The A.I.M. Interview: Algae Genetic Engineer Dr. Stephen Mayfield

by David Schwartz (Algae Industry Magazine) If moving genes around on a chromosome is your idea of a good time, meet Dr. Stephen Mayfield, Director of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology.

...Steve is now the John Dove Isaacs Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of California San Diego, where he maintains his lab. In that capacity, much of his current work revolves around the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology (SD-CAB), which he co-founded three years ago.

“The original idea was that the academic and commercial guys here in San Diego working on different aspects of algae should get together,” Steve says. “I was, and am, very committed to this idea that we need to get technologies out of academic research institutions and into commercialization as quickly as we can. That is something that is good for the country, good for science, good for the commercial guys and it’s good for the academic guys, too.

...“But there are so many other things that will come out of algal biotechnology—neutraceuticals, biopolymers, animal feed, therapeutic proteins, industrial enzymes, all of these things can be enabled by the technology we’re working on, and all of these things should and will be enabled.

“In fact many of them will have commercial success before we have commercial success in bioenergy,” he says.

...We just received a $4 million grant, over two years, from the state of California to develop a bioenergy training program. That grant is actually going to SD-CAB, plus CleanTECH San Diego, plus BioCom San Diego, plus San Diego Workforce Partnerships. Three of those are dot orgs here in San Diego, which are set up to do bioenergy, cleantech and commercial sector interactions and connectivity. The part that we/SD-CAB brings to that is we’ll generate course content and set up the certificate training programs.

We’re going to develop four certificate programs, one in biomass production, one in bioenergy technician, one in crop management and the algal pathogenesis, and the fourth one is in advanced science. Each one will have about 3-5 courses in them.

How will these courses eventually be offered? Through three different groups: UC San Diego’s extension program, San Diego State University, and MiraCosta Community College. That represents programs in a two-year community college, a California state college and a California university. At first we will teach those classes and have the certificate programs here in San Diego. But the way we’re setting up the whole system is to make this completely exportable. So if a group in New Mexico, for example, looked at this and says, “Oh, that looks like a good program. We’d like to bring it down here,” we are going to make these programs available on a web base so they can do that.

... When we get up to $250 to $300 dollars a barrel, then fuel has a value which is at least getting close to its true value. ...And as the price goes up people will start to conserve it. They’ll start to realize that this stuff is really valuable; we shouldn’t just be pissing it away at the rate we are now.

...Modern agriculture is run by fossil fuel. It’s how we feed the world. There will be seven billion people in 2011. The only way we keep seven billion people alive on this planet is because of fossil fuel, turned into fertilizer, made into food. When that starts to deplete and gets more expensive, and we start to put less fertilizer on plants, and the price of food starts to go up, we are going to start to have social disruption—and loss of life—on a massive scale. The population is going to go down.

So, what I’m trying to do is say, “Hey, let’s try to make this a smooth transition. Let’s not just run through all of our fossil fuel and then drop off that cliff. Let’s think now about how we start to integrate, how we start to incorporate bioenergy and sustainable alternative fuels into this so that we don’t have to have this ugly and catastrophic drop that looks like it’s going to come. READ MORE (Part 1) and MORE (Part 2) Also Watch Algal Biomass Organization VIDEO READ MORE (Update October 3, 2011) another VIDEO (University of California, San Diego)

The first is a certificate program run here at UCSD that also includes some faculty from San Diego State University, and that program is to train the scientific technicians. Those are the folks who are partly in research and development, and also partly in the analysis side of production. Because when we start to do production, we’re going to need people who have a scientific background. For example, they’re going to have to be able to measure the water chemistry; they’re going to have to be able to look at the pathogens and look at the nutrient utilization and availability.

So there’s a science part to growing algae that is not just agriculture. And even in agriculture there is a lot of analysis that is not done by the farmers, but by ancillary companies that come along and help them on specific tests. The certificate people that we’re training here at UCSD will fill those roles.

Second, there is another certificate program being run at Mira Costa Community College, and this program is the sort of boots on the ground, actual physical production of the algae: the people out there in the ponds, inoculating the algae, caring for and feeding the algae, and making sure that stuff grows well. They’ll also be part of the harvesting, but they won’t be part of the processing, at which point it becomes more of an industrial process and less of an agricultural process.

The program at Mira Costa, once fully developed, will be rolled out in the Imperial Valley, Allen County, and elsewhere in the agricultural areas here in California.

Third, EDGE funds industry internships at SD-CAB, Sapphire, General Atomics, Carbon Capture, and others. Along with this work experience comes a 40-hour online immersion program designed to orient participants with the industrial biotech sector, particularly in terms of how to transition into it and move up the career ladder once inside.

The final aspect of the certificate program will be a Masters of Advanced Study, and this last part of the program will come online in 2012. The MAS program is being developed at UCSD with the idea of training the energy entrepreneurs that will build the ancillary companies that will help drive the entire bioenergy sector. READ MORE