Articles by Erin Kim

On July 20 and 21st, we held the 3rd New Harvest cellular agriculture conference at the MIT Media Lab. 

The New Harvest team travelled to D.C. last week, to participate in the FDA’s much-anticipated public meeting on Foods Produced Using Animal Cell Culture Technology, held on July 12th. Our Executive Director Isha Datar was invited to speak on a panel, and Research Director Kate Krueger delivered a public comment.

Since 2015, New Harvest has grown its team of Research Fellows from one pioneering scientist in cellular agriculture to an international, multi-disciplinary, collaborative team of six! Supporting and sharing the work of these trailblazing scientists is core to New Harvest’s mission — and it has only been made possible thanks to the ongoing support of individual donors, just like you.

Today, the New Harvest Research Fellows are paving the way for future generations of scientists in cellular agriculture to take the field to new and greater depths. Our hope is to be able to fund and democratize even more of this kind of research, so that a future industry can be established on a robust academic foundation that is as accessible and transparent as possible. Read on to find out what being a New Harvest Research Fellow or a principal investigator has meant for our team, in their own words.

There’s nothing better than looking back at all that we’ve accomplished in the year.

To our donors: thank you for making this work possible. We’re continuing to change the way animal products are made thanks to your much needed help.

Thinking of making a contribution to New Harvest’s cellular agriculture research this year?

This look into how we make our funding decisions may help you make a more informed decision to give.

How much does it cost to put on a cellular agriculture conference anyway?

Meet the three scientists — from the US, UK, and Canada — who will be advancing breakthroughs in cellular agriculture starting this fall!

New Harvest has come a long way since starting out twelve years ago as the organization which brought cultured meat from a seemingly far off sci fi concept to real, news making science that regular people can get excited about. It’s no easy feat to set out to achieve a goal as far-reaching as ours, but the progress that we are making is significant – and it gets more exciting as the momentum continues to build. 

In addition to being one of New Harvest’s first interns, Natalie Rubio is a New Harvest Research Fellow working on a PhD in Cellular Agriculture under Dr. David Kaplan at Tufts University. Before relocating to Boston for her PhD studies, Natalie got a taste of the San Francisco tech scene working at Quartzy, and she also helped out in the early days of Perfect Day Foods (then Muufri) while completing her B.S. in Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. Read on to get to know Natalie!

On May 1, 2017, Abi Glencross discontinued her research at King’s College London focused on 3D vascularized tissue for the production of cultured meat. It was the first New Harvest-funded Fellowship Project, and it began in November 2015.

The Shojinmeat Project is an inter-disciplinary collaborative project aimed at the development of cultured meat in Japan. The project consists of a number of volunteers working in a variety of “clusters” in both scientific and non-scientific subject areas, giving rise to the startup Integriculture Inc.

Erin had the opportunity to chat with Yuki Hanyu, founder of the Shojinmeat Project, about the history and vision behind the initiative. Yuki works full-time at the Shojinmeat Project and Integriculture Inc., and lives just south of Tokyo, Japan.

We couldn’t be happier to share that thanks to you, we not only met but beat our fundraising goal of $750,000 for 2016! Together, we raised nearly $900,000 for open cellular agriculture research last year. Read on for the breakdown of our year end fundraise and what this means for our year ahead!

Making cellular agriculture a reality is no small feat! It is a team effort, carried out by New Harvest’s network of scientific pioneers from various backgrounds working together on the challenges of culturing meat piece by piece. For many of the scientists in our community, dedicating their careers to the advancement of cellular agriculture was a dream that could only have been made possible via a grant from New Harvest. Since New Harvest is funded completely by donors, we are essentially crowdfunding a new field of science on a global scale.

Our small but growing team of Research Fellows are on the front lines of this work, paving the way for even more future cellular agriculturists to produce meat, milk, eggs, leather, and other animal products without animals. Read on to find out in their own words what being a part of the New Harvest community has meant to them.

In the fall of 2016, New Harvest was able to provide a grant to Research Fellow Jess Krieger at Kent State University. Jess is completing her PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology, and is using her expertise in tissue engineering to solve some of the technical challenges of growing cultured meat.

We’re #blessed to have Michael Selden join New Harvest as our intern this fall! Mike holds a degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Umass Amherst and has taught Chemistry to high schoolers as well as having worked in labs dealing with invasive fungi that threaten our food supply and the biomechanics of mantis shrimp and cancer biology.  

As a lover of science and an environmentalist, Michael believes in using all of the technology that we have to help grow our food supply while shrinking our environmental impact. 

For our first donor profile in our Getting to Know series, we sat down with Joshua March, CEO and Founder of Conversocial, a provider of software which enables companies to deliver customer service in real time through social media. Josh is a longtime cultured meat enthusiast who became a donor and dedicated member of the New Harvest community after finding out about us in 2015.

The US Department of Agriculture is holding a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Biotechnology and 21st Century Agriculture (AC21) from September 8 – 9 in Washington, D.C.

New Harvest has submitted a public comment on cellular agriculture to this meeting, which can be read in full below:

New Harvest Communications Director Erin explains some of the processes that fall under cellular agriculture in plain English. A version of this article was originally published in AgFunder in July 2016.

It’s been a couple of weeks since New Harvest 2016 – this is Erin’s “NH True Hollywood story” of how it all went down.

We often joked in the office that there was something very wedding-like about it, with all the prep, nerves, and the actual day being a dreamy blur. So this is my attempt to describe what the world’s first cellular agriculture conference was like, from my perspective.

Rebecca Ruth Seidel is the dairy manager and cheesemaker of Wholesome Dairy Farms, a grazing operation in rural Pennsylvania. As a 4th generation dairy farmer, decade-long vegetarian, and former Penn State American Studies graduate student, she’s interested in the intersection of animal ethics, scientific progress, and the American diet. Rebecca shares her perspective on cellular agriculture as a current dairy farmer in her first guest post for the New Harvest blog.

New Harvest has been invited to participate in an incredible opportunity to shape U.S. regulatory policy for biotechnology products.

Marianne Ellis is a Biochemical Engineer at the University of Bath with expertise in integrated bioprocess design for large-scale cell culture. Her work involves the design and fabrication of the bioreactors in which cultured meat cells grow!

New Harvest is supporting a foundational cultured avian tissue research project for the purpose of creating chicken and turkey meat without animals at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at North Carolina State University. The project is led by Dr. Paul Mozdziak, an expert in animal cell culture techniques, transgenic animal production, and muscle biology. He is assisted by graduate student Marie Gibbons. New Harvest’s financial support to the team at NCSU will total $118,800, provided over 2 years.

The event was a way for people who are involved and interested in cultured animal products to have the chance to taste and hear firsthand about what has been developed thus far, while engaging in discussions about how to tackle practical challenges like what language can be used to describe these kinds of products, how […]