Technology’s Role in Feeding a Soaring Population Raises This Dilemma
When farmer Terry Wanzek walks out in his fields, he sometimes sees a grove of trees, which reminds him of his grandfather, who planted those trees. Or he looks out over the pond, which deer, ducks and pheasant use for water, and he knows that his grandfather made a decision to drain land and put the pond in that exact spot.
Growing more with fewer resources is becoming increasingly urgent as the Earth's population is expected to hit 9.1 billion by 2050.
"There is a connection that goes beyond running a business and making a profit," says Wanzek, a fourth-generation North Dakota farmer who raises spring wheat, corn, soybeans, barley, dry edible beans and sunflowers. "There is a connection to family, to your ancestors and there is a connection to your posterity and your kids."
Wanzek's corn and soybeans are genetically modified (GM) crops, which means that they have been altered at the DNA level to create desirable traits. This intervention, he says, allows him to start growing earlier and to produce more food per acre.
Growing more with fewer resources is becoming increasingly urgent as the Earth's population is expected to hit 9.1 billion by 2050, with nearly all of the rise coming from developing countries, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. This population will be urban, which means they'll likely be eating fewer grains and other staple crops, and more vegetables, fruits, meat, dairy, and fish.
Whether those foods will be touched in some way by technology remains a high-stakes question. As for GM foods, the American public is somewhat skeptical: in a recent survey, about one-third of Americans report that they are actively avoiding GMOs or seek out non-GMO labels when shopping and purchasing foods. These consumers fear unsafe food and don't want biotechnologists to tamper with nature. This disconnect—between those who consume food and those who produce it—is only set to intensify as major agricultural companies work to develop further high-tech farming solutions to meet the needs of the growing population.
"I don't think we have a choice going forward. The world isn't getting smaller. We have to come up with a means of using less."
In the future, it may be possible to feed the world. But what if the world doesn't want the food?
A Short History
Genetically modified food is not new. The first such plant (the Flavr Savr tomato) was approved for human consumption and brought to market in 1994, but people didn't like the taste. Today, nine genetically modified food crops are commercially available in the United States (corn, soybean, squash, papaya, alfalfa, sugar beets, canola, potato and apples). Most were modified to increase resistance to disease or pests, or tolerance to a specific herbicide. Such crops have in fact been found to increase yields, with a recent study showing grain yield was up to 24.5 percent higher in genetically engineered corn.
Despite some consumer skepticism, many farmers don't have a problem with GM crops, says Jennie Schmidt, a farmer and registered dietician in Maryland. She says with a laugh that her farm is a "grocery store farm - we grow the ingredients you buy in products at the grocery store." Schmidt's father-in-law, who started the farm, watched the adoption of hybrid corn improve seeds in the 1930s and 1940s.
"It wasn't a difficult leap to see how well these hybrid corn seeds have done over the decades," she says. "So when the GMOs came out, it was a quicker adoption curve, because as farmers they had already been exposed to the first generation and this was just the next step."
Schmidt, for one, is excited about the gene-editing tool CRISPR and other ways biotechnologists can create food like apples or potatoes with a particular enzyme turned off so they don't go brown during oxidation. Other foods in the pipeline include disease-resistant citrus, low-gluten wheat, fungus-resistant bananas, and anti-browning mushrooms.
"We need to not judge our agriculture by yield per acre but nutrition per acre."
"I don't think we have a choice going forward," says Schmidt. "The world isn't getting smaller. We have to come up with a means of using less."
A Different Way Forward?
But others remain convinced that there are better ways to feed the planet. Andrew Kimball, executive director of the Center for Food Safety, a non-profit that promotes organic and sustainable agriculture, says the public has been sold a lie with biotech. "GMO technology is not proven as a food producer," he says. "It's just not being done anywhere at a large scale. Ninety-nine percent of GMOs are corn and soy, and they allow chemical companies to sell more chemicals. But that doesn't increase food or decrease hunger." Instead, Kimball advocates for a pivot from commodity agriculture to farms with crop diversity and animals.
Kimball also suggests a way to use land more appropriately: stop growing so much biofuel. Right now, in the U.S., more than 55 percent of our crop farmland is in corn and soy. About 40 percent of that goes into cars through ethanol, 40 percent is fed to animals and a good bit of the rest goes into high-fructose corn syrup. That leaves only a small amount to feed people, says Kimball. "If you want to feed the world, not just the U.S., you want to make sure to use that land to feed people," he says. "We need to not judge our agriculture by yield per acre but nutrition per acre."
Robert Streiffer, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, agrees that GMOs haven't really helped alleviate hunger. Glyphosate resistance, one of the traits that is most commonly used in genetically engineered crops, doesn't improve yield or allow crops to be grown in areas where they weren't able to be grown before. "Insect resistance through the insertion of a Bt gene can improve yield, but is mostly used for cotton (which is not a food crop) and corn which goes to feed cattle, a very inefficient method of feeding the hungry, to say the least," he says. Important research is being done in crops such as cassava, which could help relieve global hunger. But in his opinion, these researchers lack the profit potential needed to motivate large private funding sources, so they require more public-sector funding.
"A substantial portion of public opposition is as much about the lack of any perceived benefits for the consumers as it is for outright fear of health or environmental dangers."
"Public opposition to biotech foods is certainly a factor, but I expect this will slowly decline as labels indicating the presence of GE (genetically engineered) ingredients become more common, and as we continue to amass reassuring data on the comparative environmental safety of GE crops," says Streiffer. "A substantial portion of public opposition is as much about the lack of any perceived benefits for the consumers as it is for outright fear of health or environmental dangers."
One sign that the public may be willing to embrace some non-natural foods is the recent interest in cultured meat, which is grown in a lab from animal cells but doesn't require raising or killing animals. A study published last year in PLOS One found that 65 percent of 673 surveyed U.S. individuals would probably or definitely try cultured meat, while only 8.5 percent said they definitely would not. In the future, lab-grown food may become another way to create more food with fewer resources.
Danielle Nierenberg, president of the Food Tank, a nonprofit organization focused on building a global community of safe and healthy food, points to an even more immediate problem: food waste. Globally, about a third of food is thrown out or goes bad before it has a chance to be eaten. She says simply fixing roads and infrastructure in developing countries would go a long way toward ensuring that food reaches the hungry. Focusing on helping small farmers (who grow 70 percent of food around the globe), especially female farmers, would go a long way, she says.
Innovation on the Farm
In addition to good roads, those farmers need fertilizer. Nitrogen-based fertilizers may get a boost in the future from technologies that release nutrients slowly over time, like slow-release medicines based on nanotechnology. In field trials on rice in Sri Lanka, one such nanotech fertilizer increased crop yields by 10 percent, even though it delivered only half the amount of urea compared with traditional fertilizer, according to a study last year.
"I'm not afraid of the food I grow. We live in the same environment, and I feel completely safe."
One startup, the San-Francisco-based Biome Makers, is profiling microbial DNA to give farmers an idea of what their soil needs to better support crops. Joyn Bio, another new startup based in Boston and West Sacramento, is looking to engineer microbes that could reduce farming's reliance on nitrogen fertilizer, which is expensive and harms the environment. (Full disclosure: Joyn Bio and this magazine are funded by the same company, Leaps by Bayer, though leapsmag is editorially independent. Also, Bayer recently acquired Monsanto, the leading producer of genetically engineered seeds and the herbicide Roundup.)
Terry Wanzek, the farmer in North Dakota, says he'd be willing to try any new technology as long as it helps his bottom line – and increases sustainability. "I'm not afraid of the food I grow," he says of his genetically modified produce. "We eat the same food, we live in the same environment, and I feel completely safe."
Only time will tell if people several decades from now feel the same way. But no matter how their food is produced, one thing is certain: those people will need to eat.
A company uses AI to fight muscle loss and unhealthy aging
In December 2022, a company called BioAge Labs published findings on a drug that worked to prevent muscular atrophy, or the loss of muscle strength and mass, in older people.
There’s a growing need to slow down the aging process. The world’s population is getting older and, according to one estimate, 80 million Americans will be 65 or older by 2040. As we age, the risk of many chronic diseases goes up, from cancer to heart disease to Alzheimer’s.
BioAge Labs, a company based in California, is using genetic data to help people stay healthy for longer. CEO Kristen Fortney was inspired by the genetics of people who live long lives and resist many age-related diseases. In 2015, she started BioAge to study them and develop drug therapies based on the company’s learnings.
The team works with special biobanks that have been collecting blood samples and health data from individuals for up to 45 years. Using artificial intelligence, BioAge is able to find the distinctive molecular features that distinguish those who have healthy longevity from those who don’t.
In December 2022, BioAge published findings on a drug that worked to prevent muscular atrophy, or the loss of muscle strength and mass, in older people. Much of the research on aging has been in worms and mice, but BioAge is focused on human data, Fortney says. “This boosts our chances of developing drugs that will be safe and effective in human patients.”
How it works
With assistance from AI, BioAge measures more than 100,000 molecules in each blood sample, looking at proteins, RNA and metabolites, or small molecules that are produced through chemical processes. The company uses many techniques to identify these molecules, some of which convert the molecules into charged atoms and then separating them according to their weight and charge. The resulting data is very complex, with many thousands of data points from patients being followed over the decades.
BioAge validates its targets by examining whether a pathway going awry is actually linked to the development of diseases, based on the company’s analysis of biobank health records and blood samples. The team uses AI and machine learning to identify these pathways, and the key proteins in the unhealthy pathways become their main drug targets. “The approach taken by BioAge is an excellent example of how we can harness the power of big data and advances in AI technology to identify new drugs and therapeutic targets,” says Lorna Harries, a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Exeter Medical School.
Martin Borch Jensen is the founder of Gordian Biotechnology, a company focused on using gene therapy to treat aging. He says BioAge’s use of AI allows them to speed up the process of finding promising drug candidates. However, it remains a challenge to separate pathologies from aspects of the natural aging process that aren’t necessarily bad. “Some of the changes are likely protective responses to things going wrong,” Jensen says. “Their data doesn’t…distinguish that so they’ll need to validate and be clever.”
Developing a drug for muscle loss
BioAge decided to focus on muscular atrophy because it affects many elderly people, making it difficult to perform everyday activities and increasing the risk of falls. Using the biobank samples, the team modeled different pathways that looked like they could improve muscle health. They found that people who had faster walking speeds, better grip strength and lived longer had higher levels of a protein called apelin.
Apelin is a peptide, or a small protein, that circulates in the blood. It is involved in the process by which exercise increases and preserves muscle mass. BioAge wondered if they could prevent muscular atrophy by increasing the amount of signaling in the apelin pathway. Instead of the long process of designing a drug, they decided to repurpose an existing drug made by another biotech company. This company, called Amgen, had explored the drug as a way to treat heart failure. It didn’t end up working for that purpose, but BioAge took note that the drug did seem to activate the apelin pathway.
BioAge tested its new, repurposed drug, BGE-105, and, in a phase 1 clinical trial, it protected subjects from getting muscular atrophy compared to a placebo group that didn’t receive the drug. Healthy volunteers over age 65 received infusions of the drug during 10 days spent in bed, as if they were on bed rest while recovering from an illness or injury; the elderly are especially vulnerable to muscle loss in this situation. The 11 people taking BGE-105 showed a 100 percent improvement in thigh circumference compared to 10 people taking the placebo. Ultrasound observations also revealed that the group taking the durg had enhanced muscle quality and a 73 percent increase in muscle thickness. One volunteer taking BGE-105 did have muscle loss compared to the the placebo group.
Heather Whitson, the director of the Duke University Centre for the study of aging and human development, says that, overall, the results are encouraging. “The clinical findings so far support the premise that AI can help us sort through enormous amounts of data and identify the most promising points for beneficial interventions.”
More studies are needed to find out which patients benefit the most and whether there are side effects. “I think further studies will answer more questions,” Whitson says, noting that BGE-105 was designed to enhance only one aspect of physiology associated with exercise, muscle strength. But exercise itself has many other benefits on mood, sleep, bones and glucose metabolism. “We don’t know whether BGE-105 will impact these other outcomes,” she says.
The future
BioAge is planning phase 2 trials for muscular atrophy in patients with obesity and those who have been hospitalized in an intensive care unit. Using the data from biobanks, they’ve also developed another drug, BGE-100, to treat chronic inflammation in the brain, a condition that can worsen with age and contributes to neurodegenerative diseases. The team is currently testing the drug in animals to assess its effects and find the right dose.
BioAge envisions that its drugs will have broader implications for health than treating any one specific disease. “Ultimately, we hope to pioneer a paradigm shift in healthcare, from treatment to prevention, by targeting the root causes of aging itself,” Fortney says. “We foresee a future where healthy longevity is within reach for all.”
How old fishing nets turn into chairs, car mats and Prada bags
A company called Aquafil is turning the fibers from fishing nets and old carpets into new threads for chairs, car mats, bikinis and Prada bags.
Discarded nylon fishing nets in the oceans are among the most harmful forms of plastic pollution. Every year, about 640,000 tons of fishing gear are left in our oceans and other water bodies to turn into death traps for marine life. London-based non-profit World Animal Protection estimates that entanglement in this “ghost gear” kills at least 136,000 seals, sea lions and large whales every year. Experts are challenged to estimate how many birds, turtles, fish and other species meet the same fate because the numbers are so high.
Since 2009, Giulio Bonazzi, the son of a small textile producer in northern Italy, has been working on a solution: an efficient recycling process for nylon. As CEO and chairman of a company called Aquafil, Bonazzi is turning the fibers from fishing nets – and old carpets – into new threads for car mats, Adidas bikinis, environmentally friendly carpets and Prada bags.
For Bonazzi, shifting to recycled nylon was a question of survival for the family business. His parents founded a textile company in 1959 in a garage in Verona, Italy. Fifteen years later, they started Aquafil to produce nylon for making raincoats, an enterprise that led to factories on three continents. But before the turn of the century, cheap products from Asia flooded the market and destroyed Europe’s textile production. When Bonazzi had finished his business studies and prepared to take over the family company, he wondered how he could produce nylon, which is usually produced from petrochemicals, in a way that was both successful and ecologically sustainable.
The question led him on an intellectual journey as he read influential books by activists such as world-renowned marine biologist Sylvia Earle and got to know Michael Braungart, who helped develop the Cradle-to-Cradle ethos of a circular economy. But the challenges of applying these ideologies to his family business were steep. Although fishing nets have become a mainstay of environmental fashion ads—and giants like Dupont and BASF have made breakthroughs in recycling nylon—no one had been able to scale up these efforts.
For ten years, Bonazzi tinkered with ideas for a proprietary recycling process. “It’s incredibly difficult because these products are not made to be recycled,” Bonazzi says. One complication is the variety of materials used in older carpets. “They are made to be beautiful, to last, to be useful. We vastly underestimated the difficulty when we started.”
Soon it became clear to Bonazzi that he needed to change the entire production process. He found a way to disintegrate old fibers with heat and pull new strings from the discarded fishing nets and carpets. In 2022, his company Aquafil produced more than 45,000 tons of Econyl, which is 100% recycled nylon, from discarded waste.
More than half of Aquafil’s recyclate is from used goods. According to the company, the recycling saves 90 percent of the CO2 emissions compared to the production of conventional nylon. That amounts to saving 57,100 tons of CO2 equivalents for every 10,000 tons of Econyl produced.
Bonazzi collects fishing nets from all over the world, including Norway and Chile—which have the world’s largest salmon productions—in addition to the Mediterranean, Turkey, India, Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, Pakistan, and New Zealand. He counts the government leadership of Seychelles as his most recent client; the island has prohibited ships from throwing away their fishing nets, creating the demand for a reliable recycler. With nearly 3,000 employees, Aquafil operates almost 40 collection and production sites in a dozen countries, including four collection sites for old carpets in the U.S., located in California and Arizona.
First, the dirty nets are gathered, washed and dried. Bonazzi explains that nets often have been treated with antifouling agents such as copper oxide. “We recycle the coating separately,” he says via Zoom from his home near Verona. “Copper oxide is a useful substance, why throw it away?”
Still, only a small percentage of Aquafil’s products are made from nets fished out of the ocean, so your new bikini may not have saved a strangled baby dolphin. “Generally, nylon recycling is a good idea,” says Christian Schiller, the CEO of Cirplus, the largest global marketplace for recyclates and plastic waste. “But contrary to what consumers think, people rarely go out to the ocean to collect ghost nets. Most are old, discarded nets collected on land. There’s nothing wrong with this, but I find it a tad misleading to label the final products as made from ‘ocean plastic,’ prompting consumers to think they’re helping to clean the oceans by buying these products.”
Aquafil gets most of its nets from aqua farms. Surprisingly, one of Aquafil’s biggest problems is finding enough waste. “I know, it’s hard to believe because waste is everywhere,” Bonazzi says. “But we need to find it in reliable quantity and quality.” He has invested millions in establishing reliable logistics to source the fishing nets. Then the nets get shredded into granules that can be turned into car mats for the new Hyundai Ioniq 5 or a Gucci swimsuit.
The process works similarly with carpets. In the U.S. alone, 3.5 billion pounds of carpet are discarded in landfills every year, and less than 3 percent are currently recycled. Aquafil has built a recycling plant in Phoenix to help divert 12,500 tons of carpets from the landfill every year. The carpets are shredded and deconstructed into three components: fillers such as calcium carbonate will be reused in the cement industry, synthetic fibers like polypropylene can be used for engineering plastics, and nylon. Only the pelletized nylon gets shipped back to Europe for the production of Econyl. “We ship only what’s necessary,” Bonazzi says. Nearly 50 percent of his nylon in Italy and Slovenia is produced from recyclate, and he hopes to increase the percentage to two-thirds in the next two years.
His clients include Interface, the leading world pioneer for sustainable flooring, and many other carpet producers plus more than 2500 fashion labels, including Gucci, Prada, Patagonia, Louis Vuitton, Adidas and Stella McCartney. “Stella McCartney just introduced a parka that’s made 100 percent from Econyl,” Bonazzi says. “We’re also in a lot of sportswear because Nylon is a good fabric for swimwear and for yoga clothes.” Next, he’s looking into sunglasses and chairs made with Econyl - for instance, the flexible ergonomic noho chair, designed by New Zealand company Formway.
“When I look at a landfill, I see a gold mine," Bonazzi says.
“Bonazzi decided many years ago to invest in the production of recycled nylon though industry giants halted similar plans after losing large investments,” says Anika Herrmann, vice president of the German Greentech-competitor Camm Solutions, which creates bio-based polymers from cane sugar and other ag waste. “We need role models like Bonazzi who create sustainable solutions with courage and a pioneering spirit. Like Aquafil, we count on strategic partnerships to enable fast upscaling along the entire production chain.”
Bonazzi’s recycled nylon is still five to 10 percent more expensive than conventionally produced material. However, brands are increasingly bending to the pressure of eco-conscious consumers who demand sustainable fashion. What helped Bonazzi was the recent rise of oil prices and the pressure on industries to reduce their carbon footprint. Now Bonazzi says, “When I look at a landfill, I see a gold mine.”
Ideally, the manufacturers take the products back when the client is done with it, and because the nylon can theoretically be reused nearly infinitely, the chair or bikini could be made into another chair or bikini. “But honestly,” Bonazzi half-jokes, “if someone returns a McCartney parka to me, I’ll just resell it because it’s so expensive.”
The next step: Bonazzi wants to reshape the entire nylon industry by pivoting from post-consumer nylon to plant-based nylon. In 2017, he began producing “nylon-6,” together with Genomatica in San Diego. The process uses sugar instead of petroleum. “The idea is to make the very same molecule from sugar, not from oil,” he says. The demonstration plant in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has already produced several hundred tons of nylon, and Genomatica is collaborating with Lululemon to produce plant-based yoga wear.
Bonazzi acknowledges that his company needs a few more years before the technology is ready to meet his ultimate goal, producing only recyclable products with no petrochemicals, low emissions and zero waste on an industrial scale. “Recycling is not enough,” he says. “You also need to produce the primary material in a sustainable way, with a low carbon footprint.”