Dr. Chris Buck detailed the experience in a series of posts on his own Substack, “Viruses Must Die",” and he’s also been featured in a very well-written article in Science News.

To give a short recap about his beer vaccine: Dr. Buck first observed in a mouse experiment that yeast carrying dead viruses could impart a vaccine-like effect when they ate the yeast rather than inhaled it or absorbed it from the skin. This finding implies that administering this GMO yeast as food might be an effective strategy to protect against polyomavirus, an infection deadly for immunocompromised people.

We typically consume yeast as bread and beer, but there’s also yeast in fermented foods (kombucha, soy sauce), and nutritional yeast. But what would be a suitable food to deliver this virus to the public?

Dr. Buck chose beer. And I think that’s the issue we’ll focus on today, though there are many issues I invite you to consider from his feature in Science, his own Substack, and other outlets covering this story.

[Does vaccine beer strengthen or weaken people’s confidence in public health systems? What about vaccine beer brewed outside of research ethics-approved studies and consumed in private? Is it appropriate for one highly educated virologist to drink his own home-brewed experimental beer and claim it’s in the name of safety? Food and medicine are regulated differently; whose jurisdiction does this fall under, and is it necessary to conduct a clinical trial even though this is a “food?”]

While it’s tempting for us to focus on the fact that Dr. Buck circumvented the research ethics approval system and brewed his vaccine beer in his own kitchen (drinking it in front of a reporter for his Science feature), there is another problem in his selection for how to deliver this vaccine.

Beer is Morally Loaded

Beer is a culturally significant part of human history. The oldest beers date back to 13,000 years ago as a ritualistic food for a nomadic tribe in the Middle East. For a time, beer was actually safer to drink than water because beer wort is boiled, killing off any harmful microbes. Today, beer holds up the economy, engaging stakeholders from agriculture, manufacturing, brewing, hospitality, and more. It’s is a critical part of the arts and culture, especially in settings like sports and music festivals.

But beer can also hurt you acutely, chronically, and psychologically. Alcohol poisoning kills. We’re only just finding out the long-term health effects of drinking alcohol at even one standard drink per day. Alcohol is now classified as a Group 1 carcinogen, the same as tobacco. The WHO has clear messaging based on recent studies that there is no safe dose of alcohol. Moreover, alcoholic beverages are expensive, so vaccine via beer may create financial stress or even widen the wealth gap.

Let’s not forget that alcohol is an age-restricted beverage, with purchasing being regulated variably state-to-state. Polyomavirus can be an especially serious infection in children. How could you tell a child—quite literally screaming in pain, as Dr. Buck recounts in a visit to a pediatric hospital— that he wasn’t old enough to drink vaccine beer because it had alcohol?

So, beer may seem like a playful, economically-relevant choice to deliver this vaccine.

What food would I have picked? Excellent question, but not the right one.

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To help bridge the gap in knowledge, specifically how these products are manufactured compared to conventionally farmed proteins, many experts try to give examples in parallel industries. For food and energy industries, common analogies have been the transition from gas-powered to electric vehicles, digital photography in place of film, incandescent lightbulbs changed to LEDs, and a number of other narratives. Of course, none of these actually teach the consumer what an alternative protein is, but they can be a helpful tool used to illustrate how necessary a technological transition can be.

Today, Trash Talkers, we discuss a new analogy that I have not seen used before: lab-grown diamonds and cultured pearls.

Old Habits Die Hard

In my experience, the hardest part of adopting a new technology is letting go of the old one. Consumers feel exceptionally attached to their choice foods and food types. We use favorite foods as icebreakers. Most holidays involve a consistent meal year to year. We have label terms for what foods we eat, and they often become a critical anchor of our identities: omnivores, vegetarians, vegans, pescatarians. Religious acts also revolve around food: Christian communion, ancient Greek libations, kosher meals, fasting. We celebrate wins and lessen the pain of losses with our favorite foods.

These habits and values are thousands of years old because they were born from instinct. Food is social for us because it benefited our ancestors to eat together for protection. What started as necessity has become an incredible privilege and often an act of love. So, when products like cultivated meat, fungal mycoprotein, and plant-based burgers threaten our food values, our natural reaction is to resist. I do it, too even though 50% of my life is spent thinking about and researching alternative protein technologies.

What will drive consumers to change their attitudes?

What Do We Hate About “Lab-Grown?”

To go back to our “parallel industries” discussion, I see interesting overlap between alternative proteins and jewelry. Lab-grown diamonds and other gems are becoming more and more popular for their cost affordability, increased quality, and sourcing. These products look and function identically to their mined counterparts because they appear and function identically. They do the job. However, some consumers continue to resist lab-grown diamonds, labelling them as “fake.” People continue to want the “real thing” even though the alternative they are presented with can play the exact same role.

I recently learned that the vast majority of pearls bought and sold today are cultured, with some estimates reaching as high as 95%. If you have real pearls and your name isn’t Queen Elizabeth, they are almost guaranteed to have been made with human intervention. Significant intervention. In fact, we’ve been culturing pearls on a commercial scale for nearly 100 years.

Pearls form when a mollusk experiences tissue damage. To heal the damage, the organism will secrete a chemical that forms a cyst, which later becomes the pearl. But relying on chance to meet the massive demand for high quality pearls is too risky. To culture pearls, a tissue graft is inserted into the mollusk from a donor mollusk to kickstart pearl formation. The resulting pearl is functionally the same. You can even control the shape of the pearl by manipulating the shape of the tissue graft:

Consumers don’t seem to care whether their pearls were made via culturing. But for diamonds, the conversation for some people becomes more complicated; lab-grown and mined diamonds do not hold the same value for every consumer.

The difference is in perception, not in substance. Cultured pearls and accidentally-formed pearls function exactly the same way. Lab-grown diamonds and mined diamonds function exactly the same. They both look great on you.

So when we see news about cultivated meat, insect protein for flour, and proteins from plants, what drives our resistance to try and adopt?

In my opinion, there are two critical points for each person to decide for themselves what drives this resistance: 1) is the alternative product functionally the same as the product you currently use and 2) if you could not perceive the difference between the products (appearance, flavor, aroma, nutritional value, allergenicity), would you still care enough to resist?

Obviously alternative proteins are not functionally the same as our beloved meats. The worst thing for alternative protein messaging has been the black bean burger. That depressingly bland, dry plant-based patty is not a burger. Alternative protein products can definitely lack in taste, texture, aroma, and nutritional value. So, that first question is generally easy to answer.

If the products were functionally the same, would you still care enough to resist?

For the second question, it’s tempting to imagine this scenario like some sort of puzzle. You are presented with two identical burgers, stacked to the ceiling with your favorite toppings, condiments, and seasonings, and you are tasked with determining whether these burgers are different from each other. But that’s not how we interact with food day-to-day.

If you went to the grocery store, walked to the meat section, purchased a lab-grown steak, cooked it to perfection, ate it, and felt satiated and energized, would you care enough to resist lab-grown meat technologies? Would the “fakeness” get to you?

(For my more grim readers: If 40 years after you ate the steak, you had the same heart attack that a lifetime of eating farm-grown steaks would have given you, would you care enough to resist?)

And while we discuss this question, the rest of the alternative protein industry will continue to make incremental changes to their plant-based burgers, cultivated steaks, mycoprotein not-chicken nuggets, and every other meat-oddity until we cannot tell the difference anymore.

Most importantly, this is NOT a crystal-ball-style prediction saying that 100% of our current meat products will be replaced by alternative protein technologies. I guarantee that will never be the case. But identifying affordable ways to produce these foods while maintaining the flavors, aromas, and nutritional benefits that we know and love will secure our food future during environmental, public health, and sociopolitical crises.

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Sigh

At the end of my work week, the last CNN headline I want to see is anything related to “sequenced Hitler’s DNA.” Recently, some famous geneticists and historians collaborated to sequence Hitler’s genome from a bloodstained piece of fabric recovered in 1945.

It used to be very, very expensive and time consuming to sequence human DNA. It took roughly 13 years and an estimated $3 billion to sequence the first human genome in the early 2000s as part of the Human Genome Project. We have better sequencing tools available now, and some cost estimates sit at just a few hundred dollars for one human genome.

But here’s what you need to know so we can talk some (educated, evidence-based) trash.

Sequencing is Not Objective

Sequencing DNA does not reveal objective truths. The researcher in charge of sequencing data makes many assumptions and subjective decisions about how to interpret, clean, and manage the data. The news tends to view sequencing as a foolproof, impartial method, but if you learn anything from this blog, let it be that sequencing is not objective. There are ways to make it more rigorous, but just like all science, we are not dealing in truths.

In fact, to combat bias, scientists are expected to make their data analysis methods and raw data publicly available, and their data can be subject to audits by the funding agency at any time. There are extensive databases where sequences are uploaded and can be annotated by scientists at other institutions to ensure the conclusions we make from DNA sequences are verifiable across universities and research centers.

There’s No Preprint

In the publishing world, it’s becoming more and more common to make your papers available as “preprints.” Preprint articles, managed by journals like bioRxiv (pronounced “bio-archive”), are publication drafts that are released before a paper has completed the peer-review process.

Why does it matter if someone publishes a preprint? Preprinting allows more people to critically review the work, even if they are not the official reviewers that will approve or reject the paper for publication. There’s always the caveat that the preprint article may not be the same as the final version of the publication, but the main body of the work will be mostly unchanged. There are a handful of reasons you may elect not to publish an article as a preprint:

1. You cannot afford to wait longer for the peer-review process to finish

2. It is too difficult to adapt your publication draft to a journal’s preprint policies.

3. You are afraid someone will copy your study and publish it before your paper has made it through the peer review process.

Now, if I was the one sequencing Hitler’s DNA and claiming he was higher genetic risk for stigmatized mental health disorders and delayed puberty, these issues would not apply to me. The authors of this study are very high profile geneticists and have historically been involved in genetic identification of major historical figures. They can afford to submit to preprint and delay the process by a few months. They are experienced with the publishing world, they have surely submitted other articles for preprint.

And lastly, they are the only ones in the world with access to Hitler’s DNA. Nobody can copy their study and publish it before they do.

The Study is Untargeted

The main research questions motivating this study are unclear to me, and in my opinion, it’s unlikely they had a targeted hypothesis. Their test subject is one of the most famous, well-documented, and hated figures in human history. If it were me, it would be easy to take a more untargeted approach to get some media attention on an already controversial topic. In other words, this is a “see where the data takes you” study, rather than a “we designed the study to test one specific prediction.”

Not all untargeted research studies are poor ones. Some of the most important scientific discoveries have been “accidents.” CRISPR gene editing technology interestingly had roots in the dairy industry. Post-it notes were a complete accident. Potato chips. The list goes on.

So why don’t I like this study?

There is No Good Research Outcome

Hitler’s life is one of the most well-documented in history. He was constantly, constantly surrounded by people who wrote down his mannerisms, decisions, emotions, favorite meals, whether he tied his left or right shoe first. It wasn’t like he was trying to keep anything secret (see Mein Kampf). What new information about his life is his DNA going to contribute?

An obvious counterargument is understanding his genomics may clarify why he was the way he was: irritable, arrogant, full of hatred, and yet a compelling, decisive leader. So, maybe his genes could reveal distinct differences from the average, non-hateful person to explain these traits.

This is an exciting idea for a certain subset of the population, except we must remember that Hitler was a person just like the rest of us. The study found genetic indicators for autism, ADHD, and schizophrenia. There have been millions of people over human history with these disorders that have not had violent tendencies. A well-trained scientist would refrain from saying this finding may indicate his personality and violent tendencies could be driven by these genetic differences. But the media will not refrain from making this conclusion.

The study further proposes Hitler may have had a condition known as Kallmann syndrome, which can prevent or significantly influence puberty. I wish I was kidding, but the main author of the study was careless enough to admit to the reporter that some patients with Kallmann syndrome have a micropenis. Though, Hitler was known to have some genital irregularities that may overlap with symptoms of Kallmann syndrome.

My main point here is the authors have not exercised any restraint in discussing the implications of their study. If you tell a reporter that you think Hitler could be genetically at risk for Kallmann syndrome, they will take away that Hitler had Kallmann syndrome. And if you tell them that it’s possible to have a micropenis and have Kallmann syndrome, they will take away that Hitler had a micropenis.

If the authors didn’t discover anything significant in Hitler’s DNA, the best case scenario would be once again confirming that Hitler was a terrible person.

I don’t have a familial connection to this wretched part of human history, but if I did, I would be enraged at the idea that someone even think of proposing a genetic excuse for Hitler’s behavior. It is not worth our time to rationalize on a biological level why he acted the way he did. There is no good outcome to this research, even if the main authors may think the findings are significant.

There’s not much else to discuss about this study until the findings are officially published. And if there’s something new to say about it, we’ll revisit the findings.

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Suddenly, the fluorescent lights began to flicker. The student raced back to the lab bench in a panic to check that the centrifuge was still running, but the instrument had turned off, and the screens were black. Dammit. The room went black as the power shut off completely.

Hopelessly fumbling in the dark, the student removed their samples from the centrifuge and reracked them for storage. No way I’m getting any more work done tonight with the power out.

As they removed their lab coat and prepared for the long walk in the rain, the student remembered they had cultures still growing in the incubator. Thankfully, today was the last day of growth, so the power outage wouldn’t affect them. The student opened the incubator door to retrieve them, when a wave of fear hit them from head to toe.

What’s that yellow stuff growing on my plates? My samples aren’t supposed to be yellow!

The student’s train of thought was interrupted by the lab door opening. The night janitor had opened it to collect the lab trash. They exchanged hellos, neither wanting to address why the student was in the lab so late at night.

“Whatcha got there?”

”Looks like my plates are contaminated. Take a look,” the student responded.

“Huh. Looks like the ghost Bacillus."

“The what?”

“Y’know, the ghost Bacillus. Years ago, some grad student was growin’ gobs and gobs of Bacillus culture for their project. But a few pesky bacteria escaped into the air vents. Some say it only haunts grad students in their final semester.”

“But I thought that was just a rumor to scare people into maintaining good sterile technique?”

“Nope. I saw it myself. They tried everything to get rid of it, but it always came back. It crept into shake flasks, Petri plates, test tubes—you name it, it had Bacillus on it. Eventually they fumigated the building to completely remove it. I thought it was finally gone, but here you are starin’ right at it.”

The grad student sighed. It was no question. The plate was definitely contaminated, and they had to throw it out. They tossed the samples into the bright-red biohazard bag, knotted it, and walked to the room next door for sterilization. The two night owls said goodbye to each other as the student closed the door behind them.

In the autoclave room, they loaded the biohazard bag into a plastic bin and shoved the whole thing deep in the autoclave to make sure the high heat and pressure would fully kill any bacteria. While the autoclave ran, they walked back to their desk and put their head down for a midnight nap.

The alarm on the autoclave woke them up about an hour later.

Does it always make that noise?

The student walked into the autoclave room to retrieve their waste and put it into the trash bin to be taken away the next day. Right as they approached the autoclave door, they heard a strange whistling. Yellow steam started to flood out of the autoclave as the door lowers. Rising, rising, rising to the ceiling before spreading out across the entire room. Pockets of air began to form in the cloud of steam and slowly morphed into an eerie message:

I’M BACK.

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As a grad student in a vast ocean of researchers, I often fantasize about being famous in my field. Very few people can name a famous scientist. If you ask someone to name a famous scientist, a handful of answers usually come up: Stephen Hawking, Bill Nye, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Isaac Newton, Galileo, and others. (What’s interesting is that Bill Nye is an engineer and a science communicator, but he is not traditionally a scientist in the same way we might think of these other people.)

There are THOUSANDS of scientists who are famous in their respective fields, or even famous to scientists outside their field.

Jane Goodall and her work in primate evolution. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, inventors of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tool. Suzanne Simard, who correctly hypothesized that trees talk to each other. Marie Curie, who paved the way for all women in science. George Church, who pioneered personal genomics (the analysis and interpretation of an individual’s genes). Katalin Karikó, inventor of the mRNA technology used in COVID vaccines (who was actually demoted at the University of Pennsylvania—here’s a particularly enraging account of the incident)1. Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the internet. Read that again. Why don’t you know the name of the guy who invented the internet?

Linus Pauling, who basically discovered everything we know about molecules and is labelled as “the greatest scientist of all time.” Sara Seager, an astronomer so prominent in her field that she received a six-figure grant that has no application process, commonly referred to as the “Genius Grant.” They just call you and say, “Here’s $800,000. Do whatever you want.” Justin Sonnenburg, a world-class researcher of the gut microbiome, whose research I read as a class assignment at another school. Imagine your work being so influential that it is the tool used to teach and mold young scientific minds.

My fluid mechanics professor, Manoj Chaudhury, who has a paper published in Science titled, “How to make water run uphill.” Kip Thorne, Nobel Prize-winning physicist who consulted on the scientific feasibility of Interstellar (The day I get a phone call asking to consult on the science of a movie is the greatest day of my career. But nobody is making movies about cultivated meat, are they?). Paul Erdős, who published so many mathematics papers with so many collaborating authors that there is an index identifying how distant you are from his work: the Erdős number. My partner’s Erdős number is 5. An icon of particular interest to us Trash Talkers is Mark Post, who debuted the world’s first cultivated beef burger, made by growing cow cells with some gelatin in a laboratory. The most expensive burger ever made at 5 oz. and costing over $300,000.

For all of these examples, there are hundreds of thousands of nameless students, technicians, relatives, confidants, colleagues, and friends who shaped their work, consciously or subconsciously. And all of these scientists have been honored in different ways: media features, awards, highly-cited publications, detailed Wikipedia biographies, and other accolades.

And sometimes, people are wrongly credited with being the “first.” The most famous example is Watson and Crick, who mocked and stole critical data from Rosalind Franklin. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered the first radio pulsars, was shooed off the Nobel Prize awardee list, only for her supervisors to be credited with the discovery.

Today, we need to talk some trash about another wrong “first.” And my scientifically-minded readers will tend to nitpick at the details—all of us tend to identify an angle where a particular study is actually the “first” of something. It usually includes a lot of qualifying statements. “This study is the first to investigate how mice respond to cocaine while obese, while blindfolded, while pregnant, on a Tuesday.” It’s a poor habit of ours.

Science Imitates Art

In 2013, Dr. Mark Post presented the world’s first cultivated beef burger patty on national television.

Since then, the field has exploded. There are an estimated 150+ companies globally trying to commercialize cultivated meat across every region. Dozens of cultivated meat conferences occur every year, spanning the United States, the Netherlands, Japan, Singapore, and more. Hundreds to thousands of peer-reviewed publications hit journals ever year. And now, we have regulatory approvals for cultivated meat in the United States and Singapore, with more approvals currently under review in Australia, Thailand, and the UK.

But ten years before that, a pair of artists stepped up to the [dinner] plate to try their own hand at cultivated meat and tissue engineering. In an art installation titled “Disembodied Cuisine,” Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr displayed a makeshift lab in which technicians cultured frog cells into whole tissues and ate them, all in front of a live audience. They actually displayed the live frogs next to the lab until the end of the event, where they released them back into a local pond. The work actually started at Harvard in 2000 and was part of a larger project titled “Semi-living Steaks.”

What’s worse is that this wasn’t the only proof-of-concept cultivated meat study prior to Post’s television debut in 2013. NASA also briefly researched the topic and in 2002, published a paper proving they could grow fish tissue from a small piece of fish fillet and isolated fish cells. The initial idea was to have astronauts grow their own protein in space, reducing the launch weight of spacecraft and providing astronauts with fresh, nutritious food.

How Do We Choose Scientific Icons?

Hopefully I’ve demonstrated to you that not all scientific fame is actually from being the “first” to do something. Of course, you have to do the work to be innovative; you have to ask novel questions and employ novel approaches. But you also have to get a little lucky. Sometimes you’re just in the right place at the right time.

And even if you’re not in the right place at the right time, know that there is other scientific fame. There will be students and colleagues of yours that talk about you and your work when you least expect it. People who love your papers, marvel at your students, and wish to collaborate with you. There are many ways to be honored, ways to be iconic that don’t involve being on national television or featured in Time. You can be a local icon with lots of scientific impact.

I have a lofty goal to publish a textbook once in my lifetime. I’m positioned to do the work—I started researching cultivated meat scaffolding as a college student, only a few years after the birth of the field. I’ve tried to build a network while the field is still somewhat small. And there are still plenty of milestones to meet: publishing my research, graduating, and deciding what kind of job I want.

But man, do I want to publish a textbook! The greatest honor in science is to be referenced, for someone to say, “I trust this person’s expertise and knowledge.” Fennema’s Food Chemistry, a textbook named for the father of food chemistry2. Introduction to Food Engineering by Paul Singh, one of the only food scientists ever inducted into the National Academy of Engineers. Organic Chemistry by Janice Gorzynski Smith—iconic for many reasons. Don Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming, a computer science textbook so well-written that a cheeky reward of $2.56 (one hexadecimal) is offered for reporting typos.

I have a textbook titled The Butter Industry on my desk that I rescued from the trash can, because how could I not?

There are ways to create scientific impact on much smaller, more meaningful scales, too. Mentoring a junior colleague, teaching a concept using a unique metaphor, asking a meaningful question, even a casual conversation over coffee can create a lifelong memory for someone. None of these are “measurable,” but that does not mean they have no impact.

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There are two notable lab groups working in cultivated meat and alternative proteins: the David Kaplan Lab of Tufts University, and the David Block Lab of UC Davis. I collectively call them “The Davids.” Many of their publications overlap, they have served on advisory boards together, and they are generally professionally intertwined as two leading researchers in sustainable food.

They are not early career professionals, though the alternative protein field has only emerged as an exciting topic within my lifetime (<20 years). Before they were the Davids, David Kaplan was a biomedical tissue engineer, renowned for his research on bone regeneration using biomimetic scaffolding made from silk. David Block was an enologist, working to identify alcohol-tolerant yeast to make more desirable alcoholic beverages.

The two Davids started to converge on their research in the late 2010s, as they began to publish on topics including edible scaffolds and cultivated meat-specific low-cost media formulations; in other words, they are both taking technologies commonly used in medicine, and asking if they can apply them to the food system in a cheaper, more sustainable manner. This convergence has marked a very poetic, almost too much so, rebirth of cultivated meat research.

Not only do the two of them span the bookends of expertise needed to commercialize cultivated meat—David Block of fermentation and David Kaplan of tissue engineering— but they are also geographical bookends at their respective institutions.

One David in the West, one David in the East.

Both joined their respective departments in 1996. In their publicly available faculty and Google Scholar profile pictures, both are wearing blue plaid button-down shirts. Both wear glasses. Both a little gray-haired from the years they have dedicated to pursuing science. Both engineers by training. These are trivial observations, but it all contributes to the image the two of them have somehow jointly created.

They are pillars of the field; I have many of their papers printed and annotated in my desk. They are people I aspire to meet and collaborate with, should time, resources, and willpower permit. Both have even founded large consortiums to advance sustainable food (David Kaplan with TUCCA, and David Block with iCAMP).

Aging Out

Because the Davids have a slight leg up on other alternative protein researchers due to their early start, they have gathered millions in funding, dozens of students and postdocs, and oodles of publications in high-impact journals like Nature. And what a privilege it is to have a deep pool of interested young researchers, institutions willing to fund projects, and journals willing to show off the work of these two labs. What’s more is they have each done their part in mentoring the next wave of alt protein researchers—Kaplan’s lab alone is over 50 people as of early 2025.

Their greatest pairwise contribution to the field is their willingness to take intellectual risks. In 2019 and 2020, cultivated meat was brand new to them and the rest of the world, but they took the plunge. Many probably told them it was foolish or thought the field wouldn’t become what it is today (and we aren’t out of the woods yet, but we know so much more in 2025 than we did in 2015). TUCCA and iCAMP have allocated millions in funding across the country and the world to advance sustainable food research and commercialization—that is a debt we can never fully repay.

But I worry for the future of our food system. The Davids are, unfortunately, going to age out of research quite soon; their already-long tenure at their respective institutions is not eternal. Even in retirement, they will continue to advise, motivate, and cheer on the rest of us in alt protein, but I could not possibly dream of a more fabled pair of leaders in my field than these two. I often think of who will replace them, whether I will still call them The Davids, whether the next pair of leaders will emerge out of complementary fields, and most of all, where I fit in. The esteem of being such a leader is alluring, but it comes with long travel days, high expectations, and probably very little rest.

What’s also troubling is the incentive to operate as a lone wolf; publishing, presenting, and patenting are activities we label as successful endeavors that contribute to the wealth of knowledge, but they can also be activities that isolate researchers from each other. Opportunities to be leaders in research are becoming more competitive as the standard of research gets higher.

And when The Davids are gone, it will be a race to the finish line to identify the next pair. I hope they leave the ladder down so the rest of us can continue to climb up.

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Our nation is not short of flesh, but of imagination.

I have therefore taken it upon myself, after a lengthy period of study and consultation with numerous experts in the fields of molecular gastronomy, tissue engineering, bioethics, and marketing, to put forth a most modest and reasonable proposal. It is this: that the impoverished and working poor, so long as they remain unable to secure nourishment by conventional means, ought to contribute small portions of their own tissue, that these might be cultivated into meat for public consumption.

I make no extreme demand. A single biopsy, extracted painlessly from the posterior or thigh by licensed technicians, yields sufficient cellular material to generate upwards of 500 grams of cultured protein in the first month alone. With modern techniques in bioreactor scaling and myogenic stimulation, this quantity may double by the second month. A modest tissue bank drawn from our nation’s most populous and underfed districts could thus produce many tons of lean meat each year.

There is little novelty in consuming one's own species. History is full of examples: the Aztecs in ritual, the Donner party in desperation, and the current electorate in metaphor. Yet my proposal requires no violence, no desecration of the dead, and no more discomfort than the average blood draw. The donors may even receive vouchers for their contribution, redeemable at participating grocers for discounted portions of themselves or others.

Such a system would serve many ends.

First, it would greatly reduce our reliance on industrial livestock, the maintenance of which has long plagued our environment. The methane produced by cattle has been decried by climate scientists, yet I observe that human tissue releases no methane in its post-biotic state. Cultured human meat, properly processed, is clean, low in saturated fat, and free from the hormones, antibiotics, and ancestral guilt associated with traditional animal flesh. One might even say that it represents a more ethical form of consumption, in that its source has chosen, voluntarily and with full knowledge of the facts, to have its cultured flesh be eaten.

Second, it would restore dignity to those now mocked by food insecurity. Rather than relying on charity or subsidies, they might take pride in providing for their families by the most literal of means. A mother could serve herself to her children in the form of lightly seasoned meatballs; a grandfather might return to the Sunday table as a roast. No longer would families be torn apart by hunger. They would be brought together, in nourishing communion.

Of course, I am not so insensitive as to ignore potential objections.

Some will claim that this proposal invites cannibalism. I assure these readers that the cells involved are far from sentient, lacking even a central nervous system. They are, in every functional sense, indistinguishable from the muscle fibers of a swine or steer, save for their genetic elegance and absence of hooves.

Still others will raise questions of taste. To these I say: have you eaten a chicken nugget? Have you examined its provenance?

I have consulted with numerous scientists, many of whom assure me that the nutritional profile of cultured human meat is superior to that of beef. With appropriate seasoning—a little rosemary, perhaps, or a balsamic glaze—the meat is said to possess a flavor reminiscent of pork, though more tender. It has been suggested that the thigh yields a robust stew, the cheek a delicate tartare.

I think it unnecessary to multiply the advantages of my scheme. Anyone with an elementary grasp of supply chains or empathy fatigue can see the promise herein. If but a tenth of our population were to contribute a small sample of their flesh each year, our nation might feed itself indefinitely, and do so without a single additional pasture or slaughterhouse.

Let us no longer gnash our teeth about the rising price of meat. Let us grow that meat, from ourselves, for ourselves. Let us eat, and be eaten yet not harmed, in turn.

A Modest Proposal By Jonathan Swift

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I invite you to think about why we pay people to donate blood, plasma, sperm, eggs, hair, and other bodily parts for money. These provide someone else with the gift of life—just as food does.

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It’s been a little while. I recently passed my qualifying exam (the first milestone of a PhD, arguably the hardest depending on the program), and it had consumed my entire being for several weeks straight. This was not an exam for a class, but rather a team of faculty members that were evaluating me as a scientist and a student. It was an extremely intense experience for me, and at times I felt I was at a great disadvantage, but I am very proud of the time and effort I spent preparing. During that time I also reached 100 subscribers! Lots of different ways to succeed in this life.

But it got me thinking about quite a few things. So let’s discuss, talk some trash, and more importantly, talk about trash.

Trash Reasons to Pursue a PhD

I have definitely had my fair share of conversations with peers encouraging them to pursue graduate school. It is an amazing experience, challenges me every day, and I know it was the right choice for me.

But there are also quite a few reasons not to pursue a PhD. A few are listed below, from most egregious to most crisis-inducing for any current graduate students.

1. You don’t want to find a job yet.

2. You think it will be easy to complete.

3. You want to be respected.

   1. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be respected, but having PhD after your name doesn’t make you any better of a person.

   2. This is a distinctively different reason from pursuing a PhD because you want a specific type of job that requires advanced credentials.

4. People have told you a PhD would be a great fit for you.

5. You’ve always been academically successful and a PhD is the next logical step in the process.

6. You are smart.

This last point is typically most surprising for my peers. You should not pursue a PhD just because you know you are a smart person. And you might still pursue a PhD even if you think you are not smart—I have known many students to graduate who have doubted their intellect before. Let’s break that down further.

What does it mean to be smart?

I have a friend who once described someone’s GPA as an indicator of their willingness to jump through “academic hoops.” At the time, I took personal offense to this because I took great pride in my grades, and I did not think they were indicative of my tendency to be a sheep, for a lack of a better word. But I do think he was right.

Your grades, to some degree, may represent your willingness to conform to a professor’s expectations and assignments. The student and the professor partake in a mutual agreement, and if expectations are met (whatever that may mean), the student receives a “good” grade as a reward. This dynamic often creates tension in that students do not necessarily have the authority to help determine what those expectations are; the professor decides on their behalf, without their consultation.

We do this because we collectively acknowledge that the academic community is built on the dissemination of knowledge from top to bottom, so to speak. Universities brag about the number of “experts” they have—people who are leaders in their field, have published extensively, or have otherwise demonstrated that they know what they’re doing.

And students flock to university to receive this expert knowledge, in a distilled, more basic form. In most cases, I would hope, this is an excellent model. Willing students are excited to have people who can answer their questions in their corners.

What has unintentionally emerged from this model is the association of being “smart” with meeting or exceeding the expectations of a professor or teacher. But what about instructors with unrealistic expectations? What about instructors who are unsuccessful in teaching their students from piloting a new assignment or extenuating circumstances that prevent them from focusing on their professional responsibilities? There are undoubtedly still students who are “smart” but may not be able to succeed in the structure their professor has created which would incorrectly deem them “not smart.”

All this is to say that we often associate being smart with positive grade outcomes, and people also seem to think that these positive grade outcomes would somehow prepare you for graduate school. I can definitively tell you that good grades do not mean anything in graduate school. (A side note, this doesn’t mean classes are useless. Classes can be instrumental and very fulfilling experiences.). The success of a graduate student is mostly a function of their work ethic, their independence, and their ability to critically think.

What are reasons to pursue a PhD?

This looks different for every student:

1. You definitely want to be a professor and teach in a field that requires PhD-level education.

   1. An example of a professorship not requiring PhD-level education is the field of architecture, where the typical terminal degree is a Master’s.

2. You want to work in the private sector, but see yourself leading a department or team conducting intense research.

3. You see yourself being in charge of a research project in the future.

A secondary reason that ends up fuelling almost every PhD: you long for and appreciate the opportunity to contribute to the existing wealth of knowledge. This is not reason enough alone to pursue a PhD, but most graduate students are motivated by this sentiment.

The distinction between pursuing a Master’s versus a PhD is generally the leadership component. Because a Master’s degree is designed to be completed in 1-2 years, many Master’s theses are shorter, incremental projects that are lower-risk. PhDs have a little more time to pivot or work out the kinks if a project doesn’t pan out. In both cases, your ability to design defensible experimental studies and critically evaluate the wealth of knowledge are fundamental skills.

Wrap-Up

A mentor of mine recently reminded me that the product of your PhD is not publications, presentations, or even a job offer. The product of the PhD is you. All of you. Your knowledge, quirks, habits, opinions, kindness, all of it. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the search for achievements—publishing in Nature, presenting internationally, discovering something new—but after the 5 years, the real achievement is who you have become!

There is a lot left to think about here, which I will undoubtedly revisit as I progress in my program. I’m coming up on the end of my first complete year of grad school, where I’ll do an extensive check-in with what has worked for me and what I wish I knew when I started.

Until then, keeping an eye out for biotech-related post opportunities. Happy trash talking!

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I didn’t think anything of it this morning—I thought that, at best, Colossal Biosciences had recovered the dire wolf genome from a fossil.

In the few hours since I saw that post, my entire feed has blown up with headlines. Dire wolf resurrected. 10,000 year-extinct species revived. Colossal Biosciences brings back the dire wolf. Game of Thrones is real.

Let’s discuss, Trash Talkers. Maybe we’ll even talk some trash.

Who is Colossal Biosciences?

Colossal Biosciences is a biotechnology company based in Dallas, Texas. Their primary focus is to facilitate “de-extinction,” or what the rest of us might peg as wildlife conservation. They want to prevent major biodiversity loss on our planet, especially as our climate changes and threatens vulnerable species. That’s a noble cause; Earth’s biodiversity has both intrinsic (perhaps an animal’s right to life) and extrinsic value (how we interact with animals and what services they provide our ecosystem, like beavers building dams or chickens laying eggs).

Where they lose me is the ultra-techno-futurized language and aesthetic. Let’s take a look at their website.

The landing page is an incredible feat of graphic design. Short clips of snow-white dire wolves trotting in the forest, scientists handling samples in the lab, scenic forest foliage (from the POV of prey, might I add), and other “aesthetic” shots alternate in a looped video. Right in the middle, some text:

“The science of genetics. The business of discovery.”

Wow. We don’t have time to unpack all of that.

If we scroll down, we see various collages of different animals overlayed with text akin to futuristic computer output or code. Lots of messages about the pressing need to protect extinct and critically endangered species.

Scroll farther down, more interesting images. I actually really like this one—zebras, deer, giraffes, bears, and fish amble (or swim) along a picturesque fossil or maybe a winding path of rocks.

Ah, the wonderful “Wikipedia defines this term as” tactic. Webster’s dictionary defines wedding as the fusion of two hot metals, for any Office fans. Here’s where we get to Colossal’s major claim: that they can make something de-extinct. De-extinction of course, is the process of creating something that looks like or actually is an extinct animal.

“Revival” of the Dire Wolf

Through genetic engineering, Colossal Biosciences claims to have revived the long-extinct dire wolf. According to their website, Colossal states that there were only two samples of usable dire wolf DNA in the entire world: a tooth, and a 72,000-year-old skull. They isolated DNA from these samples and sequenced the entire genome—essentially all of the written instructions that make the dire wolf what it is. Sequencing is a very common genetic tool; we sequence bacteria, yeast, mice, and other organisms in research all the time. It’s harder to sequence genomes for macroscopic life because they have more genes. For example, the Human Genome Project was a long-time effort to sequence the entire human genome, spanning over 13 years of work.

Your genes make you. The dire wolf genome makes the dire wolf.

(In this video, they say that it’s “incredible” to generate an entire genome for a species. I would argue it is not incredible. Maybe it is more resource-intensive and takes more time for a mammal like a wolf, but it’s not far-fetched from my limited knowledge of genetics.)

So, now they’ve got the genome of the extinct dire wolf. How do you make a physical dire wolf?

Colossal’s strategy is to “map” the dire wolf genome against a close living relative, the gray wolf. If you can take a set of genes that are already pretty close to your genes of interest, you can make small edits until you have a genome resembling the sequenced genome. You take the gray wolf and make genetic changes (Colossal claims they make hundreds of edits at a time) until you have what you believe to be a dire wolf.

They don’t do this part with actual wolves, by the way (and you reasonably couldn’t do that). They make genetic changes to gray wolf cells in little plastic Petri dishes.

Then comes the “making a dire wolf” part. If you remember Dolly the sheep—the first cloned animal—this process is technologically the same. Scientists at Colossal stick a dire wolf cell inside an egg cell from a gray wolf or even a domesticated dog, which makes a dire wolf embryo. Then, the embryo is inserted into a surrogate dog, and a few short months later, dire wolf puppies.

I’ll admit—they are quite cute: Romulus and Remus are six months old, and Khaleesi is three months old:

You can even track their development on Colossal’s website.

Pretty stunning animal.

What are the Implications?

I’ll admit I’m known to have intense knee-jerk reactions to news like this. I’m generally skeptical of efforts that attempt to play God beyond a reasonable amount. Genetic modification of corn, soy, and canola are already widespread—I have no problem with those. But reintroducing a long-extinct species for (what I believe to be) an indefensible reason doesn’t cut it for me.

Colossal claims they do all of this to correct humanity’s past, current, and potentially future mistakes. If we were responsible for the extinction of a species or harmed their wellbeing, Colossal believes we have a duty to fix it. That’s a pretty easy position to stand in. We messed something up, we should fix it.

But what does “fix it” mean? Why do we have the right to reintroduce species or pretend we even know how to? Even Colossal admits that their technologies rely on our still-changing understanding of fundamental biology; for example, can we identify specific genes that make something a dire wolf versus a gray wolf? They already share a lot of similarities—how do we know which ones are responsible for their differences? And, are we certain that those genes don’t affect other traits, too?

On a macroscopic scale, what if we introduced a previously-extinct animal into an area it wasn’t fit for? Or worse, what if it was overly fit and wiped other keystone species out of the area? For species that have been extinct for a long, long time like the Dodo bird, woolly mammoth, or the dire wolf (coincidentally, all species that Colossal is focused on reviving), it’s difficult for us to predict what ecological niche they fill. What habitat, what food web, what ecosystem do they fit into if the rest of biological life has evolved without them? Save for the last blip of evolutionary time where humans have made quite a dent in the Earth, organisms become extinct because they cannot survive. Unless something about the organism or its place in the ecosystem has substantially changed, it will not survive. Things do not re-evolve back after extinction.

Hearts & Elbows

There’s a famous question in biology:

Why doesn’t your heart grow on your elbow?

It might seem absurd—of course your heart is meant to be inside your body, protected from the elements, central to your veins and arteries to maximize nutrient delivery. And we know that that makes sense. Your organs need to be in the specific places they are, or things get wonky. But how does your body know where to put the heart, hair, teeth, and fingernails?

I find this video by Hank Green best explains the sheer wonder of the human body and our somewhat limited understanding of how it came to be:

@hankgreen1#stitch with @Anna Redman Bodies are amazing.

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“Where everything knows where to stop and what to be” is the best way I have thought to put it. We are made up of billions and billions of tiny evolutionary decisions (a more accurate but less wondrous term would be “evolutionary probabilities”) over an extraordinary length of time.

I’ll invite you to apply Hank Green’s whimsical sentiment to Colossal Biosciences and their dire wolves. How will we know where to stop and what to be?

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But I did just read this lovely post from about the serendipitous launch of Animal Crossing: New Horizons (often abbreviated ACNH) during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and what that did to the cozy gaming community’s collective psyche. That got some thoughts flowing.

Animal crossing broke me and rebuilt me. It broke Nintendo and rebuilt Nintendo. It tipped the gender imbalance on Reddit because it brought so many women into the gaming community (ok, I don’t know if it did that, but I would bet money that it moved the needle a little). ACNH was the second-most sold game on the Nintendo Switch with nearly 50 million copies sold. The rest of the Animal Crossing series games are also record-holders on their respective consoles—Wild World on the DS, City Folk on Wii, and New Leaf on the 3DS.

But none of those records really matter. When was the last time you read a book that wasn’t a New York Times bestseller? It seems like everything holds a record for something these days.

What is “Cozy” Gaming?

The Animal Crossing series is unique in that none of the games have a competitive or violent element. The token videogames like Call of Duty, CSGO, League of Legends, and even Pokemon all have a clear enemy or adversary—you kill or beat something to win. Even Pong and Tetris are competitive by nature.

(Sorry to burst any parents’ bubbles—but if your kid plays CSGO, the goal of the game is literally to plant an undetected bomb as an act of terrorism. But, the worst part? It’s really fun. And no, it doesn’t inspire violent tendencies in your kids—it actually makes them smarter and calmer in the short term.)

But Animal Crossing, The Sims, Stardew Valley, Coral Island, and Hello Kitty Island Adventure (which has consumed my entire being over the last 6 weeks) don’t have that. No violence, no winning, no battles, no bombs, no nothing.

So what the f*ck kind of games are they? Enter a “new” genre: cozy gaming. Cozy games are often focused on collection, decoration, and friendship; they commonly have fishing mechanics, friendly NPCs or even romance, farming, foraging, and other relaxing activities.

I hate the term cozy gaming, though. I’m not a cozy gamer. I speed run these games, hard grinding for materials, friendship bonuses, whatever I can get my hands on. I don’t listen to instrumental music in the background, I play my divorced dad rock playlist on repeat until my eyes get tired from staring at cotton ball clouds and heart-shaped lakes. I have 1,500+ hours across the Animal Crossing franchise, 600+ hours on Stardew Valley, and I’ve logged 20 hours on Hello Kitty Island Adventure in the last week (I have maxed out friendship with every main character except Hello Kitty herself—I don’t think the devs were making the game for someone like me. I think it was meant to be played a little slower). Cozy games aren’t necessarily played by cozy people.

Cozy gaming used to be referred to as the life simulation genre. The best example is The Sims: you design a character (sometimes in your likeness), build them a house, and influence their daily routine. A Sim is like a mini version of you.

But life simulation doesn’t capture the wholeness of cozy gaming: the collection, decoration, slow-but-steady progress, the heartfelt exchanges. I wish I had a better word for it—one that was non-derogatory (cozy makes it sound like I’m not trying, and some people use the term to refer to games that “girls” play) but still not an oversimplification. Maybe I’ll come up with something when I do a review of Hello Kitty Island Adventure.

Animal Crossing Leads the Genre

Animal Crossing first launched in 2001 on the Nintendo 64 and Gamecube platforms. The most popular games of 2001 were Halo: Combat Evolved, Grand Theft Auto III, and Madden NFL 2002 (honorable mention, the Tony Hawk skateboarding series). Ok, games where you shoot people, bomb stuff, rob people, crash cars, and beat the living sh*t out of each other. Makes sense.

Oh, and Animal Crossing. The only cozy game/life simulation/social simulation/ whatever-you-want-to-call-it game that released that year, selling over 2 million copies.

I can’t give you a reference for how weird this trend is because there were no other cozy games available at the time. You could argue The Sims series, but I am hesitant to compare the AC series to The Sims because it lacks a certain imaginative component. You make your character look like you, your character does things you might do. Your AC character is at best a caricature, but your neighbors are talking cows, sheep, mice, chickens, and greedy tanuki. You can fit whale sharks and refrigerators in your pocket. You can grow money trees. A ferret mails you a piece of paper every day telling you if your house is pretty enough for a silly little trophy. None of it makes any sense.

But here we are, over 80 million copies sold across the franchise, almost 25 years later. I could sit here and tell you it’s because AC brought non-gamers into the gaming community, because people just got so sick of the fast-paced 21st century that they wanted something to relax to, or that they wanted to Stick It To the Man (the man being Tom Nook). And it probably is because of those things, but really it is just a pleasure to play. There’s never been anything like it.

I Lost a Friend?

I have done essentially everything there is to do in ACNH at this point. Every inch of my island is beautifully decorated. I’ve caught every fish, dug up every fossil, purchased every house upgrade, paid off all of my loans, bred every flower type, received the highest Happy Home Academy rating, made millions in the stalk market. Of course, there are a few lingering tasks to complete—gathering the last few insects, art pieces, and Punchy’s photo. Those will all come in time.

But this week, which marks the five-year anniversary of the release of ACNH on Nintendo Switch, one of my villagers asked to move away.

That isn’t inherently a bad thing—I’ve had villagers that I really did not prefer, and I jumped at the first chance to kick them off my island. Over the years I’ve slowly gotten my favorite villagers to stay, including Punchy, Olivia, and Shino.

When you start your ACNH island, you have three “starter” villagers that are randomly selected to live in your town. Mine were Julian, a sassy blue unicorn; Rodeo, a bull; and I quite honestly can’t remember the third. Must not have been very important, and they’re certainly long gone from my island. Rodeo asked to move away some years ago when I started collecting all of the deer villagers—it was easy to send him off.

Julian, however, stayed on my island until this week. I actually hated having him—his house is decorated with a set of astrologically-themed furniture that is extremely unpractical and gives a holier-than-thou (literally) vibe, which is Julian’s whole personality. His catchphrase is “glitter.” He looks like he wears false eyelashes, and he’s the only horse villager with a horn; the only unicorn in the whole game. He might even sound like a cryptid—most players do not know about him or have only heard tall tales.

Unintentionally, I had grown quite fond of seeing Julian around my island. Comparatively, he’s much, much taller than the other villagers, and quite brightly colored. Easy to pick out in the midst of trinkets and gizmos scattered around my island. You can’t miss him.

At some point along the way, he had started calling me “canapé,” a French word for a small bite of bread or a cracker with savory toppings. I didn’t like the nickname he had given me, but I got used to reading it in his text bubbles.

I remember hoping, praying that Julian would leave my island soon, as I only had a few deer villagers left to populate my town. And then I saw that dreaded thought bubble.

When a villager wants to leave, they walk around your island with this iconic thought bubble above their head. They slowly tread along until they notice the player, and sometimes they’ll even jog towards you to start the conversation. If they mention they’re thinking of moving away, the player has the chance to say yes, it’s time for you to go, or no, please stay.

I didn’t like Julian. I wanted him to move. But now that my last original villager is gone, I’ve really noticed how much time has passed since the release of this game. It’s been a full five years—I graduated high school and college, started grad school, moved states, and everything in between. And Julian saw most of it.

The coherent ideas stop flowing here. I love Animal Crossing. I think about it most days, I buy all of the AC merch, I’m dreaming of the next game release for the Switch 2. But beyond the 10 minutes per day that I log in to check Redd’s art gallery, I’ve done my time on ACNH. There isn’t much left for me to do. I’m all grown up, but I’ll never outgrow the series.

That’s what “cozy” gaming did to the community. People will continue to mock the genre, but they can’t deny it’s carved out a space of its own.

P.S. I’m hoping to adopt a cat in the fall—if it happens, I’m 99% sure I will name it Punchy. Regardless of the cat’s resemblance to the AC villager.

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A slight deviation from my alt protein timeline series, this week we’re taking a look at the authorship dilemma, which is the challenge of determining who should be listed as an author on a peer-reviewed publication and in what order. Disclaimer: this post raises more questions than answers.

Publishing

At the very top of a peer-reviewed journal article, you’ll find the article title, journal, date of publication, and the contributing authors. Years ago, it was typical that most research articles, textbooks, and other academic works had only one or two authors. If the article was part of a graduate student’s thesis, the student is typically listed first and then the advisor or mentor. All in all, the first author is credited with the bulk of the work. My peers often distinguish their publications by first- or co-author status, signifying they have more ownership and involvement in those projects

But what happens when you have five, ten, or a dozen contributing authors? Who is permitted to be credited with the work? Who deserves the title of “first author?”

…Nobody Knows

There are no standardized guidelines for first authorship or authorship order. This is a growing problem in the publishing world, especially as scientists are encouraged to collaborate on larger and larger projects. One idea is to simply list authors alphabetically, removing the ownership component entirely; each author is perceived as having equal importance. However, not every author contributes “equally” to a project. It’s a little too idealistic to expect equal contribution.

Another common strategy is to list authors in order of contribution level, from greatest to least, except the advisor or mentor is listed last (confusingly, I’ll admit). So, a paper with four authors might follow the formula:

Most contributing author, next most contributing author, least contributing author, The Boss™.

It’s not that authorship is a question of seniority, though often the authors that “came up with the idea” are more senior and removed from the mundane tasks (like data collection), which are often assigned to graduate students and undergraduate researchers. Graduate students arguably bear the most responsibility of these parties. (Aside—this is a contentious area in research. Graduate students perform most of the science, but professors and advisors are often credited the most with the work, which creates a lot of tension. Students are seen as students, but really they’re employees, which academic institutions use as an excuse to keep stipends and benefits low but research outputs high.)

The more authors you add, the more confusing authorship and credit become. A more recent requirement in some journals is to disclose what each author specifically contributed since, interestingly, being listed as an author doesn’t necessarily mean you wrote the paper. Typical contributions are: study conception, study design, data collection, figure design, data analysis, manuscript writing, and manuscript editing or reviewing.

But even this disclosure raises a new issue: what is the perceived value of each task, and should that value dictate authorship credit? Should the person who collected the data be listed first, since our interpretations are ultimately based on their work? Should the person who analyzed the bulk of the data be listed first because this work constitutes the highest intellectual skill? Should the main writer of the manuscript be listed first simply because we’re reading their work at this very moment?

I can definitively say as a graduate student, papers resulting from my thesis will be published with me listed as the first author. That’s an easy distinction because my degree is contingent upon developing skills in study conceptualization, experiment design, data collection, data analysis, and scientific writing. It makes sense that graduate students are first authors on their own projects.

Who is the second, third, or fourth author, if that many people contribute to my paper? Of course, I’ll include my advisor as the conventional last author. But what about undergraduate students who help with data collection or other graduate students with relevant expertise that I consulted significantly throughout the project? If I was co-advised, in what order would I list my advisors?

To complicate it even further, many papers have an Acknowledgements section at the end, commonly used to list funding agencies or institutions that donated samples or equipment.

Let’s say I needed to be trained on microscopy to pursue my project, and I consulted my institution’s (imaginary) Center for Microscopy. If a staffer at this center trained me on a microscope, and then I published data using that training and that microscope, what credit does the staffer deserve? I would argue the Acknowledgements section is the appropriate distinction for these peripheral parties that help in the scientific process, but at what point is someone “promoted” from Acknowledgements to author? Even a step below Acknowledgements is to be cited in the References. All of these sections of a paper—authors, Acknowledgements, and References—are sections that award respect, but in differing capacities.

Some institutions have written explicit guidelines for determining authorship, like the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, which defines authorship criteria as:

1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND

2. Drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content; AND

3. Final approval of the version to be published; AND

4. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Notice the comparative and non-specific language in these guidelines, like “substantial” and “reviewing.” Are authors required to be part of the writing of the whole manuscript, or just the bits and pieces they worked on? These criteria don’t provide clear answers. Even “interpretation of data” is listed as a good-enough reason to be listed as an author. What if I brought my data to one of my committee members in an effort to parse out my findings? Does that make them an author?

I called my partner while drafting this post for advice—should I list him as an author?

Gifts & Ghosts

On the flip side, sometimes people are included as authors without actually contributing anything to the project, an unethical practice known as gift authorship. Gift authorship is often granted as a result of social pressures or extreme (nearing unnecessary) respect for a researcher.

Interestingly, the opposite concept is also an issue in authorship and publishing: ghostwriting. Ghostwriting is when the person who wrote the work is not listed as an author. In book publishing, dedicated ghostwriters, especially in fiction, are still paid for their work, but their name isn’t listed on the final product. They still receive compensation.

Ghostwriting in academia, on the other hand, is a little fishier. As academics, we collectively agree to preserve academic integrity, which includes the agreement to not steal or plagiarize intellectual works. Explicitly listed authors on ghostwritten papers may not be fulfilling their obligation to foster a community with strong academic integrity. And, in many cases, the ghostwriter on a peer-reviewed publication may be from an institution in the private sector with obvious competing financial interests, which compromises the integrity of the published work. Both parties lose.

A World Record

The current record-holder for most contributing authors on a peer-reviewed journal article is a publication in Physical Review Letters, with over 5,000 authors. Five. Thousand. Somehow the actual paper is only 9 pages, with the following 24 pages used just to list the authors.

(If you’re an academic, I know what you’re thinking—is PRL a respected journal? PRL is regarded as the most prestigious journal in the field of physics.)

What does it even mean to be part of a 5,000-author collaboration? Or, perhaps more importantly, what does it mean to first-author a 5,000-author paper (I use first-author as a verb because this issue is so pervasive.)? That might be the ultimate scientific feat—our physicist friend G. Aad takes home the biggest authorship prize ever awarded. Even the eight authors listed after G. Aad take home a big win here—how did they decide that these eight would be listed at the beginning of the article?

My Internal Conflict

In my undergraduate, I had an independent research project in chemical engineering that I would say was comparable in complexity and intensity to at least an M.S.-level project (and maybe even PhD). When I say independent, I mean I wasn’t paired with a graduate student. In many research labs, undergraduate students work directly with graduate students on the same project, but that wasn’t true for me. At the beginning it was by chance; my advisors hadn’t recruited for my project yet, and then things ended up changing. But I took the opportunity and ran with it.

Because I was the only student on the project, I was in charge of its direction, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I had the freedom to ask the research questions that I cared about answering. I had the autonomy to identify the right methods and data visualization techniques to tell this scientific story. I loved having this level of control over my project.

On the other hand, my project being mine meant that I was also solely responsible for writing a manuscript that would result from my experiments. It was my job to report what I had done, and my advisors would be there to read and review my manuscript when I had written it.

I never wrote the paper. In my head, I had a million reasons for not writing it—I was taking seven classes and had no time, I needed to repeat an experiment, I didn’t have enough data, I didn’t know how to interpret my data, whatever. The reality is, people have published papers on less information than I had from my project. I could have managed it.

I have peers that have published in their time as undergraduate researchers. Publishing is a major milestone on a project, and people should celebrate when their papers are accepted. But to be frank, some people are just in the right place at the right time, and they are lucky enough to get listed as an author (though maybe not a first author).

I felt cheated. I felt cheated that my project was regarded as being high-quality, highly innovative, yet I didn’t get the same recognition. I’ve presented this work a half dozen times, and every time people ask where they can find my papers. Professors have even nominated me for internationally-competitive scholarships for early-career, high achieving scientists thinking I’m published. People are genuinely surprised that I don’t have papers.

And this is what I didn’t know about science when I started: you have to stop at some point to report what you did, or no one will know. You have to tell someone that you learned something new so they can learn it, too! You have a duty as a scientist to report what you’ve found.

That’s where I failed—I didn’t even know I had this obligation. I just thought that, at some point, the work will get published when I’m finished with it—but you’re never finished with it. When grad students graduate, 90% of the time their project is handed off to the next student, who asks some new questions and generates some new data, only for the cycle to repeat. (Even my undergraduate project has morphed into a graduate-level project now for a new student. Maybe I should just take that as a win.) There is no concrete end to the project, but you have to work in the time to publish or you’ll end up like me, with all of the effort expended and none of the credit.

So, a toast to gifts & ghosts, the over-recognized and under-recognized. Being a published author is great, but it isn’t everything, and sometimes it isn’t even anything (if you’re a gift author).

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Welcome back to the (limited) history of alt protein, Trash Talkers! Be sure to read the first post in the series to get up to speed.

Next in our alternative protein timeline is a spotlight on Quorn, a protein made from fungus, first launched in 1985.

Single-Cell Protein: A 1960s Buzzword

In 1960, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations recognized the growing “protein gap,” which stated that 25% of the population had a dietary protein deficiency. The protein gap was a worldwide call for new protein innovations; how could we produce more protein without using more land and water?

One potential solution was (and still is) single-cell protein (SCP), or protein derived from microbes like bacteria, fungi, and algae. In the case of SCP, the microbes are the food product, rather than the food as a byproduct of fermentation, like wine or dairy.

A particularly exciting application of SCP in the 60s was creating more sustainable agricultural feedstocks; many SCP cultures can grow on waste products like sawdust, coffee grounds, and other food industry byproducts and could then be fed to livestock, creating a more circular food system. These incremental improvements in sustainability are essential for maintaining the longevity of our global food system. Small improvements have a profound impact when translated across the globe!

The greatest challenge in SCP production is species selection. How do you pick a microbe that grows quickly, is safe to eat, has nutritional value, requires minimal processing, and produces enough biomass to be economically feasible?

That’s the golden ticket that made Quorn, a microbial protein made from the filamentous fungus Fusarium venenatum, first isolated from soil in 1967.

(Quick vocab lesson: a filamentous fungus is a fungal species that produces mycelium, the root-like structure underneath many mushrooms. Yeasts are examples of non-filamentous fungi).

Why mushrooms instead of bacteria, algae, or yeast?

The general industry perspective at the time was that consumers would be more willing to try foods made from fungi, since fermented products like miso, soy sauce, and tempeh were so culturally widespread. Plus, many mushrooms have distinct, meat-like sensory properties, so maybe they’d make a pretty decent meat replacement if fermented.

With some ingenuinity, perseverance, and a bit of luck, the founding members of Quorn identified the edible fungus Fusarium venenatum as the ideal microbe to grow as food. Of course, it took some time to tune the process; F. venenatum is now grown on a well-defined feedstock (biologists often refer to the food for microbes as media) and industrial-scale fermentation technology.

Former President of the British Mycological Society wrote a lovely historical review of Quorn mycoprotein if you’d like a deeper read on the biology of F. venenatum. Turns out Quorn mycoprotein was so delicious we couldn’t just save it for our livestock—humans love it, too!

Quorn is a Big, Big Deal

Quorn dominates the edible SCP market, partially because of branding, but mostly because of technological innovation allowing them to produce large amounts of affordable protein. Many alternative proteins are cultivated in bioreactors, which are large stainless-steel tanks that have controlled agitation (or, the rate of mixing), nutrient flow, oxygen levels, pH, and waste removal. The Quorn bioreactor is particularly special in that the microbial culture is mixed by aeration rather than physical mixing, which can damage the cells. Protein is continually harvested from the bioreactor outlet and fresh nutrients are fed into the inlet. Check out Controlled Mould’s Quorn post for more information about their bioreactor technology.

I’ll remind you that most alternative protein products have only launched since the 21st century, with most products launched within the last ten years. But Quorn is celebrating its 40th birthday in 2025.

Maybe it’s just me, but to think that my parents could have seen Quorn in the freezer aisle at the grocery store while Tears for Fears topped the music charts is mind-blowing (maybe not my parents—Quorn was first launched only in the UK).

Wrap-Up

A short and sweet post for Quorn mycoprotein—next up in the timeline is MorningStar Farms’ plant-based burgers. See you in two weeks, Trash Talkers!

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"Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?" he asked.
"Begin at the beginning," the King said gravely.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Where should we start, then?

The Turn of the Century

No, not that one—I mean the turn of the 20th century.

In 1894, a publication in The Times estimated that nine feet of horse manure would bury London by 1950 due to the booming population. The article incited a mass panic, with the crux of the issue being the increasing number of horses (and consequently, the enormous amount of horse manure) needed to transport people and products. Moreover, these tens of thousands of horses would require many acres of land and massive amounts of agricultural feed, but people especially feared the stinking, ever-expanding piles of manure that would cover the city.

The average horse produces between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day. London alone had 50,000 horses for shipping and transportation in 1900. That’s anywhere from 750,000 to 1.75 million pounds of horse manure every day, just in one city.

Four years after the article’s release, dozens of international leaders, public officials, and urban planners convened in New York to discuss solutions for supporting this rapid urbanization (and preventing the accumulation of horse manure) over ten days. Overwhelmed and intimidated, officials abandoned the effort after only three days of discussion; they could not see an outcome in which we solved the problem; humanity would simply cease to exist in 50 years.

In a 2004 article, economist Stephen Davies coined this event, “The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894.”

And yet, 50 years later, civilization continued to thrive. London even avoided the predicted nine-foot pile of horse manure—the automobile soon phased out any need for the horse-and-buggy.

Why Are We Talking About Horse Manure?

Great question. As an alternative protein scientist, it’s important in my presentations, writings, and conversations to convince people why alternative proteins matter and a big reason is sustainability. In 100, 500, or 10,000 years, we can’t expect that agriculture will be exactly the same as it is now. Our current agricultural practices are unsustainable; we have a finite amount of arable land, but our economic system is built on the assumption that we have infinite resources. We don’t have enough food, water, energy, and land to support our growing population. Changes will be necessary, like diversifying our food supply with alternative proteins.

The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894 has become a popular example of demonstrating how a simple invention (the automobile) can solve a seemingly impossible problem (a gigantic, stinking pile of horse manure). We’re approaching a similar crisis in agriculture. Many journalists, policymakers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and just plain ol’ people are stressed about the fragility of our global food supply, and if we expect to exist a few hundred years from now, we need serious, large-scale innovation. We need the food version of the Ford Pinto (without the spontaneous combustion, of course) to save us from that pile of poop.

This is where alternative proteins come in. What food technologies are radical enough to revive our food system? Proteins that are produced in a fundamentally different fashion than conventional animal protein can help us build a more climate-friendly food supply. Cell-cultivated proteins like Vow’s cultivated foie gras, microbial proteins like Quorn and Spirulina, plant-based proteins like Impossible Meat, and other alternatives can be our Ford Pinto (again, no exploding, I promise!).

Churchill’s Prediction

Three decades after that failed urban planning conference, former UK prime minister Winston Churchill published a short essay titled “Fifty Years Hence,” detailing his vision for humanity 50 years from its time of writing in 19311.

In his essay, he focuses on humanity’s major technological advancements and details how they will undoubtedly enhance the quality of life. Here, I focus on his predictions about food:

“Microbes…will be fostered and made to work under controlled conditions, just as yeast is now….We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium. Synthetic food will, of course, also be used in the future. The new foods will be practically indistinguishable from the natural products from the outset, and any changes will be so gradual as to escape observation.”

He rightly mentions that microbial fermentation will become more precise and tunable in future society. Fermentation is the process that microbes (mostly bacteria and fungi) use to chemically break down sources of energy (like sugar) so they can grow and reproduce. In the process, they release byproducts like alcohol and carbon dioxide, which give rise to the characteristic flavors in beer, wine, kombucha, cheese, and more.

At the time of Churchill’s writing, scientists were just beginning to understand the mechanisms of yeast fermentation in wine, dairy, and brewing; just two years before this essay was published, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to two scientists studying biochemical reactions in yeast. Fermentation was an emerging technology that many people felt was a necessary research endeavor.

Now, fermentation has become an essential pillar of our food and healthcare systems. Beyond beer and wine, we harness microbial fermentation to produce insulin, food pigments and dyes, chocolate, cheese, soy sauce, vitamin B12, and emerging alternative proteins like chicken-free egg protein, cow-free milk, and even infant formula. The important distinction here is we have figured out how to precisely control fermentation over the last century. Humans have always, always fermented beer and wine, but for 99% of our history, those fermentations were uncontrolled and the resulting product taste was somewhat random. Now, we can produce targeted products and flavors, which is safer and cheaper!

Churchill also managed to predict our consumption of meat grown without raising a full chicken or cow. Animal farming is calorically inefficient; the average chicken requires 9 calories of energy input to produce only 1 calorie of chicken meat (and chickens are even regarded as the most efficient energy converters in the animal world). That’s a lot of lost energy! If we could produce the same amount of chicken, beef, pork, fish—whatever you like—with greater energy efficiency, we’d have more available land AND more protein to feed our population.

(I’m not going to touch on Churchill’s comment about synthetic food—I’ll leave it as an exercise for you lovely Trash Talkers.)

Companies like UPSIDE Foods, Mosa Meat, Vow, Good Meat, and many others have been leading the charge in bringing cell-cultivated proteins to market; these are meat products grown without the slaughter of a farm animal. While I won’t get too much into the details (full-scale cultivated meat post coming soon 😉), cultivated proteins essentially start with a stem cell sample from an animal (cow, chicken, etc.), and then scientists grow those cell cultures until they form a larger piece of meat! This process generally uses less land, water, and energy compared to conventional agriculture.

Fluke or Premonition?

How did Churchill conceive of such a technology in only 1931? We weren’t anywhere close to cell-cultivated protein!

Well, it probably wasn’t his original idea. His inspiration likely came from the famed birth of tissue engineering in the early 20th century, often attributed to the work of French biologist Alexis Carrel.

The field of tissue engineering involves using cells, biomaterials, and biochemical principles to study tissues like skin, heart, brain, and muscle. But the applications aren’t just medical—we can use tissue engineering principles in food, too! Cell-cultivated protein is a modified version of tissue engineering; instead of growing 3D tissues to study wound healing or drug delivery, we can use them to make meat.

Carrel’s famous contribution to tissue engineering was his immortal culture of chicken liver cells. What is an immortal cell culture?

Most cells are not immortal. Imagine you start a cell culture with one cell; you give it plenty of fresh nutrients to grow, grow, and grow until it divides to make two cells. Then those two cells keep growing until they divide and make two cells for a total of four. The process repeats until you have a Petri dish with millions of cells after just a few days.

But that first cell is still dividing, too! It doesn’t stop after the first division. It continues to divide, divide, and divide until it starts to act…funky. Soon, it doesn’t divide quite as quickly, it changes shape, and ultimately dies. After a while, your whole culture starts to die—the cells have reached their dividing limit!

Carrel managed to avoid this process by keeping the same cell culture alive for over 20 years, the first documented observation of an immortal cell line. TWENTY YEARS! 20! Read that again! The average lab cell culture is only kept alive for a few weeks at most!

Well, it might not have actually been so impressive. Many scientists years after this experiment have questioned Carrel’s observations; he may not have been truthful or his employees may have continually replenished the culture with fresh cells to make it appear immortal. Regardless of the integrity of his experiment, the concept still marks the beginning of tissue engineering.

Immortalized cell lines are absolutely real, though! Many biomedical scientists have observed spontaneous immortalization in mammalian and fish cells, though we still don’t understand what causes the immortalization. The most famous immortal cell line is the HeLa cell line, named for Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman who was treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins in the 1950s. Unfortunately, her cells were taken without her consent, and the thousands of scientific discoveries that use the HeLa cell line often fail to address the unethical isolation of her cells. Even Johns Hopkins’ official statement contains no apology or reparations to her and her family. I invite you to read more about HeLa cells and scientific consent here.

Science Must Right A Historical Wrong

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That’s it for the timeline, for now. We’ll pick up with the 1985 release of Quorn mycoprotein—the most intellectually mind-blowing alternative protein of our time, in my opinion!

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Having finished my first semester of grad school, I figured I’d reflect on my journey and get into the nitty-gritty of what it means to study for a PhD. What is a PhD, anyway?

A Helpful Visual

Matt Might, a professor in Computer Science at the University of Alabama Birmingham, created The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D. to explain what a PhD is to new and aspiring graduate students. [Matt has licensed the guide for sharing with special terms under the Creative Commons license.] It’s a simple visualization of what pursuing a PhD contributes to the global wealth of knowledge because it’s much easier to draw in pictures than to say in words.

Imagine a circle that contains all of human knowledge:

By the time you finish elementary school, you know a little:

By the time you finish high school, you know a bit more:

With a bachelor’s degree, you gain a specialty:

A master’s degree deepens that specialty:

Reading research papers takes you to the edge of human knowledge:

Once you’re at the boundary, you focus:

You push at the boundary for a few years:

Until one day, the boundary gives way:

And that dent you’ve made is called a Ph.D.:

Of course, the world looks different to you now:

So, don’t forget the bigger picture:

Keep pushing.

PhDs & Isolating

This model caught on very quickly on several social media platforms, and now Might provides PowerPoint, Youtube, and print versions of the drawings. He advertises it as a great gift for a recent PhD graduate or someone just starting their grad school journey.

I think what this visual does best is illustrate the “boundary-pushing” of a PhD. I completely empathize with and understand that I’m studying something that nobody else on the planet is studying in the same way. This is easily >90% of my motivation for coming to work.

There are two potential pitfalls of this series of drawings: 1) the fear factor and 2) the faulty depiction of specializing.

Pushing at the boundary of human knowledge may sound like a solitary activity when it isn’t. This can instill a pretty strong sense of impending doom for young students.

How am I expected to discover something completely novel?

Am I supposed to do this alone? Who can I rely on?

In the first few weeks of my starting at Penn State, a professor warned my class about doing science in isolation (partially as an excuse for us to work on homework together); 100 years ago, science may have been done by a single man hunched over a lab bench for days on end, until he left his hovel to announce a discovery to the world. But science isn’t like that anymore. Science is done in partnership, in collaboration. Otherwise, it doesn’t get done.

So, while pushing the boundary of human knowledge is primarily the responsibility of the student, it doesn’t mean it is only performed by the student. It takes a village to do a PhD.

Specializing

When I was putting together my applications for grad school, I was under the impression that what you studied and researched in your Master’s and PhD programs was what you would study for the rest of your career (if you chose to stay in academia). I read many, many faculty profiles that all detailed the same journey:

“In my PhD, I studied [material or process]. In my postdoc, I expanded on that by manipulating [material or process] in a different way. Now, as a professor, I continue to manipulate [material or process] and adapt it to different applications.”

I understood this to be a formula that every academic followed. Start research on a thing, continue researching the thing, continue researching the thing, eventually retire.

This is not how it works AT ALL. To my (and your) delight.

Academics are constantly pivoting in their research—that’s what keeps the funding and students coming in. Many professors in my department, including my advisor, have made major pivots in their research directions over the years. Some have even switched fields to find a career niche better suited to their interests and expertise.

So, while the PhD is intended to create specialists, it doesn’t mean you’ll specialize in the same thing for your whole life. I’ve learned so much from my peers, hobbies, the media, art—yes, I specialize, but I am a lifelong student.

I wish Might had included an alternative version of his specialization drawing; many people have diverging expertise and interests, and not all knowledge is gained solely from higher education. His final drawing might be more inclusive and accurate if it looked something like this:

What Do You Do All Day?

To those outside of grad school, getting a PhD may sound ambiguous or confusing. A lot of people seem to think I’m just doing my undergraduate work again, in a different discipline. The main distinction between a graduate student and an undergraduate student is that graduate students are employees.

So what do I do all day at my job? Keep in mind that this is from a STEM PhD's perspective, but the formula is largely the same across fields.

PhD students have three main responsibilities:

1. Work on your research project. This is expected to take the majority of your time. Reading publications, planning and performing experiments, analyzing data, applying for grant funding (to do more experiments), publishing your work in peer-reviewed journals, and writing your dissertation. The main point is that this responsibility, by itself, is an entire job. Probably two jobs.

2. Take classes to complete your degree requirements. This is the same as undergraduate coursework, but graduate courses are generally more in-depth, of higher complexity, and applications-focused. Sometimes, you take undergraduate courses if the course content is valuable for your project. The total number of credits required for PhDs varies from school to school. I’m expected to take about 25 credits (8-9 classes) in the first 1-2 years of my degree. I’ve known students in other programs who took more classes, and some who took fewer classes. This, by itself, is an entire job.

3. Teach. Almost every PhD program requires assistant teaching in some capacity. Some programs require that PhD students teach a class every semester, other programs might require every other semester, or even just teach if you’re in between sources of funding. The workload of TAing depends on the course you get assigned and the professor you’re working with. This, by itself, is also an entire job.

While these are the explicit responsibilities of each student, there are many implicit ones: lab management, seeking out professional development opportunities, attending trainings, traveling to and presenting at conferences, mentoring undergraduate students, and working on side research projects. It’s easy to see how grad students’ schedules fill up quickly. We wear a lot of hats!

That’s what drew me to apply for a PhD in the first place. Mentally, I require a lot of forms of stimuli to stay engaged with my work. It’s amazing that I can take breaks from some responsibilities to work on others and then come back to them later. It keeps me awake, thinking, and motivated.

How Do I Know a PhD is Right for Me?

I’m not giving advice. Just sharing my experience. The justification for a PhD is different for each and every person.

I know a PhD is right for me because I’ve become frustrated by how much time my classes take away from my research. I love in-class learning, but man, it is so much more boring compared to my project. This is a bit of a silly reason, but it’s an indicator that I belong in research (though I’ll always be a student to some extent).

I know a PhD is right for me because I get excited thinking about where my project will take me. What new techniques will I learn, who will I collaborate with, and what will I contribute to the field?

I know a PhD is right for me because I feel at home amongst other scientists. I recently traveled to Austin, TX to collaboratively address food safety challenges with other cultivated meat experts. While I was nervous as an early career professional in alternative proteins, my apprehension settled as soon as we got to talking about science and the future of the field. I was meant to do this. I was meant to be a scientist.

In essence, a PhD is the ultimate demonstration of someone’s ability to critically evaluate our current understanding of a topic and subsequently contribute new knowledge to deepen that understanding.

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After several real-life months (or eight in-game years) of wine-making, cheese-aging, fruit-dehydrating, pickle-preserving, sheep-shearing, truffle-picking, cow-milking—you get the point—I’ve reached 100%—or, Perfection—on my original Stardew Valley save file from the game’s release on Mac in 2016.

A whopping 0.8% of players reach 100%, a feat which requires:

• Reaching level 10 in all skills

• Cooking 81 recipes

• Shipping 155 Farm & Forage items

• Crafting 149 items (which implies obtaining their recipes as well, often exclusive to villager quests)

• Catching 72 fish

• Completing the Adventurer’s Guild monster slayer quest by killing:

  • 1000 slimes

  • 150 void spirits

  • 200 bats

  • 50 skeletons

  • 80 cave insects

  • 30 duggies

  • 500 dust sprites

  • 60 rock crabs

  • 100 mummies

  • 50 pepper rex dinosaurs

  • 250 serpents

  • 150 magma sprites

• Finding all 130 hidden Golden Walnuts

• Building all four biome Obelisks, a total cost of 4,000,000 g

• Building the Golden Clock (10,000,000 g)

• Reach max friendship with all 34 eligible villagers

• Obtaining the seven rare Stardrops

• A ridiculous amount of mental fortitude.

To give you a reference just on the amount of gold required for Perfection (not including the behind-the-scenes cost of paying for supplies), a strawberry takes 8 days to grow and sells for 120-160 g, depending on its star rating. It would take 87,500 gold-rated strawberries to earn 14,000,000 g, enough for the golden clock and obelisk construction costs. Of course, selling raw materials is not the most efficient way to make gold, and many who came before me have figured the best get-rich-quick schemes. That’s beside the point.

Eric Barone, Stardew Valley’s sole developer, took heavy inspiration from well-established, wildly successful games like Harvest Moon, Terraria, and Animal Crossing when designing the game; however, in my mind, it stands alone in the genre.

The attention to detail, atmosphere, and replayability are all exceptional, but those qualities aren’t unique to Stardew Valley. Many cozy and farming RPGs have achieved fame in the industry like Sun Haven and Coral Island.

However, no other games have managed to achieve the same level of emotional realism and heartfelt connection. Each character is wildly different in likes and dislikes, career goals, mannerisms, and upbringings, but what makes Stardew Valley so captivating is the characters’ flaws and problems are real.

Kent, a veteran whom the player meets starting in Year 2, battles post-traumatic stress disorder while raising two sons. Shane struggles with his mental health and tends to keep others at arm’s length. Sebastian has trouble accepting his mother’s second marriage and resents his stepfather, Demetrius, and half-sister, Maru. Evelyn and George adapt to disability in old age, having lost their daughter and subsequently taking in their grandson. Mayor Lewis blames himself for how the town has fallen into disrepair and struggles to accept that he deserves happiness from a secret romance that may threaten his public image. Pam struggles with alcoholism and maintaining her relationship with her adult daughter, Penny. Linus, a homeless person, sees himself as an outcast and has become extremely distrustful. Sisters Emily and Haley live on their own while their parents travel the world without knowing when they’ll be home (Okay, maybe this one isn’t so realistic.). The town wizard, M. Rasmodius, lives a life of isolation on the outskirts of the Valley, watching his illegitimate (either Abigail or her mother, Caroline, it’s never quite confirmed) daughter grow up from afar. Even the player has recently experienced loss: losing their grandfather, suddenly inheriting the farm, and adjusting to their new life in the Valley.

To make a crude comparison to another leader in the genre, Animal Crossing: all 413 villagers have one out of eight possible personality types. There just isn’t the same level of empathetic connection for the player (and the game wasn’t ever meant to do that, to be fair). The most real-world issue in Animal Crossing is that Tom Nook scams you into paying millions in loans, and he makes his twin nephews run the local store. Arguably child labor. However, you do slowly befriend the introverted Sable after speaking with her daily for several weeks, a friendship that still tugs at my own heartstrings almost 10 years later. The rest of the game’s conversations are something akin to “I can’t wait to take a nap later!” or “Want this green-striped shirt?”

But beyond the limited emotional realism, Animal Crossing still has a major “achievement” component: catch all of the fish and bugs, complete the Museum fossil collection, buy all of the rare and valuable art pieces, collect all DIY crafting recipes, and receive the top rating from the Happy Home Academy—then what? Of course, the player has full creative freedom to decorate their island or town however they please, but the replayability component of the game is decidedly lacking compared to Stardew Valley.

This isn’t at all a slight on Animal Crossing; I have a collective 1,500 hours of play across the franchise. I’m writing this post at my desk next to my Animal Crossing bell bag pen holder, Rover and K.K. Slider plushies, Punchy holographic stickers, and my Nook’s Cranny beanie that I wear for emotional support every single day of the fall and winter seasons while wearing my Nintendo-licensed Animal Crossing socks. However, Animal Crossing caters to a smaller variety of players compared to Stardew Valley. This is what has propelled Stardew Valley, a game developed by a single computer science engineer, to “stardom” in such a short time.

Stardew Valley has combat, romance, crafting, mystery-solving, farming, fishing, foraging—whatever you want to pursue, you can in Stardew Valley. It has brought millions (literally) of new players into the cozy RPG genre since its 2016 release. And all of those too-real issues from each character I listed—those get better, too.

Kent begins to feel more at home following his return from war as he grows closer with the player. Shane finds joy again taking care of his rare blue chickens, a hobby he has missed for a long, long time because of his depression. Sebastian learns to manage his social anxiety and vocalizes his dreams of moving to the big city. Evelyn and George find peace in each other’s company and raise a wonderful grandson, Alex. Mayor Lewis works together with the player to bring new, bustling life into the Valley. Pam starts a new life after the player helps upgrade her mobile home, gets a job as the town bus driver, and finds faith in Yoba, an in-game deity. Linus starts to trust again and befriends both the player and Leo, a young boy who lives in a treehouse next to Linus’ tent. Emily rescues and rehabilitates an injured parrot, and she teaches the player to sew. Haley hangs on to her family, remembering her great-grandparents with a cherished bracelet, and learns independence living with her sister. The wizard shares his interest in the supernatural with the player, dutifully documenting the strange happenings in the Valley, making potions and reading old texts in his pastime. Eventually, the spirit of the player’s grandpa visits the farm to congratulate you on how far you’ve come and how proud he is.

Most importantly, the player has an active role in the fate of the town and its residents; rebuilding the community center, driving out the predatory Joja corporation, contributing to the town’s library and museum collection, and other community initiatives vastly improve the quality of life for everyone in the Valley. Without you, the town is static with little potential for growth. As the player, though day-to-day you may not notice it, you are healing the town and its residents.

So, here it is. My letter to the greatest game of all time, the game that has consistently brought me the most joy in my eight years of play time, a game that stands next to Tetris, Pong, and Minecraft in fame and stature, the game that tested my patience, the game that made me feel.

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What Did You Say?

Yep, holographic meatloaf. You might recall, in an excellent episode of Spongebob Squarepants, Plankton comes home to his computer wife Karen and a tasty plate of his favorite dinner, holographic meatloaf. He excitedly drives his Plankton-sized fork into an odd, ghostly rendition of homemade meatloaf, a futuristic “whoosh” sounding each time he picks up a bite—food made from air.

Other mainstream entertainment has featured futuristic food made from air, too. Fans of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series might remember the Nutrimatic Drink Dispenser, a device that produces a customized drink based on your neurological signals. The beloved FLDSMDFR (pronounced phonetically) from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs can produce complex meals like cheeseburgers, donuts, spaghetti, and of course meatballs from clouds. In the Star Trek universe, replicators synthesize complete meals just from energy. Even the Jetsons eat meals condensed into tiny pills or instantly produced out of thin air, reimagining the future of food culture with their Dial-a-Meal and food-o-matic systems.

Now, we might get our fair share of Plankton’s holographic meatloaf. Maybe you’ve seen an article like this one in the past few months, featuring companies that are growing edible protein from air, like Air Protein (aptly named, I might add) and Solar Foods.

Value Proposition

Why bother trying to make protein from air? You might already know, intuitively; this fermentation—the chemical breakdown of air by microbes—requires very little land, and we can make protein from air anywhere with a fermentation facility (or the potential to build one). Conventional agriculture requires arable, grazable land, limiting its capacity for protein production. With fermented protein, there is more available land to produce food, and fermentation facilities can run on renewable energy, reducing environmental impact even further. Air protein fermentation is also a carbon negative process, meaning it removes carbon from the atmosphere, helping to mitigate the effects of climate change.

Science

How do people make air from protein? Let’s break it down (pun fully intended).

Although we may forget in our everyday lives, air does actually contain “stuff.” Air is full of oxygen, carbon dioxide, water vapor, and nitrogen—everything that microbes need to survive! As microbes digest these gases, they grow and grow and grow, until it’s time to harvest, purify, and dry the protein.

The inspiration for microbial protein from air hails from NASA; the original pitch included using carbon dioxide that the astronauts exhaled for biomass fermentation, creating a completely circular process for protein production. As astronauts breathed in oxygen and exhaled carbon dioxide, the carbon dioxide would be fed to microbes to produce biomass, adding another available source of protein in space. Though, at the time, the major barrier was psychological; astronauts didn’t want to eat food like that.

But times are changing, and these novel foods are back on our plates. Companies are utilizing novel branding strategies to change our perception of microbial protein. Take a look at some of Air Protein’s marketing tools found on their website:

To make protein from air, companies grow microbial cultures in bioreactors, or large, usually stainless steel, closed containers. Bioreactors allow scientists to precisely control growth conditions like temperature, the rate of nutrient flow, pH, and culture density. Scientists first clean the bioreactor (to prevent any unwanted growth) and load it with liquid nutrients, called broth. When the culture reaches a certain threshold of growth, they empty the contents of the bioreactor and separate the broth from the microbes, resulting in a paste-like mass of cells.

After the fermentation, they break open the cell membranes, also called lysis (pronounced lye-sis, rhymes with crisis), in order to access the proteins that are inside the cells. But there’s a lot of other stuff inside cells, too, so they have to separate the protein from the cell debris (mostly water, cell membrane remnants, DNA, and other small molecules) through purification steps. The extracted protein is then dried to create a flour that can be added to baked goods or turned into other functional foods spanning dairy, meat, and grains. Some companies even use this protein flour as a supplement in pet food or agricultural feed.

Closing

Let’s just take a moment and peruse the myriad of futuristic food featured in our favorite films.

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Don’t Think Too Hard

In my first post, I briefly mentioned plant-based protein as an example of an alternative protein (remember, alternative proteins are plant-based or food technology alternatives to meat). A relative who read my post said to me:

“I’ve never eaten a plant-based protein.”

“Well, have you eaten a bean?”

Or, for that matter, nuts, lentils, peas, chia seeds, or quinoa? Don’t think too hard about it; not all alternative proteins are fancy technologies. Sometimes, they’re just beans. Regular ol’ plants. But, let’s take a deeper dive.

So, welcome to the first installment of The Alt Protein Breakdown, a series where I dissect different kinds of alternative proteins. We’re starting with plant-based proteins—some of the oldest in the book.

History of “Plant-Based”

The term “plant-based” was originally coined by nutritionist Dr. Thomas Colin Campbell starting in the 1980s. Campbell, an extremely prolific scientist, has dedicated his life to advocating for a diet full of whole foods, low fats, and plants; in fact, his own diet is “99% vegan,” but he prefers the term plant-based. Now, alternative protein companies, consumers, enthusiasts, and researchers alike apply the term to plant-based proteins, which are exactly what they sound like—protein alternatives made from plants. Plant-based proteins exist on a spectrum spanning two broad categories: meat mimics, which aim to replicate the taste, texture, smell, and appearance of traditional meat—or any animal product, like cheese, eggs, milk, and yogurt—and non-meat mimics.

Non-Meat Mimics

Humans have relied on plant-based proteins long before we started calling them that. In other words, these are proteins that do not aim to recreate the sensory experience of eating meat; they have different textures, flavor profiles, and appearances. In addition to farming trusty veggies, fruits, legumes and nuts, our ancestors fermented plants into more robust proteins. Tofu, made from soy, is over 2,000 years old; tempeh, a soy-and-edible-fungi hybrid, is estimated at 400-1,000 years old. Both tofu and tempeh are popular plant-based choices for home chefs, as they can be roasted, sautéd, fried, and put into soups or stews.

Both tofu and tempeh have a strong soy flavor, which might not be appealing to every eater. Fortunately for us, there is so much nutritional and culinary diversity in the world of plant based proteins! For vegetarians, vegans, and flexitarians—people who eat a semi-vegetarian diet—beans are often a major dietary staple, since they are high in protein and fiber, shelf-stable, affordable, and easy to prepare. There are thousands of bean varieties to satisfy even the pickiest of eaters.

Beyond beans, other substantial plant-based proteins include nuts like almonds, peanuts, and cashews; chia, hemp, flax, and pumpkin seeds; and protein powders, many of which have soy protein. And remember—just because something is a plant doesn’t mean it’s automatically a fruit or a vegetable! Many grains also have high protein content, like quinoa and oats.

While whole food plant-based proteins are amazing, many people struggle to give up the sensory experience of eating meat. That’s where meat mimics come in!

Meat Mimics

Meat mimics are proteins that recapitulate the experience of eating meat through texture, appearance, taste, and aroma. Meat mimics can be homemade or commercially produced; you may have heard of seitan (pronounced “say-tan”), a plant-based protein growing in popularity made from wheat gluten. Another popular homemade meat mimic is pulled jackfruit, which looks and tastes very similar to pulled or barbecued meat when tossed in the right sauce.

If you’re interested in eating plant-based meat or animal mimics, you don’t have to go full caveman and make them yourself; there are plenty of options at the grocery store. Animal product mimics like Just Egg, a scrambled egg replacement, are readily available, not to mention the plethora of plant-based milk (almond, coconut, soy, macadamia nut, and rice, just to name a few), yogurt, and cheese mimics lining the aisles of the dairy section.

The most prominent meat mimics on the market are Beyond Meat, Impossible Meat, and Quorn (which is a special case for us Trash Talkers—I’m saving Quorn for another post).

Beyond Meat, founded in 2009, sells plant-based meats including burgers, meatballs, steak tips, sausages, and ground chicken products. The main plant proteins in these meat mimics are peas, lentils, and beans. They make a pretty remarkable burger.

What makes this meat mimic better than a bean burger or a veggie burger? It actually tastes like meat. Humans are exceptionally good at detecting small differences between food products, especially foods that we eat often and in large quantities, like meat. We’re sensitive to small changes in texture, taste, and appearance, and veggie burgers just don’t do the trick most of the time. While the taste and texture experience of Beyond Meat isn’t 100% the same as real meat (they have a pretty distinct nutty flavor), I’d have no problem eating a Beyond Burger any day of the week. They look spot on, though.

Impossible Meat makes very similar products but with one key distinction. Like Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods makes many ground meat products like burgers, sausages, meatballs, chicken nuggets, and even prepared meals. Impossible Meat products have soy and potato proteins; like most soy products, they have a pretty strong soy flavor that can be off-putting for many customers. The strong flavor soy imparts is a common challenge for plant-based products across the board.

These two products target the same audience, but market research suggests Impossible Meat is taking more and more of the plant-based meat market. Initially, that was due to a simple price difference—Impossible Meat was cheaper on product launch. In response, Beyond Meat decreased their price to stay competitive, but consumers often still chose Impossible Meat. Both companies have presence in commercial products, too, like the Impossible Whopper from Burger King and KFC’s Beyond Fried Chicken. In late 2023, their market shares were almost equal.

Why do people like Impossible Meat? Let’s talk about heme.

Impossible Meat has a distinct, bloody, umami flavor that Beyond Meat is arguably lacking. This bloody flavor does a better job of imitating traditional meat, which is essential to influence consumers to choose a plant-based meat over an animal-based one. A compound called heme (think hemoglobin, the iron-containing oxygen carrier in our blood) gives rise to this unique savory taste and aroma. Plant cells contain small amounts of heme, but not nearly enough to impart a meaty flavor; how does Impossible Foods do it?

The answer is a pretty amazing biotechnological feat, starting with DNA. DNA contains special, detailed instructions that tell cells how to make proteins, including hemoglobin, which contains four hemes per protein unit. Scientists at Impossible Foods isolated the portion of DNA that contains the instructions for making heme, generally called a plasmid, and gave that plasmid to a yeast cell (actually, millions of yeast cells). The yeast picks up the plasmid and starts making heme, which they can later harvest and use in their plant-based meat products. The original source of the heme DNA is actually a soybean—once again, beans to the rescue!

Soy Long & Farewell

Plant-based proteins will continue to evolve as consumer needs and preferences change. If you’re a meat eater looking to diversify your diet with some added plants, take a crack at making jackfruit “pulled-pork,” seitan deli meat, or fried tofu. And if that sounds like biting off more than you can chew, ready-to-eat proteins like Impossible Meat, Beyond Meat, and many other plant-based brands have you covered.

A Strange Aside on Beans

Famous mathematician Pythagoras (as in, the Pythagorean theorem for right triangles) was a vegetarian who refrained from eating beans, for he feared their chewy and fibrous texture was too similar to that of human flesh. Some records say he believed that beans contained the human spirit, and consuming them would thus be cannibalism.

According to a record originating from Greek historian Neanthes, his fear of beans was so intense that it led to his death. While fleeing a violent attack at a meeting with his followers, he came to a field of fava beans and, rather than run through it to escape his captors, stopped running.

He was captured and killed at the foot of the bean field.

Note, there are contradictory records detailing his death—he may not have died because of beans (and for the sake of the field of mathematics, I sincerely hope he did not).

So. Have you eaten a bean?

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Overview

It’s easy to fall behind in grad school with the huge amount of responsibilities ranging from reading literature, giving presentations, planning experiments, applying for funding, analyzing data, assistant teaching, and more; with a few organizational tools, I’ve found a few ways to enhance my productivity and take the stress out of planning while keeping diligent records of my work. Below are my tips and tricks, but I’d love to hear what productivity tools you use, too!

Notion

Notion is a free or paid productivity tool that can do pretty much anything you want. I use three Notion “pages:” Dashboard, 1:1 Notes, and Conference Timeline Tracker. I’ve seen other notion users with homework trackers, chore charts, social media content calendars, trip planners, and a whole lot more. You can customize fonts; add content blocks; embed images, links, and Widgets; add custom icons and banners to the top of your Notion pages; and integrate with other Google-owned apps like Slack, Trello, and Google Calendar. You can also tag almost any Notion entry with “properties” which can be links, text, dates, currency, and custom tags.

For everything but the Conference Timeline, I use templates, many of which are free on Notion’s website. My favorite and most-used page by far is my Dashboard, which organizes my tasks by priority level and category. I keep a few cute pictures and use pastel colors to bring some positive energy to my workday.

Notion has a web app, desktop app, and mobile app, which means I can have access to my updated to-do list everywhere I go. Tasks are categorized under Research, Coursework, Teaching, Service, or Personal, and then further delineated by priority level: Major Projects, Quick Wins, Fill-ins, and Thankless Tasks. I rarely add tasks to my schedule that are Thankless Tasks, and I try to prioritize Quick Wins. Most of my total time is spent on Major Projects, which are usually my research aims. This is singlehandedly the most important tool I have used in my college career.

This semester, I’ve also taken advantage of a free Notion template for taking notes in 1:1 meetings. You could easily do this in any document software like Google Docs, OneNote, or Word, but since I always have Notion open, it’s convenient to keep my meeting notes there. This page has a button that automatically generates a meeting notes template with the person’s name, date, agenda, notes, and action items, which is faster for me than creating a new document for every meeting. The meeting notes are also collapsable to keep the page less cluttered.

My Conference Timeline is just a spreadsheet, which would be perfectly fine done in Excel, but (again) I always have Notion open so it’s convenient to keep everything in one place.

Miro

Usually a collaborative tool, I use Miro to diagram and visually organize my experiment designs. Miro allows you to create flow diagrams, link images and files, add virtual sticky notes, add comments, and even create mockups for websites or apps. You can share boards with other people and give them edit access, but I use mine solo. I also have Miro embedded into my Notion dashboard, so I can see a quick snapshot of what I was last working on.

My only major qualm with Miro is it’s poor loading time, but the desktop app runs smoothly enough that I continue to use it. In the past, I’ve used other diagramming tools like Figma (or even just Powerpoint), but Miro seems to have the best integration of outside media like pictures and files to help me fully flesh out an idea.

LinkedIn

A no-brainer for most professionals these days. I started my LinkedIn in undergrad to document my work experience in a way that’s more long-term than a résumé. As a grad student, LinkedIn has been indispensable in building a global network of researchers and leaders in my field that help me as an early-career scientist. After a webinar, presentation, or casual coffee chat, I’ll send a LinkedIn connection request to a colleague with a friendly note identifying myself. It can feel intimidating at first, but once you start to populate your profile, you’ll realize just how much you’ve already accomplished!

A quick recommendation: especially as someone with a network of early twenty-somethings, a lot of posts tend to follow the same format. “I’m excited to announce…” with a company logo and a picture of someone in professional attire. While I love to read about people’s new jobs, initiatives, and accomplishments, I’d like to see more variety from my peers on LinkedIn. Brainstorm unique ways to start your posts, how you can best take advantage of adding pictures or links, and how you can leverage your network to serve you in the long-run.

Zotero

A citation manager is nonnegotiable as a researcher. Zotero is a free Google Chrome extension and desktop app that will import publications and automatically generate citations and bibliographies for you. You can easily sort papers by category, and they have a large variety of citation formats available. Zotero also stores the PDF version of publications, so you can open them in the app directly if you want a look at the full paper text. As soon as you press the Zotero extension in Chrome while you have a paper open, it automatically records information like author, journal, publication year, volume, issue, abstract text, and everything else you need to cite a source.

Zotero does also have cloud storage, though it’s pretty limited in the free version. I haven’t personally tried other citation managers like Mendeley or Endnote, but Zotero has been so simple I haven’t felt the need to go looking for another resource.

OneNote

It might sound silly, but I’d never taken advantage of a dedicated notetaking software until I started grad school. I use OneNote to keep my digital library (peer-reviewed journal articles, protocols, class notes, and a scanned copy of my lab notebook) organized. When I read an academic paper, I prefer to take notes directly on the printed paper, but I need a way to document that I did, in fact, read it, and be able to reference my notes at a later date.

I’ve been taking notes on paper, using a flag or page marker sticky note to categorize the paper, and then uploading a scan to OneNote. Then, I electronically tag the OneNote entry with the same category as what’s on the post-it note and add the paper citation to the entry. My OneNote filing system matches my paper filing system at my desk, which means I can find both the paper and electronic version in just a few seconds.

Many of my classmates use OneNote or Goodnotes with their iPads and tablets; if I had one, I would write directly on the electronic copy of the paper and store my notes the same way. Documentation is a high priority in research; if I lost access to my physical lab notebook, class notes, or any of my protocols, I can easily access them electronically with this system and make sure I haven’t lost any important data.

The PARA Method

While not a physical tool, the Projects, Areas, References, and Archive (PARA) method is a useful organizational framework for things like file and inbox organization. Recommended to me by my friend , I sort my Outlook inbox using the PARA method, which keeps my inbox emails to a minimum and (as a bonus) optimizes the loading time of the Outlook app.

Projects are initiatives that have a definite end date, like a class taken during the fall semester. Areas are similar, but are usually ongoing and don’t have an easily identifiable “end.” References are templates and important documents that you may return to frequently, and tasks are moved into the Archive when they’re finished. For example, I have my Fall 2024 classes listed under Projects, but I have club membership and responsibility tasks sorted under Areas. I only have a handful of emails saved in References like my degree requirements and some positive feedback that I like to look back on. I also use Outlook’s category feature to add another way to search for specific emails.

Before coming to Penn State, I hadn’t used any organizational method in my inbox, which made it really hard to search for emails once they were more than a few days old. I highly recommend using a simple folder system in Outlook or Gmail.

Writing Materials

Despite all of my electronic resources, I still find regular need for writing things down physically, and I love to collect stationery. For the last few years I’ve used the Poppin ballpoint pens, which smear a little but are overall pretty smooth. I use regular ol’ Post-it notes to write down quick tasks that are usually lower priority and aren’t included in my Notion dashboard.

I keep a blank bullet journal lying around in case I need to take physical meeting notes, which is usually the case if I don’t want my laptop to be between me and the person with whom I’m speaking. My favorite bullet journal brand to date is LEUCHTTERM1917.

ChatGPT

I didn’t use ChatGPT in undergrad because I associated it with cheating—many people still use it to cheat in academic settings—but now I’ve certainly come around to using it with some restrictions. I only use ChatGPT as a preliminary search tool, similar to how I would use wikipedia, but for more complex questions. I do a lot of ideating for my experiment designs, which ChatGPT can help me screen and point me to reading material for deeper learning. I don’t think it’s a great tool since it’s pretty easy to tell if something is ChatGPT writing, but there are probably ways to write efficient writing prompts to help it match your writing style. If you’re curious, I asked ChatGPT to write a short paragraph explaining my initial reluctance and my recent change of mind:

“Initially, I was reluctant to use ChatGPT, unsure of its value and wary of relying on AI for tasks like research. However, as I began exploring it for quick, preliminary searches, I found it surprisingly useful in jumpstarting my workflow. Now, I often use it to brainstorm ideas, clarify concepts, and gather initial insights before diving deeper into academic sources. It has become a helpful tool for ideation, saving time when I need to get a broad overview of unfamiliar topics. While I still rely on primary research for detailed analysis, ChatGPT complements my process by providing a solid starting point.”

Not that bad, but a little overly-formal in some places.

I use the free version because I doubt I could get much more out of the paid version, but I know some peers and professors that have a subscription. There are other AI models out there specifically tuned for academic research, but from what I’ve seen, most of them only have paid versions.

I’m 50/50 on my confidence in language learning models. They have a high carbon footprint since they’re trained on datasets with billions of datapoints, and they’re still not very accurate. I have little faith in its ability to convey any reproducible emotional qualities; if you ask it for opinions, it usually just tells you your idea is good as long as it’s marginally comprehensible. I am by no means a resident AI expert, but I’m hoping we’ll see significant improvements in AI’s writing capabilities in the near future.

Takeaways

Thankfully, there are a plethora of tools available now to grad students that can help streamline the grad school experience and enhance productivity; these are just a few of those tools that I’ve found success with over the years. I’d love to hear how other students and professionals have kept good organizational habits. Leave a comment below with your favorite tools, whether it be software, your favorite pen, or even habits for maintaining mindfulness!

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Jack of All Trades, Master of None

Well, not really all trades. But a decent handful.

Now, I’m a recent college graduate studying for my Ph.D. in Food Science at Penn State; but let’s go back a little further.

1. Washed-Up Athlete

Before I used “scientist” as a label, I was a competitive travel softball player for 10 years in the Mid-Atlantic region. Though I had a bit of an unconventional build for an athlete, I brought precise decision-making and consistency to the field. I primarily played shortstop (though I stand 6' tall), but grew to enjoy playing almost all positions in the later stages of my career.

I say washed-up because it is deathly embarrassing to think about my capabilities on the field after being away from softball for 6 years and counting. I earned my fair share of shiny trophies, but nothing compares to the friendships and competitive spirit softball gifted me. I left the sport near the end of high school to apply to college and work part-time at a local pie shop, but I’ll always love softball.

2. Interdisciplinary Student

A permanent part of my identity. I went to college at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA, where I studied in the Integrated Degree in Engineering, Arts and Sciences (IDEAS) honors program. IDEAS students design their own intercollegiate course of study and take eight discussion-based engineering ethics seminars throughout their degree.

An incredible opportunity, the IDEAS program gave me the freedom to explore my interests without the restrictions of a traditional major like biological sciences or chemical engineering, though I took courses that aligned very closely with those majors. I was able to integrate knowledge across diverse fields while still building a foundation in disciplines like molecular biology, environmental science, chemical engineering, and electrical engineering.

In the later stages of the IDEAS degree, students identify a theme encompassing their coursework; my IDEAS coursework and research experience led me to the theme of “Food Science, Sustainability, & Alternative Proteins.” I ultimately earned my B.S. in Integrated Natural Science and Engineering before starting graduate school at Penn State.

3. Alternative Protein Researcher

While at Lehigh (and still at Penn State), I joined a cultivated meat research project in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Cultivated meat, or meat grown from cells, is a novel food with a smaller environmental footprint compared to conventionally farmed-proteins like beef, pork, chicken, and seafood. Cultivated meat also has public health benefits like controlling the spread of disease and managing antibiotic resistance, and it addresses ethical issues in industrial farming practices.

My work is in developing “scaffolds” for cultivated meat. Scaffolds are supportive structures (semi-solid hydrogels like gelatin, small carrier particles, or even fungal mycelium) that help cells grow and differentiate into muscle, fat, and connective tissue (all parts of meat!). More about this later.

My research in cultivated meat and my passion for sustainability led me to the alt protein space, which broadly includes plant-based protein, fermented protein, cultivated protein, insect protein, and even molecular farming. Alternative proteins are opportunities to add resilience to our food system since their growth isn’t reliant on arable land, and they can help feed our rapidly-growing global population with more resource efficiency than conventional agriculture.

Being in alt protein is exciting because most products are very, very new, and the field is evolving fast. Plant-based products have carved out a dedicated space in the food market in the last 10-15 years; most people are familiar with what they’re made of and what they taste like. Quorn, a fermented protein, is about 40 years old, but new fermented products like Spirulina are still popping up. Cultivated proteins are the newest—only about 10 years old, and only recently FDA-approved in 2023!

4. Keeb Enthusiast

I’ve always loved playing video games, but in the last five years I fell deep into the rabbit hole of building custom mechanical keyboards (keebs) after I bought my first PC. When you go custom, you have full freedom over color and design, sound, and material type of your keyboard. From the hobby, I learned to solder and have slowly developed an eye for design, though I’m still learning how to pick keyboard parts and tune them for a specific typing sound and feel.

Though it may require some trial and error to figure out what typing sound and feel you enjoy, know that there are endless options out there! The community has been steady growing (over 1 million members on r/mechanicalkeyboards), and, thankfully, prices for parts have decreased significantly since the pandemic. As of October 2024, I have three boards built: Gingham60 Picnic Edition with Kiwi switches and Cherry Taro keycaps; Neo80 in Navy with Durock Lotus switches and GMK Rudy keycaps; and a GMMK Pro in White Ice with Zealios v2 switches and MiTo Pegaso keycaps. I’ve got another in the works—lots and lots of more keyboard content coming!

But Better Than a Master of One!

I’m someone who enjoys diverse hobbies and experiences, spanning arts and crafts, food and food technology, science culture, and a whole lot more. Whether you’re here for the science, to learn about sustainability, or just a bit of grad school camaraderie, I’m excited to share my experiences with you!