A rendering of a 3D-printed burger.
Imagine it's 2050. You wake up and make breakfast: fluffy scrambled eggs that didn't come from a chicken, but that taste identical to the ones you remember eating as a kid. You would never know that the egg protein on your plate, ovalbumin, was developed in an industrial bioreactor using fungi.
"We have this freedom to operate, freedom to engineer way beyond what we have now with livestock or plants."
For lunch, you head to your kitchen's 3D printer and pop in a cartridge, select your preferred texture and flavor, then stand back while your meal is chemically assembled. Afterward, for dessert, you snack on some chocolate that tastes more delicious than the truffles of the past. That's because these cocoa beans were gene-edited to improve their flavor.
2050 is not a random year –it's when the United Nations estimates that the world population will have ballooned to nearly 10 billion people. That's a staggering number of mouths to feed. So, scientists are already working on ways to make new food products that are unlike anything we consume today, but that could offer new, potentially improved nutritional choices and sustainable options for the masses. To whet your appetite, here are three futuristic types of food that are currently in development around the world:
1) Cellular Agriculture
Researchers at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, a leading R&D organization in Europe, are on the cutting-edge of developing a whole new ecosystem of food with novel ingredients and novel functionality.
In the high-tech world of cellular agriculture, single-cell organisms can be used in contained environments to produce food ingredients that are identical to traditionally sourced ingredients. For example, whey protein can be developed inside a bioreactor that is functionally the same as the kind in cow's milk.
Ditto for eggs without a chicken – so the world will finally know which came first.
The steel tank bioreactors in VTT´s piloting facility are used to grow larger amounts of plant cells or to brew dairy and egg proteins with microbes.
(VTT)
"We take the gene from a chicken genome, and place that in a microbe, and then the microbe can, with those instructions, make exactly the same protein," explains Lauri Reuter, a Senior Specialist at VTT who holds a doctorate in biotechnology. "It will swim in this bioreactor and kick out the protein, and we get this liquid that can be purified. Then you would cook or bake with it, and the food you would eat tastes and looks like food you would eat right now."
But why settle for what chickens can do? With this technology, it's possible, for example, to modify the ovalbumin protein to decrease its allergenicity.
"This is the power of what we can do with modern tools of genetic engineering," says Christopher Landowski,a Research Team Leader of the Protein Production Team. And the innovative potential doesn't stop there.
"We have this freedom to operate, freedom to engineer way beyond what we have now with livestock or plants," Reuter says. Future foods sourced from cells could include meat analogues, sugar substitutes, dairy substitutes, nutritious veggies that don't taste bitter, personalized nutrition – ingredients designed for individual needs; the list goes on. It could even be used one day to produce food on Mars.
The researchers emphasize the advantages of this method: their living cell factories are efficient – no care of complex animals is required; they can scale up or down in reaction to demand; their environments are contained and don't require antibiotics; and they provide an alternative to using animals.
But the researchers also readily admit that the biggest obstacle is consumer acceptance, which is why they seek to engage with people along the way to alleviate any concerns and to educate them about the technology. Novel foods of this sort have already been eaten in research settings, but it may take another three to five years before the egg and milk proteins hit the market, probably first in the United States before Europe.
Eventually, the researchers anticipate widespread adoption.
Emilia Nordlund, who directs the Food Solutions team, predicts, "Cellular agriculture will revolutionize the food industry as dramatically as the Internet revolutionized many other industries."
Jams made of culture cells of various plants: strawberry, scurvy grass, arctic bramble, tobacco, cloudberry and lingonberry.
(VTT/Lauri Reuter)
2) 3D-printed foods
In South Korea, researchers are developing 3D-printed foods to help solve a problem caused by aging. Elderly people often rely on soft foods which are easier to chew, but aren't always healthy, like Jello and pudding.
With 3D printing, foods of softer textures can be created with the same nutritional value as firmer food, via a processing method that breaks down the food into tiny nutrients by grinding it at a very low temperature with liquid nitrogen.
"The goal is that someone at home can print out food with whatever flavor and texture they want."
The micro-sized food materials are then reconstructed in layers to form what looks like a Lego block. "The cartridges are all textures, some soft and some stiff," explains Jin-Kyu Rhee, associate professor at Ewha Womans University, whose project has been funded for the last three years by the South Korean government. "We are developing a library of food textures, so that people can combine them to simulate a real type of food."
Users could then add powdered versions of various ingredients to create customized food. Flavor, of course, is of prime importance too, so the cartridges have flavors like barbecue to help simulate the experience of eating "real" food.
"The goal is that someone at home can print out food with whatever flavor and texture they want," Rhee says. "They can order their own cartridge and digital recipes to generate their own food, ready to cook with a microwave oven." It could also be used for space travel.
Rhee expects the prototype of the printer to be completed by the end of this year and will then seek out a commercial partner. If all goes well, you might be able to set up your 3D printer next to your coffee pot by 2025.
3) CRISPR-edited foods
You may not know that the cocoa plant is having a tough time out there in nature. It's plagued by fungal disease; on farms, about 30 to 40 percent of the potential cocoa beans are lost every year. For all the chocolate lovers of the world, this means less to go around.
Conventional plant breeding is very slow for trees, so researchers like Mark Guiltinan at Penn State University are devising ways to increase the plants' chances for survival – without moving any genes between species, as in genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
"Because society hasn't really embraced [GMOs] very much, we're trying to develop ways that don't use transgenic plants and speed up breeding," Guiltinan says.
He and his colleagues are using CRISPR-cas9, the precise method of editing DNA, to imbue cocoa plants with immunity to fungal disease.
How does it work? Similar to humans, the plants have an immune system. Part of it functions like brakes, repressing the whole system so it's only working when it needs to.
"Like when you get a fever, your immune system is working full blast, but your body shuts it down when it doesn't need it," he explains. "Plants do exactly the same thing. One idea is if we can reduce or eliminate that brake on the immune system, we could make plants that have a very high immunity."
A CRISPR-edited npr3 mutant cacao plantlet, not too much to see yet, but soon it will become a happy plant in the greenhouse.
(Photo credit: Mark Guiltinan)
The CRISPR-cas9 system allows "a really amazing little protein" to go into the cocoa plant cell, find a specific gene, and shut it off to put the whole immune system into overdrive. This confers the necessary immunity, and though the plant burns through a lot of energy, as if it has a fever all the time, this method would allow for more plants to fend off the fungal attacks every year. Which means more chocolate. It could also greatly reduce the need for pesticides.
"Replacing chemicals with genetics is one part of our goal," Guiltinan says. "And it's totally safe." Another goal of his project is to improve the cocoa beans' quality and flavor profile through gene editing.
Yum. Is your mouth watering yet?
Some researchers argue that active, playful engagement with a "robot nanny" for a few hours a day is better than several hours in front of a TV or with an iPad.
A 2017 study led by Google executive James Manyika suggested that skills like creativity, emotional intelligence, and communication will always be needed in the classroom and that robots aren’t likely to provide them at the same level that humans naturally do. But robot teachers do bring advantages, such as a depth of subject knowledge that teachers can’t match, and they’re great for student engagement.
The teacher and robot can complement each other in new ways, with the teacher facilitating interactions between robots and students. So far, this is the case with teaching “assistants” being adopted now in China, Japan, the U.S., and Europe. In this scenario, the robot (usually the SoftBank child-size robot NAO) is a tool for teaching mainly science, technology, engineering, and math (the STEM subjects), but the teacher is very involved in planning, overseeing, and evaluating progress. The students get an entertaining and enriched learning experience, and some of the teaching load is taken off the teacher. At least, that’s what researchers have been able to observe so far.
To be sure, there are some powerful arguments for having robots in the classroom. A not-to-be-underestimated one is that robots “speak the language” of today’s children, who have been steeped in technology since birth. These children are adept at navigating a media-rich environment that is highly visual and interactive. They are plugged into the Internet 24-7. They consume music, games, and huge numbers of videos on a weekly basis. They expect to be dazzled because they are used to being dazzled by more and more spectacular displays of digital artistry. Education has to compete with social media and the entertainment vehicles of students’ everyday lives.
Another compelling argument for teaching robots is that they help prepare students for the technological realities they will encounter in the real world when robots will be ubiquitous. From childhood on, they will be interacting and collaborating with robots in every sphere of their lives from the jobs they do to dealing with retail robots and helper robots in the home. Including robots in the classroom is one way of making sure that children of all socioeconomic backgrounds will be better prepared for a highly automated age, when successfully using robots will be as essential as reading and writing. We’ve already crossed this threshold with computers and smartphones.
Students need multimedia entertainment with their teaching. This is something robots can provide through their ability to connect to the Internet and act as a centralized host to videos, music, and games. Children also need interaction, something robots can deliver up to a point, but which humans can surpass. The education of a child is not just intended to make them technologically functional in a wired world, it’s to help them grow in intellectual, creative, social, and emotional ways. When considered through this perspective, it opens the door to questions concerning just how far robots should go. Robots don’t just teach and engage children; they’re designed to tug at their heartstrings.
It’s no coincidence that many toy makers and manufacturers are designing cute robots that look and behave like real children or animals, says Turkle. “When they make eye contact and gesture toward us, they predispose us to view them as thinking and caring,” she has written in The Washington Post. “They are designed to be cute, to provide a nurturing response” from the child. As mentioned previously, this nurturing experience is a powerful vehicle for drawing children in and promoting strong attachment. But should children really love their robots?
ROBOTS AND THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEM: Holding on to Our Humanity in an Age of Social Robots by Eve Herold (January 9, 2024).
St. Martin’s Publishing Group
The problem, once again, is that a child can be lulled into thinking that she’s in an actual relationship, when a robot can’t possibly love her back. If adults have these vulnerabilities, what might such asymmetrical relationships do to the emotional development of a small child? Turkle notes that while we tend to ascribe a mind and emotions to a socially interactive robot, “simulated thinking may be thinking, but simulated feeling is never feeling, and simulated love is never love.”
Always a consideration is the fact that in the first few years of life, a child’s brain is undergoing rapid growth and development that will form the foundation of their lifelong emotional health. These formative experiences are literally shaping the child’s brain, their expectations, and their view of the world and their place in it. In Alone Together, Turkle asks: What are we saying to children about their importance to us when we’re willing to outsource their care to a robot? A child might be superficially entertained by the robot while his self-esteem is systematically undermined.
Research has emerged showing that there are clear downsides to child-robot relationships.
Still, in the case of robot nannies in the home, is active, playful engagement with a robot for a few hours a day any more harmful than several hours in front of a TV or with an iPad? Some, like Xiong, regard interacting with a robot as better than mere passive entertainment. iPal’s manufacturers say that their robot can’t replace parents or teachers and is best used by three- to eight-year-olds after school, while they wait for their parents to get off work. But as robots become ever-more sophisticated, they’re expected to perform more of the tasks of day-to-day care and to be much more emotionally advanced. There is no question children will form deep attachments to some of them. And research has emerged showing that there are clear downsides to child-robot relationships.
Some studies, performed by Turkle and fellow MIT colleague Cynthia Breazeal, have revealed a darker side to the child-robot bond. Turkle has reported extensively on these studies in The Washington Post and in her book Alone Together. Most children love robots, but some act out their inner bully on the hapless machines, hitting and kicking them and otherwise trying to hurt them. The trouble is that the robot can’t fight back, teaching children that they can bully and abuse without consequences. As in any other robot relationship, such harmful behavior could carry over into the child’s human relationships.
And, ironically, it turns out that communicative machines don’t actually teach kids good communication skills. It’s well known that parent-child communication in the first three years of life sets the stage for a very young child’s intellectual and academic success. Verbal back-and-forth with parents and care-givers is like fuel for a child’s growing brain. One article that examined several types of play and their effect on children’s communication skills, published in JAMA Pediatrics in 2015, showed that babies who played with electronic toys—like the popular robot dog Aibo—show a decrease in both the quantity and quality of their language skills.
Anna V. Sosa of the Child Speech and Language Lab at Northern Arizona University studied twenty-six ten- to sixteen- month-old infants to compare the growth of their language skills after they played with three types of toys: electronic toys like a baby laptop and talking farm; traditional toys like wooden puzzles and building blocks; and books read aloud by their parents. The play that produced the most growth in verbal ability was having books read to them by a caregiver, followed by play with traditional toys. Language gains after playing with electronic toys came dead last. This form of play involved the least use of adult words, the least conversational turntaking, and the least verbalizations from the children. While the study sample was small, it’s not hard to extrapolate that no electronic toy or even more abled robot could supply the intimate responsiveness of a parent reading stories to a child, explaining new words, answering the child’s questions, and modeling the kind of back- and-forth interaction that promotes empathy and reciprocity in relationships.
***
Most experts acknowledge that robots can be valuable educational tools. But they can’t make a child feel truly loved, validated, and valued. That’s the job of parents, and when parents abdicate this responsibility, it’s not only the child who misses out on one of life’s most profound experiences.
We really don’t know how the tech-savvy children of today will ultimately process their attachments to robots and whether they will be excessively predisposed to choosing robot companionship over that of humans. It’s possible their techno literacy will draw for them a bold line between real life and a quasi-imaginary history with a robot. But it will be decades before we see long-term studies culminating in sufficient data to help scientists, and the rest of us, to parse out the effects of a lifetime spent with robots.
This is an excerpt from ROBOTS AND THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEM: Holding on to Our Humanity in an Age of Social Robots by Eve Herold. The book will be published on January 9, 2024.
Stem cells from a fetus can travel to the heart and regenerate the muscle, essentially saving a mother’s life.
If there is a silver lining to peripartum cardiomyopathy, it’s that it is perhaps the most survivable form of heart failure. A remarkable 50% of women recover spontaneously. And there’s an even more remarkable explanation for that glowing statistic: The fetus‘ stem cells migrate to the heart and regenerate the beleaguered muscle. In essence, the developing or recently born child saves its mother’s life.
Saving mama
While this process has not been observed directly in humans, it has been witnessed in mice. In a 2015 study, researchers tracked stem cells from fetal mice as they traveled to mothers’ damaged cardiac cells and integrated themselves into hearts.
Evolutionarily, this function makes sense: It is in the fetus’ best interest that its mother remains healthy.
Scientists also have spotted cells from the fetus within the hearts of human mothers, as well as countless other places inside the body, including the skin, spleen, liver, brain, lung, kidney, thyroid, lymph nodes, salivary glands, gallbladder, and intestine. These cells essentially get everywhere. While most are eliminated by the immune system during pregnancy, some can persist for an incredibly long time — up to three decades after childbirth.
This integration of the fetus’ cells into the mother’s body has been given a name: fetal microchimerism. The process appears to start between the fourth and sixth week of gestation in humans. Scientists are actively trying to suss out its purpose. Fetal stem cells, which can differentiate into all sorts of specialized cells, appear to target areas of injury. So their role in healing seems apparent. Evolutionarily, this function makes sense: It is in the fetus’ best interest that its mother remains healthy.
Sending cells into the mother’s body may also prime her immune system to grow more tolerant of the developing fetus. Successful pregnancy requires that the immune system not see the fetus as an interloper and thus dispatch cells to attack it.
Fetal microchimerism
But fetal microchimerism might not be entirely beneficial. Greater concentrations of the cells have been associated with various autoimmune diseases such as lupus, Sjogren’s syndrome, and even multiple sclerosis. After all, they are foreign cells living in the mother’s body, so it’s possible that they might trigger subtle, yet constant inflammation. Fetal cells also have been linked to cancer, although it isn’t clear whether they abet or hinder the disease.
A team of Spanish scientists summarized the apparent give and take of fetal microchimerism in a 2022 review article. “On the one hand, fetal microchimerism could be a source of progenitor cells with a beneficial effect on the mother’s health by intervening in tissue repair, angiogenesis, or neurogenesis. On the other hand, fetal microchimerism might have a detrimental function by activating the immune response and contributing to autoimmune diseases,” they wrote.
Regardless of a fetus’ cells net effect, their existence alone is intriguing. In a paper published earlier this year, University of London biologist Francisco Úbeda and University of Western Ontario mathematical biologist Geoff Wild noted that these cells might very well persist within mothers for life.
“Therefore, throughout their reproductive lives, mothers accumulate fetal cells from each of their past pregnancies including those resulting in miscarriages. Furthermore, mothers inherit, from their own mothers, a pool of cells contributed by all fetuses carried by their mothers, often referred to as grandmaternal microchimerism.”
So every mother may carry within her literal pieces of her ancestors.
