Making Protein from Thin Air - Sonja Billerbeck

In this episode of Future of Foods Interviews, Alex speaks to Dr. Sonja Billerbeck, synthetic biologist and researcher at Imperial College London, whose groundbreaking work is redefining how we produce food at the cellular level. Sonja’s research explores cell cultivation and gas-based precision fermentation, using hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria to convert carbon dioxide into nutritious biomass — a process that could one day decouple food production from land, water, and climate constraints.

Sonja discuss how technologies could revolutionize global food systems, Bezos Earth Fund financing, and the challenges of scaling cell-based innovations, and the ethical questions that come with reprogramming biology for human use.