Thread by @NewHarvestOrg

To celebrate the last day of #OpenAccessWeek a short thread about how New Harvest is working to democratize the building blocks of cellular agriculture through open science 🧫🥩 #OAWeek2021

The building blocks of cultured meat are cells, scaffolds, media, and bioreactors. Each of these components have yet to be optimized, standardized, etc. There isn't some "catalog" from which you can really order any of those building blocks.

That means there is a LOT of redundancy in what companies and researchers are working on. One goal of our research program has been to accelerate breakthroughs in each of those building blocks and have that research be public and usable by the entire field to build upon.

Openness, therefore, is a core value here at NH - so much so that is baked included in our grantees' contracts and a criteria by which we decide who to fund. new-harvest.org/app/uploads/20…

Our philosophy re. openness is hugely inspired by @ShuttleworthFdn, where our ED @IshaDatar was a fellow. Shuttleworth seeks to apply the ethos, processes, and licenses of the open source software world to areas outside of software - like cell ag web.archive.org/web/2021100622…

Our most famous open project is probably the bioreactor we are building in collaboration with @institute_irnas, which we hope can be an accessible research tool for the entire cell ag community.
new-harvest.org/initiatives/op…

But in an ideal world, ALL research NH funds gets published open access. This isn't always possible bc journals are...expensive 😤 Recently, 21+ NH donors pitched in to ensure our landmark safety paper was published open access.

new-harvest.org/app/uploads/20…

new-harvest.org/safety-paper-p…

^^ This was a huge win for us - made possible by mission-aligned donors - because our entire safety project was designed to fill the giant gap in publicly available information about how cultured meat is made and accompanying safety hazards.

The safety initiative was accomplished without signing NDAs, which has long been a NH policy but something we only formalized in writing recently. More on why we don't sign NDAs here: new-harvest.org/why-we-dont-si…

Our commitment to openness extends beyond research. We are committed to transparency about pay, internal policies, and general "intel" about the field. We believe it's important to be frank about "insider" info to newcomers trying to get a lay of the land.

All of which is to say...we are here to help. Cultured meat isn't a pet project to be precious about. It is too urgent and important not to work together with a spirit of openness.

Finally...gonna take this opportunity to plug @GarrettBroad and Rob Chiles' paper about democratizing ownership and participation in cell ag! Read it! link.springer.com/article/10.100…