Senior Adham Ali has always loved food.
“I grew up in an immigrant household, and it was always really hard to connect with my culture in general, especially growing up in the US,” Ali said. “But I was always really drawn to food because food really let me connect with my family, connect with my grandparents. It really transcended the whole language barrier.”
As a child, Ali aspired to be a chef to feed his appreciation for the culinary arts, until he got to high school, where his interest was piqued by science. That’s when Ali learned about cellular agriculture.
“I thought it was the coolest thing ever because it was combining the food thing I really liked with this new science thing I also really liked,” Ali said.
Cellular agriculture is a young but rapidly growing industry, and this fall Tufts became the first school in the world to offer a minor in the discipline.
“[Cellular agriculture] is essentially growing meat from animal cells without needing the animal,” Professor David Kaplan said. “So the idea is to get away from traditional factory farming, livestock farming, and use biotechnology approaches to generate protein-rich foods that we're going to need for the future.”
Kaplan is a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the director of the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture. Now, with this new minor in cellular agriculture, his students will officially be recognized for their work in the field. Ali and senior Olivia Calkins will be the first students to receive the minor upon their graduation this May. However, Calkin discovered cellular agriculture with completely different motivations than Ali: the environment.
“Ever since I was young, I knew I wanted to use my career to help the environment,” Calkins said. “And I thought [cellular agriculture] was just the coolest thing because it combines my interests in engineering for the environment … with my passion for animal welfare. So I guess ever since that, I kind of knew that was exactly what I want to do.”
Together, Ali and Calkins founded the Tufts chapter of the Alt Protein Project, a student group supported by the Good Food Institute with the goals of educating more students about cellular agriculture and connecting them to research opportunities and resources.
“[The Good Food Institute is] just looking to turn universities into catalysts for all protein innovation,” Calkins said.
And a center of protein innovation Tufts has become. Outside the classroom, students can hone their cellular agriculture skills by working for Kaplan’s lab or TUCCA.
Calkins researches insect cell culture with the goal of eventually turning insect cells into a potential food source, while Ali focuses on generating an immune characterization of insect cells to test if they can be grown at a large scale without using the antibiotics that farms treat their animals with to make them grow bigger and keep them healthier in poor conditions.
“This also contributes to antibiotic resistance, which is a very rapidly growing public health crisis,” Ali said. “So in cellular agriculture, one of the main goals is to be able to grow ourselves without antibiotics, to represent a step away from conventional practices.”
Antibiotic use in agriculture contributes to antimicrobial resistance, which poses a threat to human life. The United Nations Environment Programme has estimated that antimicrobial resistant infections could kill up to 10 million people annually by 2050.
Sophomore Sam Goldberg was drawn to studying cellular agriculture from yet another new angle: social impact.
“I was just so drawn to how you could utilize and harness biotechnology for social impact,” Goldberg said. “It's a really cool industry, because it really sits at the intersection point of social impact and innovation. And that’s what I really love about it.”
What also stands out to Goldberg is how unexpectedly multifaceted the field can be.
“I find it to be a really interdisciplinary minor,” they said. “And I think that it reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the field, because of the fact that it really combines entrepreneurship and science, there’s a lot of different ways that you can be involved.”
While students’ research and coursework certainly look excellent on a resume, officially recognizing their efforts with a minor adds critical additional value.
“It really helps to have some kind of credential,” Ali said. “Now on my LinkedIn, I can write biochemistry and cellular agriculture student at Tufts. I think making that distinction really goes a long way … it also really catches people’s eyes.”
The minor has already proved itself to be an asset to students that they’ll use in their future beyond Tufts. Ali is going on to pursue a Ph.D. in bioengineering at Princeton University; he hopes to continue to work on cellular agriculture or in food systems.
Meanwhile, Calkins is hoping to land a job involving food systems or alternative proteins.
For Kaplan, Ali and Calkins’ journeys reflect the outcomes he hopes his lab and TUCCA will produce for students.
“Our goal is to do really good research, and propel educational opportunities for students as the field grows, and the field will grow,” he said. “At the same time we try and build partnerships with industry to understand where their needs are going forward, and also to give our students opportunities for things like internships, co-ops and jobs.”
Kaplan has been heavily involved in researching and teaching about cellular agriculture on campus. Yet, the minor was born of the efforts of neither Kaplan nor undergraduates, but graduate students.
“I want to recognize the Ph.D. students in the group who study [cellular agriculture and] were the driving force on getting new [cellular agriculture] courses initiated here at Tufts,” Kaplan said. “They really pioneered that from their own desire to have more access to these courses.”
The minor could only come to fruition once the coursework existed to back it up.
“[The graduate students] were the ones putting the actual courses together, and helping to teach those courses in the early days,” Kaplan said. “So really, it was driven by the students.”
As the first school to offer the minor, Tufts is taking a step toward what perhaps might be the inevitable future of protein consumption across the globe. Cellular agriculture has the ability to help combat climate change by offering a source of meat that doesn’t use the same quantities of land and water, or create harmful antibiotic resistance like traditional farming methods.
Livestock alone produces 14.5% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. And lab-grown meat may become a necessity — not solely out of a desire to slow global warming, but due to the already-present effects of climate change, as farmlands may become too arid to support livestock or grow their feed as the United States groundwater supply is depleted.
“I think immediately … [lab-grown meat] probably needs to be able to exist alongside existing practices,” Ali said. “But I think the long term goal is that this should be our source of food.”
In the face of urgency, undergraduates are enthusiastically furthering cellular agriculture development to ensure protein remains available for human consumption as our farmland warms and changes.
“I love this topic because students come at it because they care about food equity, animal welfare, human health, population growth [or] sustainability, you know, it doesn’t matter. They all bear on how we’re going to feed the planet in the future,” Kaplan said. “And this is the best way forward that we know of. So I think it's imperative to get things moving as quick as we can.”
