A mother in Sub-Saharan Africa walks to a well just outside her village, an infant boy strapped to her back with a colorful cloth. She鈥檚 retrieving the day鈥檚 drinking water, but it鈥檚 food that鈥檚 on her mind. Soon, she must wean her son from breast feeding, and she worries that there isn鈥檛 enough food available for him to get the nutrients he needs. It鈥檚 a pressing concern where she lives; more than 33 million children younger than five years old suffer from starvation there, and nearly half either die or have stunted development because of malnutrition. Even those who can get enough food may not get the right kinds鈥�40% suffer from vitamin A deficiencies, which regularly cause blindness in this part of the world.
As this mother walks through the brush on the outskirts of her village, pushing a few six-foot-tall weeds out of her way, she continues fretting about how she鈥檒l get healthy food for her son. It doesn鈥檛 occur to her that the weeds themselves might be the solution. To her, these ubiquitous plants, Amaranth, are just brush鈥攅dible in a pinch, but a poor man鈥檚 survival food, not something routinely suitable for a household鈥檚 dinner.
Nearly 8,000 miles away in Pittsburgh, two engineers鈥�Philip LeDuc and 鈥攈adn鈥檛 given Amaranth much thought, either. Instead, they were thinking about ketchup.
Walking around LeDuc鈥檚 lab in a quiet corner of Hamerschlag Hall, you could be forgiven for not figuring out what the dozen or so students鈥攎ostly PhD candidates鈥攁re studying. Their backgrounds seem to be all over the place, ranging from electrical engineering to computing to medicine to physics to materials science. Asking these students what they are working on might not be much help either, as you鈥檒l hear answers ranging from bacteria to synthetic gene circuits to three-dimensional imaging to bioenergy to cancer to magnets.听
And even if you sit in on their regular lab meetings, you won鈥檛 hear the professor droning on about the protocols of the research paper they鈥檒l all be helping him publish. Instead, you will hear him ask what they were 鈥渋nto鈥� that week and whether anybody wanted to bring up a topic that they could 鈥済eek out on.鈥�
For the record, the lab is ostensibly centered around mechanical engineering, but LeDuc makes clear that any discussion of disciplines bores him terribly. To him, any differences among materials science, mechanical engineering, and cellular biology are a matter for administrators to work out when handing out degrees鈥攈e couldn鈥檛 care less. A former corporate management consultant, he often says, 鈥淚 only care if a student is talented; I don鈥檛 care in what. My approach is to identify students with incredible drive and initiative, give them the tools and support they need, and then get out of their way.鈥�
Whether you鈥檙e working on a bone cell, a hunk of steel, a Mars rover, or a Fortune 500 company, such endeavors don鈥檛 strike him as fundamentally different tasks鈥攖hey鈥檙e all engineering systems. Get him talking about tinkering with systems, and he lights up and speaks with an evangelist鈥檚 zeal.听
Every week, LeDuc gathers his students for a lab meeting, which is more like an intellectual 鈥渏am session,鈥� just a group of engineers bringing up ideas and problems that intrigue them. During one particular meeting, the students run out of things to talk about. So, LeDuc pulls out his BlackBerry, which can access a folder he named, Ideas. In it are dozens of random topics culled from conversations with co-workers in the hallway, papers he鈥檚 come across, and even some thoughts that occurred to him while he was brushing his teeth. In hopes of ending the meeting鈥檚 standstill, Ideas become the topic of conversation.
鈥淗ere we go,鈥� he says, using his index finger to zip through a few shorthand notes. 鈥淗ave any of you ever thought about using mechanical engineering to make ketchup taste better? Mary Beth, weren鈥檛 you taking a cooking class? Want to go along with me to meet the R&D department of a food company?鈥�
It may not seem like it, but mechanical engineering is actually central to cooking and eating. Take a leafy green, for instance; there are any number of 鈥渕echanical interventions鈥� cooks can implement鈥攄icing, steaming, boiling, or leaving it raw. Preparation has a big effect on how it tastes and how it鈥檚 digested. Steaming a raw carrot, for example, can rob it of up to 50% of its vitamin C; boiling nightshade versus eating it raw makes the difference in whether its food or poison.
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Although that has always been understood in a general way, the boundary between hardcore science in cellular mechanics and tinkering in the kitchen to get a more robust tomato bisque has gotten a lot fuzzier in recent years. Molecular gastronomy is all the rage in foodie circles. Chefs now experiment with carbon dioxide to create foam, use thermal immersion circulators for low-temperature cooking, and even dabble with centrifuges and liquid nitrogen. Go into a five-star restaurant kitchen these days, and you may think you鈥檝e just walked into a chemistry lab. The reverse is also true, as skillets and saucepans can be found in labs because scientists are conducting tests in the same way chefs have been鈥攁ltering cellular properties of plant and animal matter to gauge effects on nutrition and palpability.
It鈥檚 no wonder LeDuc received an email one afternoon from a local food company asking for a meeting even though his lab has nothing to do with food or nutrition. LeDuc, intrigued, placed it in his Ideas folder, where it surfaced at the lab meeting. Mary Beth Wilson, a PhD candidate in his lab, agreed to tour the food company鈥檚 industrial research division. It wasn鈥檛 just her recent cooking class鈥攐r her obsession with the Food Network and shows like Top Chef鈥攖hat led LeDuc to singling her out. She earned her undergraduate degree from Carnegie Mellon in 2007, a double major in and Engineering and . That second major led her to work on tooth mineralization in a graduate dental program in Alabama before returning to Pittsburgh to work in LeDuc鈥檚 lab in pursuit of her PhD in synthetic vascular regeneration. Such a background, LeDuc surmised, might enable her to better understand, on a cellular level, how mechanical engineering could be of use in food preparation.
On the tour, the two scholars are shown the many ways that food producers think about leveraging cellular engineering to perfect their products. Alas, reorganization at the company and the academic commitments of LeDuc and Wilson prevent a professional partnership. Still, the visit gets both of the engineers thinking about food. Wilson begins ordering books on molecular gastronomy; LeDuc thinks about adding some culinary equipment to the lab. That鈥檚 essentially it, though鈥攋ust another idea in LeDuc鈥檚 BlackBerry鈥攗ntil a few months later, when he is going through his email. He comes across an opportunity from the , which allocates hundreds of millions of dollars a year to research geared toward increasing global health and reducing poverty. The foundation is particularly interested in pushing the envelope and spurring innovation. Many of its grants are designed not to support well-established research, but rather to get academics thinking about new ways to apply science to practical problems.
One program, which pertains to LeDuc鈥檚 email, is the . Its award of $100,000 doesn鈥檛 require pages of data and proven results, just a compelling idea about a global health issue. The application is essentially a two-page pitch. It鈥檚 intended to spur new projects and to get scientists thinking about striking out in bold new directions. The $100,000 is the seed money for that process. Awardees then have 18 months to pursue their big ideas, and if the ideas bear out, they have an opportunity to receive a $1 million follow-up grant. Not surprisingly, the foundation says it receives hundreds of thousands of applicants annually, making the Gates challenge award one of the most competitive research grants in science. Only 2% of submissions get funded.
The email LeDuc received is about a specific challenge: Explore nutrition for healthy growth of infants and children. Remembering his discussions with Wilson about mechanical engineering and nutrition, he forwards the email to her with this brief message: Hey, think we could get something together on this? The proposal is due in two weeks.
Since the tour of the food company, Wilson鈥攊n her off hours 鈥渁lmost as a hobby鈥濃�攈ad been exploring molecular gastronomy. Now, she thinks, here is an opportunity to apply it to a real-life situation. So, she puts her PhD research on hold for the next two weeks and researches global malnutrition, with a particular eye toward areas where engineering might be able to make a difference, looking at crops or foods that may be underutilized.
She finds she isn鈥檛 alone in her thoughts. There is an entire cadre of academics, humanitarians, and policy makers around the world also thinking about underutilized crops and new potential sources of nutrition in places acutely affected by malnutrition, such as Africa. One candidate that many of these people had begun exploring was a plant called Amaranth.
Amaranth is an ancient crop indigenous to South America and Africa. Fast growing and hardy (鈥渁maranth鈥� comes from the Greek word for 鈥渦n-withering鈥�), it was a staple in the diet of the Incans and Aztecs. The seeds can be consumed as a grain and the leaves are edible as greens, but overall Amaranth is bitter to the taste and labor intensive to prepare. And once European crops flooded the world, the rancid-flavored plant was largely cast aside. These days, it grows seemingly everywhere in dry, scrub climates (exactly the climates most affected by famine), where it鈥檚 known more as a nuisance (the American variety is known as 鈥減igweed鈥�). Find a ditch, a vacant lot, or an uncultivated patch of land, and you鈥檒l probably find Amaranth there, too. Several languages even have pejorative colloquialisms that translate to 鈥渘ot worth an Amaranth.鈥�
Although there seems to be worldwide agreement that it鈥檚 not a dining option, it remains an edible food, incredibly rich in nutrients, particularly vitamins A and B. Amaranth is, in other words, a perfect candidate for the kind of project Wilson has in mind.
It turns out that there is the Amaranth Institute, which is devoted to studying how the weed might be better utilized. As Wilson peruses the staff list, she discovers one of those strange coincidences that seem almost common within Carnegie Mellon鈥檚 international community. The president of the institute, one of the world鈥檚 leading experts in Amaranth, who runs a nonprofit that helps grain farmers in Latin America, is鈥攐f course鈥攁 1996 grad. Pete Noll earned his MS in . He had been a Peace Corps volunteer who became involved in humanitarian work in Oaxaca, Mexico, and says he pursued his MS to become better equipped at running nonprofits, which he now does as executive director of Puente a la Salud Comunitaria.
When Wilson gets in touch with him, he fills her in on Amaranth鈥檚 massive potential to combat global hunger. Wilson realizes that if鈥攍ike the five-star chefs who tinker with chemistry to get better-tasting food鈥攕he changes the way the weed tastes, it could have a global impact on nutrition and hunger. All that鈥檚 needed is a dash of applied cellular mechanics, and suddenly the world might have a delicious new staple vegetable, and the African mother pondering ways to keep her child fed might have a solution growing just outside her front door.
Wilson types up the two-page proposal and writes a summary of what an 18-month exploration of the topic will entail. A few months later, she gets a jubilant email from LeDuc. The Gates Foundation thinks it鈥檚 a good idea. Grant awarded.
Bradley A. Porter, of Philadelphia, has been a regular contributor to this magazine since his senior year at Carnegie Mellon.
Related Links:
Carnegie Mellon's Philip R. DeLuc Discovers New Protein Function That Could Save Lives
Carnegie Mellon's Philip DeLuc and Mary Beth Wilson Receive Prestigious Gates Foundation Grant for Fighting Child Malnutrition in Africa
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