- Overview
- Background
- Updates
Overview
After observing the popularity of crowdfunding among citizen scientists, New Harvest began to wonder if crowdfunding might be a helpful fundraising tool for cellular agriculture research.
We decided to experiment by doing. We used experiment.com, a crowdfunding platform for science experiments, to fundraise for a project to sequence the genome of an endangered black rhino. The project was led by Pembient, a cellular agriculture company making rhino horns, and Dr. Chuck Murray at the University of Washington.
New Harvest offered support as a fiscal sponsor, with our intern running the crowdfunding campaign as a summer project.
01
New Harvest helped Pembient exceed their goal of $16,500. We raised $17,292 from 181 individuals.
02
New Harvest concluded that the opportunity costs of crowdfunding campaigns were not suitable for the fundraising needed to advance cellular agriculture research.
03
This project experienced roadblocks and pivots. New Harvest decided to focus on food applications of cellular agriculture going forward.
Updates
August, 2015 – New Harvest disburses the funds to the University of Washington.
July, 2015 – New Harvest closes the campaign after exceeding the fundraising goal.
June, 2015 – New Harvest intern Meera Zassenhaus launches the crowdfunding campaign.
Collaborators
This initiative was a collaboration between New Harvest, Matthew Markus of Pembient, and Dr. Chuck Murray at the University of Washington.
New Harvest’s only role was to run the crowdfunding campaign. Beyond that, New Harvest had no involvement in the research itself.
See More Initiatives
2020 - PRESENT
The New Harvest OpenCellAg Repository
In order to see our vision of a more just, equitable, and humane food system one of our key strategies is to default to open. By creating an open cellular agriculture repository on Zenodo we ensure that the research produced by New Harvest and other researchers is accessible for all to use, read, share, and build upon. In that way we are increasing the impact of this crucial knowledge by furthering its reach.
2020 - Present
Safety Roadmap for Cultured Meat
Because growing meat through cell culture is so novel a process, many questions about the safety of cell-cultured meat and seafood products remain unanswered.
This industry-wide initiative was designed in partnership with Vireo Advisors to begin a data-driven conversation about the safety of cultured meat. 50 leading companies shared previously unpublished details about their manufacturing processes which we used to create a body of publicly available information about how cultured meat is produced and what safety hazards might be introduced along the way.
2018-2019
Cell-Based Seafood
Cellular agriculture can be applied to seafood production to reduce our dependence on commercial fishing, which threatens the health of oceans and marine life.1 Why, then, is seafood so underexplored compared to land-based meat?
Prior to this initiative, no public literature explored marine applications of cellular agriculture. We consolidated all of the technical reasons why seafood is uniquely suited for cell culture into a peer-reviewed paper to advance further research about cell-based seafood.