Industrial Biotechnology: IB likes to share with our readers the human side of innovation and innovators. Can you share with a little bit about how you career unfolded, having grown up in Israel?
ASAF TZACHOR: In several critical respects Israel is a frontier state, if I may borrow from Turner's thesis. The country is defined to a large degree by its geography and boundaries. More than half the land area is desert, and the taming of nature and conquest of the desert have shaped a culture of innovation. The controversies surrounding its borders and contentions on the movement of the frontier line have likewise left an imprint on the social attitude and local practice of democracy. Together, they inspired a Hutzpah mindset of risk-taking and pioneering on an unproportional scale, considering the country's tight land area; Israel is about 33 times smaller than Texas, with water technology, agricultural technology, food technology, and cyber technology becoming world leading activities.
Born and bred in Israel, a collective frontier mentality left a mark on me as well, and my career choices, all organized in the overlap of environmental sciences, clean-tech and agri-tech, environmental justice, and human and physical geography related disasters, discomforts and disenfranchisements, have been inspired and informed by the Israeli ecological and cultural landscape.
IB: Your Institute at the University of Cambridge in the UK has a rather unusual name: The Center for the Study of Existential Risk. What is the mission of the Institute, and what unique innovative angles are being pursued by you or your Institute related to industrial (including agricultural) biotechnology?
TZACHOR: CSER, our often-used acronym, is an interdisciplinary research center within the University of Cambridge. In CSER, we study severe and potentially global catastrophic risks, develop collaborative strategies to reduce them, and foster a global community of academics, technologies and policymakers working to safeguard humanity. Our research focuses on biological risks, environmental risks, risks from artificial intelligence, and how to manage radical technological risk in general.
We employ a broad set of methods, including foresight, scenario planning, system analysis, sustainability analysis, techno-environmental and techno-economic analysis, and risk assessments, across our research domains.
At the intersection of biotechnology, agtech, digital agriculture and industry-relevant research, we explore future foods and future foods production technologies (such as advanced photobioreactors); we assess barriers to the actualization of AI in agriculture and how to remove them, in developing and developed countries; we identify emerging topics in digital agriculture; and we explore AI and machine learning applications across agricultural supply chains to mitigate environmental, economic and operational risks.
IB: Your focus is on food security. Are there any recent advances in biobased data science or biotechnologies that you see as exciting to help achieve the Center's mission or on food security in particular? For example, are CRISPR-based technologies or analytical and interpretive platforms using machine learning or other tools from data science seen as critical to extract new insights and connections (such as with genomics and the microbiome) to assist food ingredient companies, or farmers or policy-makers etc. in decision-making?
TZACHOR: There is a broad basket of advanced technologies that, if weighed together and integrated, present attractive options to mitigate some of the most imminent threats to global food security.
For instance, machine learning techniques, such as artificial neural networks and support vector machines, coupled with sensor technology and genomic and proteomics research, stand to advance plant phenotyping, plant trait discovery, and improve plant breeding for productivity.
These applications should be instrumental in mitigating biotic and abiotic risks to crops at the primary production phase. This is an area of research that stands to improve farming everywhere.
IB: Are you concerned with consumer acceptance of new products or solutions, and is there a methodology in hand to help generate adoption?
TZACHOR: Future foods, a category of novel and nutritionally-rich items such as micro-algae, macro-algae mycoproteins and insects, cultivated and harvested for food and feed purposes, can be processed into highly potent biomass (concentrates). A future foods concentrate, in the form of paste or powder, can be blended into the mix with other ingredients, thereby enriching food stuff while circumventing any consumer preference barriers.
So, no, I'm not concerned. We should also remember that different population groups consume insects frequently. In Sub Saharan Africa, caterpillars are quite popular and in Thailand, crickets are a common dietary option. And we all feast on algae, Nori, and Kelp, when we eat sushi.
IB: What policy opportunities and challenges are unfolding that influence your institute's direction or ability to innovate for the global bioeconomy?
TZACHOR: Leveraging our unique methods and perspectives, we are strategically positioned to advise governments and collaborate with leading global institutions. We travel quite often to engage with local partners aiming to be a bridge of sorts between science and policy. Of my own collaborations, I can name the Governments of Germany, Finland, Singapore, and the United Kingdom, the World Economic Forum, UN Environment, United Nations Development Programme, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Bank, and CGIAR, a global partnership that unites international organizations engaged in research about food security.
IB: Life cycle assessment (LCA) has been important to assess the sustainability of innovations that we make to complex biobased industrial systems. Has the approach to, or design of, LCA seen any evolution in recent years, for example in light of extreme developments in climate change, or the virus pandemic?
TZACHOR: We don't employ LCA in my projects. I would imagine big data analytics in combination with other techniques such as remote sensing could potentially improve LCAs.
IB: Can you discuss the risks to food production and what is required to achieve global food security?
TZACHOR: This is a critical issue, and I'm completing research in this area, with 22 risks identified, prioritized and scored by 70 global experts engaging with us for a year.
IB: What role can biotechnology play in mitigating risk to our global food supply?
TZACHOR: An immense role. The human enterprise, global agriculture included, must learn to operate within planetary boundaries. Biotechnologies are the means to achieve this aim. Currently, the global food system both engenders catastrophic risks to the environment; eroding soils, deforesting forests, emitting greenhouse gasses, polluting aquifers with chemicals, and threatening biodiversity. The integrity of this life-critical system is also threatened by risks, such as climate change and extreme weather events, droughts and dry spells, plant pests and diseases. The full spectrum of biotechnologies from genomics to large-scale, cutting-edge cultivation facilities of future foods, must assist humanity to both mitigate risks to food production, processing and provision as well as to minimize the devastating ecological footprint of modern agriculture.
IB: How has the COVID-19 pandemic revealed vulnerabilities in global food security, and how can these vulnerabilities be addressed?
TZACHOR: The global food system is a fragile structure, coronavirus notwithstanding. A panoply of parameters jeopardizes the system, including climate change and extreme weather events, institutional failures, physical- and cyber-attacks.
With COVID-related policies, lockdown rules, and the sealing of borders, the fragility of this structure has been tested, and continues to be tested. To this date, COVID has had little impact on global agricultural supply chains, and global food security.
It's fair to say that the pandemic didn't reveal novel vulnerabilities as much as it brought the fragility of the system to the fore of the international policy thinking.
Locally, however, the pandemic disturbed supply chains and markets, affecting the state of local food security in several countries, such as India.
One of the world's premier food-baskets—India—has been nourishing the world with rice, millet, wheat, dairy products, fruits and vegetables but now comes to bear with the disturbances delivered by the pandemic. Movement restrictions across India prevented tens of thousands of farmers from transporting their harvest to aggregation centers, leaving them with spoiled produce that had to be eradicated.
Severe local disturbances have also been registered in Nigeria, for instance, Africa's most populated country, and in the Philippines, where movement restrictions prevented shipments of bananas to many markets in Southeast Asia, where the fruit is a nutritionally important staple.
As with other environmental risks, the most vulnerable populations are the ones to suffer the greatest from the pandemic.
IB: What type of content would you like to see in the pages of IB?
TZACHOR: Many biotech and high-tech applications across supply chains—and particularly in primary agricultural production—stand to transform the agri-food science, technology and policy landscape, with profound implications for natural resources and ecosystems. This, in my view, is the most exciting angle of the fourth industrial revolution and the next agricultural revolution. IB should venture into these new and exciting territories.
