Fatbergs turned into perfume - inside Britain's bizarre new industrial revolution - Voice of Asia

In a gleaming laboratory in Edinburgh, robotic devices hum, sliding and mixing chemicals. The end product will be a pine-scented chemical, useful as a perfume ingredient. But its starting point is very different: a brown, gloopy mixture of fats, recently dredged from underground – fatbergs.

Fatbergs are the foul phenomena that lurk (and clog) in sewers. The technology being developed to perform this apparent alchemy is being described by some as a new industrial revolution. It is a fast-growing field of bioengineering. The good news is that the UK is currently strong in this area of science.

It could also be good news for the environment, as it recycles waste and makes production more sustainable. The government is also keen, as it could mean new industries and new jobs. However, the UK’s lead has slipped due to a lack of investment, poor regulation and policy missteps. The question now is, can that lead be regained?

And if it can be regained, at what cost? Because despite the many benefits, some experts fear that in the rush to reap the rewards and regain the lead, some potential risks are being overlooked. “A crazy idea that works” Professor Stephen Wallace at the University of Edinburgh is one of the people turning fatbergs into perfume. “It’s a crazy idea,” he admits, “but it works.”

Fatbergs are the congealed lumps of fat that accumulate from cooking oil, toilets and other food waste that people flush down their drains. Stephen gets his raw material from a company that specialises in dredging them from sewers and turning them into biofuel. It arrives at the lab in tubular form. The first step is to sterilise the material in a steamer. Professor Wallace then adds specially modified bacteria to the remnants of the fatberg. The bacteria have had a small piece of DNA inserted, giving them specific characteristics.

As the bacteria devour the fatberg, it gradually disappears, producing a pine-scented chemical – which can be used as an ingredient in perfumes. Professor Wallace says that while the UK has played a leading role in establishing this technology, it now needs to show that it can take the next step. “We’re at a pivotal moment where the core technologies that enable all sorts of sustainable industrial technologies have been established, and we’re now moving into a phase of scaling them up for manufacturing.”

“But in the UK, to create the infrastructure… and to commercialise it at the rate that Europe and the US are investing is a challenge.” If the UK can scale up, the appetite for investment appears to be there. Professor Wallace is working with two perfume companies who are interested in the process because it is more sustainable than their current methods, which involve making perfumes from chemicals extracted from fossil fuels.

But although the basic technology exists, it is developing at an astonishing rate, which means the UK’s lead is not secure. One of Stephen’s colleagues, Dr Joanna Sadler, has created microbes that can turn waste plastic that would otherwise damage the environment into vanilla flavouring and other useful and expensive chemicals. “Since I first published this work four or five years ago, the field has absolutely exploded, not just in the UK, but around the world,” she told me. “It’s an incredibly fast-moving area.”

One member of the Edinburgh University centre has created bacteria that can extract important metals from used batteries, which would otherwise leak toxic chemicals into landfill. Another is turning waste water from whisky distilling into a plant-based alternative to fish oil supplements. The possibilities are endless, and the pace of innovation has been accelerated by the development of cheap and precise ways of manipulating DNA. This means it is now easier to harness and adapt the power of nature to create all sorts of things. However, all these possibilities require funding.

The previous government published a policy document called the National Vision for Engineering Biology in December 2023 and designated the technology a national priority with £2bn of funding over 10 years. The Labour government says it also sees it as a priority but has not made explicit spending commitments. On the face of it, engineering biology could help Labour achieve two of its government’s five priorities: growth and sustainability. But at the moment, funding remains uncertain.

Professor Angela McLean, the chief scientific advisor to the prime minister on scientific matters, has been looking into the issue. “We’re looking at products like this handbag,” Professor McLean explains, while stroking a faux-leather handbag that has been derived from university research by a number of newly formed engineering biology start-up companies. Modern Synthesis, based in south London, made the bag from a material grown by a non-genetically engineered microbe. “They will be less polluting and more sustainable than current equivalents, while creating lots of jobs, a good environment and prosperity,” she continues.

“Engineering biology is an area that the UK is very good at, and the world is going to need it. It is still in its early stages, and we need to keep investing in it as a nation.” In the 20th Century, the UK was a leader in the basic science of electronics, computing and the biosciences. But with some notable exceptions, that scientific excellence in these fields did not translate into really big world-leading companies. In all of these cases, there was initial government enthusiasm and funding, but no follow-through. This meant that the science and the ideas were bought up by mainly US companies, creating wealth and jobs overseas.

A new House of Lords report has highlighted concerns that the UK is losing its way, published on January 14th, saying that engineering biology is at risk of going down the same path for exactly the same reasons. The report states that, “Other countries are beginning to overtake the UK and we face a serious risk of losing the potential benefits of being world-leading in engineering biology”. It also says that there is a “small but closing window” to make a big impact by making some small policy tweaks, such as recommitting to the target set out in the National Vision of providing at least £2bn of funding over the next ten years.

Professor Susan Rosser, co-director of the Edinburgh Genome Foundry, told the House of Lords science and technology committee that produced the report, “We were ahead of the game, but we’ve lost our lead because of massive investment in the US and South Korea”. She said: “We are losing trained people overseas. People from Edinburgh have moved to Singapore, the US, Germany and Austria.” “If this is really going to be a key part of our economy, we need the trained skill set and the sooner the better.”

Dr Carolina Grandellis, the biofoundry manager at the Earlham Institute Research Park in Norwich, adds that it is difficult to replace the loss of talent by attracting overseas scientists because both the previous and current governments have tightened visa rules. “The government is intending to increase restrictions on legitimate skilled migration. That will be a loss to our sector.” According to the chair of the House of Lords committee, Baroness Brown of Cambridge, the core of the problem is that there is no clear plan to increase the number of skilled scientists, and no proper policies and regulations in place to allow engineering biology to flourish in the UK.

“We often hear that when companies reach a certain size, they move abroad for better investment and growth prospects, taking the bulk of the economic benefits with them,” she says. “This needs urgent action”. Another problem is that UK biofoundries like the one in Edinburgh are not properly funded, according to Professor Paul Freemont, co-director of the biofoundry at Imperial College London. “The scale of investment in biofoundries internationally is massive. In South Korea, it has just announced a $100m investment (£82m) in a K-Biofoundry. In Shenzhen, China, about $750m (£614m) has been put into one building, with each floor researching one type of biology.”

“Our biofoundry in London got £7m of public investment in infrastructure, but we didn’t get funding for staff. We’ve been scrabbling around for cash”. Not all funding comes from the government. But the House of Lords report found that private investment is also insufficient. Unlike the US, investors in the UK are looking for a return in a few years, rather than the decades it can take for innovative companies to really start making money. According to Will Milligan, CEO of Extracellular, which provides products for companies that produce lab-grown meat, another barrier to the sector is government regulation, especially for applications that produce novel foods.

“Singapore, on the other hand, has a very clear framework for the approvals process for getting products to market, and the suggested time frame is about half of that in the UK.” In response to the criticism, the government has set up a body to cut red tape, the Office for Regulatory Innovation. But Dr Helen Wallace, the director of the campaign group, GeneWatch, argues that “streamlining in many cases means deregulation”. She worries that the government is overlooking the risks of engineering biology in its rush to reap the claimed benefits.

Many applications of the technology involve creating entirely new organisms, which are contained within large vessels during the production process. Even if they escaped, they are unlikely to survive, as they have been designed to thrive in the very specific, artificial conditions for which they were designed. But Dr Wallace is concerned about some applications that are designed to be released into the environment. “There is a project in the US designed to survive and reproduce in the soil to increase the nitrogen content, which is extremely worrying because even very small changes in their DNA could have greater harm on humans, animals and plants.”

“This could create a new kind of living pollution, which could spread in rivers, oceans, the air, the rain, and you won’t be able to reverse any adverse consequences”. Scientists and industrialists agree that without public trust, this shiny new industry will go nowhere. To gain that trust, advocates of engineering biology must be open and honest about the risks. The biggest fear is of accidentally creating superbugs that could spread disease or cause environmental problems by disrupting delicate ecosystems.

Recently, a group of 38 leading scientists raised concerns about creating “mirror life” – artificially created organisms whose DNA is a mirror image of its naturally occurring counterpart. Writing in the journal Science, they said these mirror organisms could pose a serious risk and could disrupt the immune systems of plants and animals. The scientists called for a moratorium on creating them until more is known about them and what measures could be taken to minimise the risks. But the problem is that the technology has become so cheap and widely available that it is hard to regulate such a moratorium.

While creating mirror life is a highly specialised skill, bad actors could make simpler alterations that would increase the risk of bioterrorism. The government and manufacturers argue that the technology has huge environmental and economic benefits. But all this increased investment will be pointless if the public doesn’t accept it: it won’t be used; no one will buy the products. And there is a real risk: scientists and activists want the public to be fully informed in an open and transparent way.

Professor Freemont admits that they have been keen on the potential benefits of engineering biology. “We’ve been a bit negligent in engaging with the public.” “The sector needs to make sure that the average consumer and citizen can start to understand the technology”.