Interview with Art Ragauskas

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INDUSTRIAL BIOTECHNOLOGY: How do you envision the future landscape of industrial biotechnology unfolding? How will biobased innovation help drive the global bioeconomy?

ART RAGAUSKAS: One thing that struck me recently is that we are at the point where the old silo research disciplines are almost gone. You do not do organic chemistry, biology, or even modeling anymore. It is more of an integrated effort now. Maybe within this whole integration process some new super-disciplines are developing, as the chemists are working with the plant scientists, and the analytical people are working together, and systems biology is evolving, etc. The effort is more centered around focus areas such as plant cell walls, and less so around the old classical divisions that we all went through university with— it is all evolving into more integrated research centers. You cannot stay in your laboratory and just focus on your own work if you want to have an impact. The multidisciplinary research centers, such as those established by the US Department of Energy (DOE), have really helped to accelerate this effort. A perfect example of this effort is the BioEnergy Science Center (BESC) centered at Oak Ridge National Laboratory involving 17 partners (including Georgia Tech) in a multidisciplinary research program involving biological, chemical, physical, and computational sciences, mathematics, and engineering, all focused on the fundamental understanding and elimination of biomass recalcitrance.

It is clear that along with this comes an enormous generation of data. DOE, along with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and other national labs are leading the way with the new KnowledgeBase (KBase) and strategies for how to use this data across disciplines to accelerate the science. My own contribution in all of this is that certainly in the last decade at least the conversion of biomass to bioenergy and biofuels has accelerated, and from an industry perspective that is a very strong component. But there seems to be more growing interest and resurgence in utilizing bioresources for biobased chemicals, plastics, films, and other materials. Certainly, the consumers seem to be much more sensitive to sustainability issues when it comes to the materials it purchases. It is possible that my sampling is faulty on this topic, but that is what I see.

To produce biobased fuels you need large volumes of biobased resources. This then facilitates the movement to take some fraction of those resources and make them into plastics, films, or foams, for example. I do not see these efforts in competition, I see them leveraging each other. So maybe the question for the industrial biotechnology community is how do we better leverage these efforts. If you look at national funding across the world, governments like to fund a sole mission—like a biofuel or a bioplastic—but I think we can get further faster if we focus on a systems approach such as biorefining. How do we pick apart a plant and garner value from each component? To some extent the people who play in the biotechnology space are ideal to champion this type of vision because they are used to multidisciplinary projects and moving the technology ahead to address evolving markets. They are typically not stove-piped.

Regarding the second part of the question, we have to sing our successes more than we have done in the past. In addition, we have to provide a viable, vibrant vision of where the research and the industry is going. Clearly, we will need public support, consumer support, industrial support, and governmental support. If you cannot provide a clear vision based on past successes, current advances, and what we need in science in the future, then you are not going to get that support. On the other hand, if you have that support—and this is where I think industrial biotechnology as a whole can play such a key role—then people are willing to make strategic investments.

Not focusing on any particular global region, what I have done in introductory talks on biorefining is to go into Google Earth and zoom into places such as Iowa or southern Georgia and show images of the bioresources available for pathway conversion. I can then show places that are highly industrially polluted and ask which of the two processes the participants want to see promulgated into the future. There is never an argument.

IND BIOTECH: What would you describe as the main challenges facing the industrial biotechnology community at present? Do the solutions lie mainly in the area of R&D/technology advances, policy, funding, or greater integration and coordination of effort?

ART RAGAUSKAS: Short-term, I think we are all still suffering from the economic downturn that began in 2008 and limited access to capital markets. I think the cellulosic ethanol industry could have been much further along, if we could have gotten additional investments for pilot-scale and demonstration facilities and full-scale plants. Everyone has suffered from that downturn. Long-term, I worry about the ongoing and sometimes loud arguments in the news about some failures in green technologies, and I worry that this will impact future students coming into the field. That is why I believe it is important that we deliver a coherent, viable message about where the industry is going as a whole. Ultimately you need gifted researchers, teachers, and entrepreneurs, who have completed their studies and are prepared to go out and make it work. In the long term it is always the people that matter. Over the last couple of years there have been some green energy failures and those have been politicized. How does that impact someone in the third or fourth year of their studies who now has to make a strategic decision about where they are going to go for their career.

Governments are struggling with budget problems that may slow down some fundamental advances down the road, but those are bumps, short-term issues. After our former President, for example, came out and said that our country was addicted to oil, I had a flood of students that wanted to do graduate studies with me. That has remained the same, but I still worry about it.

In terms of the solutions, sometimes the R&D is there, but it is “process awkward,” and as a result of it being awkward implementation is costly. When I go to conferences and hear about the state-of-the-art, some of it is just so exciting. When I hear that in 5 years we may be able to transfer biomass to biofuels using transgenic plants that have reduced recalcitrance, which may have co-products that can be extracted or residues that you can use after you deconstruct the sugars, and that with reduced recalcitrance we might be able to use a consolidated processing technology to convert the biomass to ethanol, those promises are strong and compelling. On the other hand, today you have to do an extensive pretreatment, you might have to tweak the amount of cellulase you have to use and then do a separation and a fermentation; that is expensive. If you look at where the field is going, where the horizon is—which is moving all the time—we are just at the turning point of an incredible revolution.

We have had almost 10 years of investment in biorefining. It takes a long time to change a system that is as complex as what is established in North America or Europe. The fundamental research that started 5 or 6 years ago has now become routine. Even in my own group, things we were challenged to do and that I was not even sure we would be able to do 5 years ago are now routine analytical tools and are accelerating everything we do today. There are things people proposed that were difficult to believe would even work. Now we know we can have lower recalcitrance, how productive these plants will be in the field, and how we can grow them. Some of the visions that were there 5 or 10 years ago are now real and it is becoming a question of implementation.

IND BIOTECH: What would you identify as the greatest positive change in the industrial biotechnology community or overall research environment since you began your career? The biggest negative change?

ART RAGAUSKAS: This is a bit of a self-centered comment, but to me it has been the acceptance of biorefining, which is a very broad technology. Take forests, for example, and the idea now that we can make something besides lumber and paper. That can extend to the “easy” technologies: we can make pellets for biopower; look at the bark for extractives that can be used for food additives, or dissect leaves for new drug breakthroughs; extract the polysaccharides from wood for a variety of applications; use cellulosics for ethanol production; and shortly down the road, utilize lignin for carbon fibers. From my perspective, that has redefined my research group. You would not even be talking to me if that was not of interest. It has redefined the chemistry we do, the biology we study with, our working partnerships, and certainly what my students do and where they go after they leave Georgia Tech.

Rather than describing a “negative” change, I would express a concern, and that is that we might have promised too much too fast. There are people that really did expect we would all be driving E85 cars by now. I remember seeing a study about how long it took to get catalytic converters into cars, which was a clean-cut implementation technology. Given the fact that the rolling stock of cars does not turn over quickly, it can take quite a while for technology to go from 0% to 50% implementation, especially for things that are capital-intensive. So I think people expected things to happen too quickly.

At the same time there are beautiful examples of people achieving some great successes. There are good stories to be told, such as Walmart's sustainability efforts and Coca-Cola's PlantBottle™. My disappointment is that we tend to focus more on the failures than on the successes. In Georgia much is talked about the closure of the Range Fuels effort in South Georgia. But people forget that the Range Fuels facility in Soperton was bought by LanzaTech and continues to be developed. There will be failures en route in biotechnology, but you have to have a balanced perspective and get the message out about the industry's successes.

IND BIOTECH: What are your main research and career interests at present? What are you most passionate about?

ART RAGAUSKAS: I can summarize my research focus in one word: biorefining. I started my career working on the utilization of woody biomass and pulp and paper, and my group still does some of that. But we are now very interested in the use of woody biomass for biobased fuels such as ethanol, green diesel, and green gasoline; looking at utilization of nanobiocomposites; and developing biobased films, foams, barrier properties, plastics, and chemicals. In my group, we typically use a mixture of chemistry and biotechnology. We try to rely as much as we can on enzymes to do much of the heavy lifting and then use old-fashioned chemistry when its amenable.

We have a mix in our group of chemists, biochemists, and a little bit of modeling expertise. We lean more on basic research than applied science, and we partner with as many people as we can. While we are not plant scientists, we are very good at telling what the plant cell wall looks like and what we would like it to look like. I do not do genetics research, but I can tell people what types of enzymes we can use and would benefit our research in the future.

I would have to say that I am most passionate about translational research. What really gets us excited is great fundamental research that you can see have an impact on real life.

IND BIOTECH: How do you see your role in championing industrial biotechnology?

ART RAGAUSKAS: Certainly there is an educational component, and my participation in Industrial Biotechnology helps accomplish that; it is an important role. Championing industrial biotechnology also involves educating students, recruiting new students, and involvement in a variety of technology platforms, from professional journals to audiovisual, conference presentations, and development and maintenance of our group's active website. In the last decade I have done a lot of consulting to help people take fundamental knowledge and make the transition to commercial product and process development.

The only thing my group has not done is to start a small business. I want to do that and I have talked to people about starting the process; it is just a matter of juggling all the balls. That will be the next step in my career pathway, and will likely focus on some aspect of biobased materials.