So I want you know to actually put a call out for those listening for those that are still with us on the call Which is you know, actually most of the folks that have joined what can listeners do to help new harvest today?
The most easiest answer to that is you can donate to New Farmers, give us a birthday present or something, we are still powered by individual people, primarily like individual donors like you and I, Alex, who give just a little bit per month, and especially those monthly contributions make an enormous difference.
Difference for an organization like us in maintaining our independence and maintaining our ability to do the things that we think we want to do on the Thailand’s want to do, we have to be pretty flexible, but also have our own agenda and independence as an [00:52:00] organization. I think the other thing that people can do is just engage with cellular agriculture, share your opinions and.
have a voice out there. Like sometimes even on LinkedIn, we’re all on there, but it still feels like the conversation does not represent all of us. So I, I would put that out there too. If you see things out there on LinkedIn and you’re like, ah, I don’t know about that. You should share that.
Cause otherwise the field gets scared by these kinds of vocal minorities. Great. And really just sharing the, what is cellular agriculture page of New Harvest, I think I have seen, gets a lot of people that might not have known about the field that, that they get really excited about it.
It’s good to know so we’re going to go into an audience q a so if you have any questions Feel free to put it in the q a and we’ll try to get to it now but right now I want to just go through a couple questions. I have here Which is what gives you the most hope slash? What are the greatest opportunities?
And I guess that means in the field in [00:53:00] general. I almost feel like I can’t talk about the hope without talking about what the opposite first, which is what worries me the most. And so there, there are two things that worry me the most about cellular agriculture today. And neither of them are resourcing of the field, because I think adequate funding is coming in and is going to come in.
The two things that worry me the most is that the mission of cell life just evaporates and no one cares about it anymore, because no one is actually advocating for the mission of cellular agriculture. We have to remind ourselves the reason why. new harvest was founded 20 years ago was to create, secure, sustainable, humane food sources, where animals were not harmed, where it was like actually better for the environment than the counterparts from traditional ag, et cetera, et cetera.
And there really, there’s nothing. enforcing that. There’s nothing really incentivizing that from happening. [00:54:00] So far, though, that has been used as marketing for companies and for nonprofits like New Harvest to move this stuff forward. But there isn’t really anything holding anyone to that except promises of individual people.
And of course, these are not enforceable promises. That’s what really worries me is that the mission is going to slip and instead we have these kind of sell products, sell culture products in the market that really aren’t better for the world, but are just another thing that people might consume. And so what was the point of all of this?
The second thing that I’m really worried about is this semi academic thing called the tragedy of the anti commons. So there’s a tragedy. So we’re, the tragedy of the commons is if you have a common resource. It gets completely depleted. So you know, the ocean, say you have a farmer’s field that belongs to no farmer, but all the farmers put their sheep on it.
And then it’s just barren because the sheep are eating the grass all the time. So it’s the tragedy of the commons is common stuff gets overused. The tragedy of the anti commons is stuff [00:55:00] is. so privatized that it doesn’t get used at all. And I’m worried about that in cellular agriculture because there is so much opportunity for IP protection that what happens if this company owns the patent for this cell line development or this process in the cell line development or this cell or this gene in the cell and then this other company owns IP for the media, this media firm, blah, blah, blah.
This other one has, there’s all these little pieces of IP in the entire manufacturing process of cultured meat. We could say this about other cell like stuff. What if that actually is a decelerant and actually holds the field back because we have this anti common situation where something is so private?
That all the puzzle pieces are private, we can’t get the full puzzle put together. That’s something I worry about a lot. We’ve seen it happen in biotech before. I actually was making sure I wasn’t saying something that I shouldn’t say on this podcast by reading a little bit more about that tragedy of the anti commons yesterday.
And people are like, Oh, we actually don’t see this that much in biotech. We reviewed a lot of biotech, but there [00:56:00] have been examples of, pharmaceutical cures and stuff like that, that have not been on put on shelves because the patent holders in that manufacturing process are like, no, you have to buy this from me.
And it is such a high price. that they’re locked. They’re like completely locked and that can’t be released. And I think that even if people say that’s not a big problem in biotech it will be a problem in cell ag because we’re starting the research. From a private perspective so early, like we came out of the gate privatized.
And if you look at some of the IP out there, some of the filings that are not even completed, people are trying to patent cell lines that are like pretty basic. And if they succeed, imagine, this is a, an example and. Possibly not true, but just to make an example, imagine if someone protected a beef cell line and excluded people from using beef.
Okay, then now, but they never make the media and the cell and the bioreactors and all those other pieces. We could create a kind of blockage that actually prevents cell lag from happening, which of course then ties to my [00:57:00] previous concern of total missions slippage because we’re all people are all rent seekers on the IP.
So I’m really worried about that because you have such a pre competitive space. That is so private. So then now to answer your real question about what gives me the most hope what gives me the most hope is a little bit, and I don’t know if everyone’s gonna like this, but it’s a little bit that we have seen a trough of disillusionment that we’re descending into, and that hype is not number one item anymore, and I think I’m excited about that because I hope it forces us to realize we have to work together to survive.
It’s just a little bit more pressure that we can’t all go our own way. We have to make this through, we must collaborate, and we must work together. I’m hopeful about this next period because of that, and I’m also hopeful because this, that trough of disillusionment in the private sector seems to be accompanied by more excitement from philanthropists, foundations, and government in supporting cellular agriculture research because we need that to [00:58:00] come up and academia in my mind should be the kind of place where collaboration happens or is pushed from.
So I’m actually really incredible, incredibly hopeful for where we are as a field right now. I think the pressures are in place. And I hope that New Harvest can create this like perfect environment for collaboration to happen so that we can keep mission central and we can actually accelerate the field instead of decelerate it through all this kind of IP stuff.
Great. Thank you. And for, for those of you listening, as we begin to wrap up definitely check New Harvest’s website at new harvest. org for the latest and future episodes of this podcast series. And we’ll also put a transcript and the those links in the show notes. Isha, before we close out, do you have any last insights for our listeners today?
My last insight is to listen to the other podcasts. Everyone’s bored of me and tired of me talking. The people on the new harvest team [00:59:00] are going to be doing some of these podcasts. And I think you’ll really enjoy digging into all the stuff that they’re working on and the way that they have been leading change in their spaces.
So we had to reorganize our. Organization a little bit to have each of our directors focus on different regions. So I think they’ll all have really interesting things to say about what does it mean to advance cellular agriculture in Canada in Europe in the U. S. How are those environments slightly different?
How does collaboration look different in those? different places. That’s my insight is to listen to the other leaders on the new harvest team. Great. We definitely look forward to those conversations. Isha, thank you so much for joining us as the guest on the cultured meat and future food show.
Thanks for having me, [01:00:00] Alex.
This is your host Alex and we look forward to seeing you on the next episode.