Ground-Breaking Hackathon to make meat without animals

Calling on all scientists, engineers, business students and hackers! Do you want to harness the power of technology and join the revolution? You are invited to use your skills and passion at the world’s first “Cellular Agriculture Hackathon at Imperial”.

Cellular agriculture is the process of growing cells to make agricultural products. Growing meat and milk without using animals is not only an extraordinary feat scientifically, but also addresses some of the major issues of our generation: climate crisis, antibiotic resistance, resource scarcity amongst others. Currently, meat production is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire transportation sector combined. It is also the main driver of biodiversity loss and deforestation. As well as being unsustainable, if considered pragmatically, meat production is highly inefficient. For example chickens only convert 11% of what they eat into meat, yet this is the highest caloric conversion rate for any land-based animal. This suggests there is room for invention!

With your help, we could achieve a sustainable process of meat production which can meet the growing worldwide demand for food, with a fraction of the environmental impact and animal suffering.

The field of cellular agriculture began in 2013 when the first cell-based, “lab grown” burger was made by Mark Post. It is currently facing four main challenges: reducing costs for resources such as growth mediums and cell sources, engineering tissue scaffolds to mimic the in-vivo myogenesis environment, scaling up into commercial scale bioprocessing, and finally, marketing to aid customer adoption. You will be able to choose which of these issues to tackle.

This hackathon is not limited to meat only. It is open to any potential application of cellular agriculture even leather! We are recruiting talent from all academic areas to facilitate collaboration.

It will be guided by Benjamina Bollag, the CEO and founder of Higher Steaks, a UK clean meat start up. There will also be a large team of mentors who are experts in the following domains: cell culture, engineering, marketing and innovation management.

If you are looking to network with other driven hackers or dive into the field of cellular agriculture this event is for you! Here’s what you will gain contribute to solving the greatest challenges of our time, dive into the field of cellular agriculture and its opportunities, show off your talents, network and meet people as passionate as you are, get a chance of winning large cash prizes, and finally, with a free book and food to top!

The hackathon will begin with a launch event on Monday 3rd June at the Advanced Hackspace, at Imperial White City campus, with talks by scientists, entrepreneurs and influential actors in the field, from 5pm to 9pm. The hackathon proper will kick off on Tuesday at 9:30am. You have until 5 pm to complete!

Thanks to APES, Effective Altruism, VegSoc and Environmental society, Imperial Enterprise lab and the Advanced Hackspace.

FELIX SUSTAINABILITY IS RECRUITING!

For further details see https://tinyurl.com/y2dggnnc (or use QR code). Email sustainability.felix@protonmail.com.

Applicants will be given free training on how to use industry-standard publishing software at a workshop in June.