1964년 NASA의 우주 식량 연구에서 시작된 기술이 핀란드의 식품 테크 스타트업 솔라 푸즈(Solar Foods)에 의해 상업화되고 있습니다. 이 회사는 수소와 이산화탄소를 활용해 박테리아를 발효시켜 필수 아미노산이 풍부한 고품질 단백질을 생산하는 공장을 가동 중입니다. 이 혁신은 극한 환경이나 기후 변화 대응을 위한 미래 식량 산업의 중요한 대안으로 평가받습니다.
번역된 본문
헬싱키 외곽에서 자연스럽고 확장 가능한 단백질을 박테리아 발효만으로 얻어내는 혁신적인 공장이 가동 중입니다. 이것이 미래의 식량이 될 수 있을까요?
핀란트 반타에서 시작된 이야기입니다. 우주 공간에서 숨을 쉬는 것은 쉽지 않습니다. 국제 우주 정거장의 우주비행사들을 살리기 위해 전기 분해가 사용됩니다. 이는 우주 왕복선의 연료 전지, 우주비행사의 땀과 소변에서 얻은 물을 산소와 수소로 분리하는 과정입니다. 산소는 선실 내로 다시 여과되고, 수소는 우주로 방출되거나 우주비행사가 내쉬는 이산화탄소와 결합해 더 많은 물을 만듭니다.
지구에서도 이렇게만 간단하면 좋겠지만 상황은 다릅니다. 1964년, 두 명의 생화학자가 펜실베이니아주 피츠버그에서 열린 미국 화학 공학회 국가 대회에서 남은 수소의 활용 방안을 제안하는 논문을 발표했습니다. NASA와의 계약으로 탄생한 이 논문은 이전에 하이드로제노모나스(Hydrogenomonas)로 알려졌던 특이한 박테리아를 이용해 잔류 수소를 변환시키는 과정을 설명했습니다. 이 미생물은 수소뿐만 아니라 이산화탄소와 배출된 요소를 흡수해 '필수 아미노산을 모두 포함한' '고단백'의 '세균 물질'을 생성합니다. 이는 언젠가 우주 여행자들이 별들 사이의 긴 항해에서 즐길 수 있는 잠재적인 식량원이었습니다.
60년이 지난 지금, 이 밀폐된 환경에서 식량을 생산하는 접근 방식은 아직 국제 우주 정거장에 등장하지 않았습니다. 대신 우주비행사들의 식단은 주로 탈수되거나 냉장된 식품으로 구성되며, 인공 조명 아래 궤도에서 재배한 몇 가지 채소와 함께 90일마다 지구에서 배달되는 보급품으로 충당됩니다.
하지만 1964년의 제안은 살아남아 핀란드라는 예상치 못한 곳에 자리를 잡았습니다. 식량을 생산하기에 저궤도의 진공 상태만큼 극단적이지는 않지만, 여전히 비교적 열악한 환경을 가진 곳입니다. 올해의 날씨 역시 예외가 아니었습니다.
4월 말, 저는 1964년 논문에서 영감을 받아 새로 준공된 약 3,200평방피트 규모의 파이프, 탱크, 케이블이 얽힌 공장을 방문했습니다. 이 공장을 지은 솔라 푸즈(Solar Foods)는 '공기 중에서 식량을 만든다'는 주장으로 유명한 핀란드 식품 테크 스타트업입니다. 공장 밖에는 최근 늦은 폭풍으로 인해 녹기 시작한 눈이 쌓여 있었는데, 솔라 푸즈의 공동 창립자이자 최고 기술 책임자(CTO)인 유하-페카 피트카넨(Juha-Pekka Pitkänen)은 이런 일은 '전례가 없는 일'이라고 확신시켰습니다.
피트카넨은 두꺼운 반투명 안경을 쓰고 덥수룩한 수염과 붉은 안색을 가진 인물이었습니다. 제가 시설의 회의실에서 머그잔의 커피로 몸을 녹이려 노력하는 동안, 그는 유리잔으로 펩시를 홀짝였습니다.
'봄이라고 하기엔 이렇게 늦게 눈이 올 리가 없는데요.' 그가 덧붙였습니다. '하지만 우리는 인생이 결코 그렇게 쉽지만은 않다는 생각에 익숙합니다. 우리는 새로운 아이디어에 열려 있습니다.' 수염 너머로 그의 씩 웃는 모습이 보였습니다. '그게 바로 이곳 농부들이 우리에게 돌을 던지지 않는 이유 중 하나입니다.'
피트카넨은 헬싱키에서 북쪽으로 약 250마일 떨어진 실린예르비(Siilinjärvi)라는 소규모 광산 마을에서 자랐습니다. 그의 아버지인 유카 피트카넨은 서유럽에서 가장 큰 노천 인산염 채석장 중 하나인 이 마을 광산의 이전 소유주였던 케미라(Kemira)에서 일했습니다. 어린 피트카넨은 아버지로부터 화학을 배우며 자랐지만, 20세기식 비즈니스 방식이 초래한 환경 파괴를 외면할 수 없었습니다.
정확히 무엇인지는 확신할 수 없었지만, 그는 자신의 에너지를 '지속 가능한 무언가'에 쏟기로 결심했고, 2001년 핀란드 분자생물학 스타트업인 메디셀(Medicel Oy)에 합류하기 전 헬싱키에서 생물공정(bioprocess) 공학을 전공했습니다. 인간 게놈 프로젝트가 2000년 인간 게놈의 '작업 초안'을 발표한 후, 소프트웨어 회사들은 자연의 정보를 카탈로그화하는 거대한 작업에서 금광을 발견하고 생물학적 데이터를 채울 수 있는 다양한 데이터베이스 구축을 시작했습니다. 메디셀에서 근무하는 동안 피트카넨은 이 과정의 속도를 높이기 위한 자동화 시스템을 개발했습니다. ('이것은 새로운 천년의 낙관주의였습니다.' 그가 말했습니다. '게놈 시퀀싱은 저렴해질 것이고, 생물학의 난제는 해결될 것입니다.')
Making ‘Food Out Of Thin Air’ On the outskirts of Helsinki, a pioneering factory is harvesting natural, scalable proteins all from fermented bacteria. Could this be the future of food? Credits Philip Maughan is a writer and researcher based in London. VANTAA, Finland — It’s not easy to breathe in outer space. To keep crew members on the International Space Station alive , electrolysis is used to split water from the space shuttle’s fuel cells, astronaut perspiration and urine, into oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen is then filtered back into the cabin, while the hydrogen is either vented into space or combined with carbon dioxide the crew exhales to make more water. If only it were so simple on Earth. In 1964, two biochemists presented a paper at a national convention of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which proposed a use for the leftover hydrogen. The paper , which emerged from a NASA contract, described a process in which residual hydrogen could be transformed by an unusual bacterium from the genus formerly known as Hydrogenomonas . The organism would take not just the hydrogen, but also CO2 and excreted urea, and use them to grow a “bacterial substance” that was “high in protein” and held “all the essential amino acids”; a potential food source spacefarers one day might come to relish on long voyages between the stars. Sixty years later and this approach to making food in a closed environment has yet to appear on the ISS. Instead, the crew’s diet mainly consists of dehydrated or refrigerated food, replenished every 90 days by deliveries from Earth, along with a few veggies grown in orbit under artificial light. But the 1964 proposal lives on, and has found an unexpected home in Finland, where conditions for producing food are, if not quite as extreme as the near-vacuum of low-Earth orbit, still relatively undesirable. The weather this year was no exception. In late April I visited a newly completed factory inspired by the 1964 paper, a roughly 3,200-square-foot tangle of pipes, tanks and cables. The company that built it, Solar Foods, is a Finnish food tech startup known for claiming to make “food out of thin air.” Outside the factory lay melting snow from a recent late-season storm that Solar Foods co-founder and chief technology officer Juha-Pekka Pitkänen assured me was “totally unheard of.” Pitkänen wears thick translucent spectacles and has a full beard and ruddy complexion. He sipped Pepsi from a glass as I attempted to warm up with a mug of coffee in the facility’s conference room. “It’s not supposed to snow this late into the spring,” he added. “But we are used to the idea that life is not necessarily so easy. We are open to new ideas.” Behind the beard, I detected a little smirk. “That’s one of the reasons the farmers here are not throwing stones at us.” Pitkänen grew up about 250 miles north of Helsinki, in a smallish mining town called Siilinjärvi. His father, Jukka Pitkänen, was employed by Kemira, former owners of the town’s mine, one of western Europe’s largest open pit phosphate quarries. The younger Pitkänen grew up learning about chemistry from his father but felt unable to ignore the damage wrought by the 20th century’s way of doing business. Though he wasn’t sure what exactly, he was determined to invest his energy into “something sustainable,” and studied bioprocess engineering in Helsinki before joining the Finnish molecular biology startup Medicel Oy in 2001. After the Human Genome Project published a “working draft” of the human genome in 2000, software companies saw a potential gold mine in the grand task of cataloging nature, and began setting up a range of databases, ready to be populated with reams of biological data. During his time at Medicel, Pitkänen developed automated systems intended to speed up the process. (“This was the optimism of the new millennium,” he told me. “Genome sequencing will become affordable and biology will be solved,” and yet, “it’s a quarter of a century later and we still don’t fully understand how even the simplest cells work.”) Much of the Finnish startup scene in the 2000s was funded by wealth created during the rise of Nokia, but as the company lost market share to Apple and Google after 2006, sources of seed capital began drying up. After leaving Medicel in 2007, Pitkänen transferred to Finland’s state-owned technical research institute, VTT, the equivalent of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in the U.S. or Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft in Germany, where a team was focused on novel uses for the country’s abundant forest biomass. Ideas included using industrial byproducts like sawdust and wood chips to extract sugars that could fuel cars or be turned into chemicals like lactic acid to make biodegradable plastic bags. But these ideas did not last. Although VTT is owned by the Finnish state, it is run like a private company. When the price of oil fell in 2014 , thanks to a flood of American shale and a decision by OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) to keep production high, the economics of second-generation bioethanol suffered. Pitkänen calculated that even if the entirety of Finland’s forest biomass was burned, they’d still need to import oil. And yet like all good Europeans at that time, the researchers at VTT had great faith that an inundation of cheap, renewable energy from solar and wind was just around the corner. It was around this time that he was reminded of a flurry of research from the 1960s that had focused on using microbes to convert waste into edible proteins. What if we used waste for something other than powering cars, he thought. What if we ate it instead? The End Of Agriculture Today, almost half the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture. Of that, an astounding 80% is dedicated to livestock grazing and animal feed. This means 40% of the planet’s total habitable land is dedicated to animal products, despite the fact that meat, dairy and farmed fish combined provide just 17% of humanity’s calories. Only a fraction of agricultural land (16%) is used to grow the crops that we eat directly, with an additional 4% for things like biofuels, textiles and tobacco. Just 38% of habitable land is forested, a slice of the pie that continues to shrink , primarily in diverse tropical regions where the greatest number of species live. We need more forests. They may not quite be the planet’s lungs (most oxygen comes from our oceans ), but they are home to many billions of plants, animals, bacteria and fungi whose complex metabolic interactions make up the biosphere with its crucial role in stabilizing the climate. As the human population rises, the demand for food will continue to increase. Just as importantly, as incomes continue to rise, people will favor more nutrient-dense foods like fruits and vegetables, oils, meat and dairy (a phenomenon known as Bennett’s Law named after Stanford food economist Merrill K. Bennett ). While it’s clear that meat consumption must be reduced, we also need to do more with the space we currently have. One approach, which Elizabeth Kolbert has written about in The New Yorker, could be to manipulate the surprisingly inefficient chemistry of photosynthesis, boosting yields without requiring more land. Another would be to forgo fields altogether, harnessing the power of microbial fermentation on an “urban farm” that looks, at least from the outside, like a provincial office building. Protein From Electricity Solar Foods’ Factory 01 is located on a modern industrial estate in Vantaa, a satellite town about a 10-minute train ride from Helsinki Airport. Inside the building’s jet-black exterior, bundles of polished steel pipes twist and weave above a royal blue epoxy floor, feeding a noxious mix of hydrogen, ammonium, oxygen and carbon dioxide into a series of bioreactors and the silent creatures who dwell inside. It is in these roughly 53-, 530- and 5,300-gallon tanks that the