Meanwhile, in 2014, he’d moved to Boston to become director of engineering at 3D printing firm Formlabs after meeting that company’s cofounder and CEO Maxim Lobovsky through a mutual friend.
“I didn’t make any money off that, but the lessons learned were extremely valuable,” he says. In 2016, Scotts Miracle-Gro acquired Oso for an undisclosed amount. “It was the wrong time, wrong team and wrong tech,” Torrealba says. Their company, Oso Technologies, raised nearly $100,000 on Kickstarter in 2014 to bring its Plant Link moisture sensor to life. With a few friends, he targeted a problem that plagues a lot of students: They were killing their houseplants. to start a company, you can just start a company.” I went to a startup event and I learned that you didn’t have to have a Ph.D. “I really just wanted to build products that solved problems for people. “I started doing research and I instantaneously realized I hated it. He saw how some of his professors had commercialized technology based on their research, and he went to University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with the intention of following that path to become a professor. “It gave me a chance to see and experience things I wouldn’ve have otherwise.” “College changed my life,” Torrealba says.
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He went to Baylor University in Waco on a full scholarship from the Gates Foundation’s Millennium Scholars Program.
Torrealba, a 34-year-old Hispanic American, grew up in a working-class family in Arlington, Texas, where his father ran an air-conditioning repair business. After all, he suggested, in the future “human beings will place less emotional importance on the gourmet aspects of food and will eat more to support their body chemistry.Lumafield cofounder and CEO Eduardo Torrealba: "This is the hardest thing I think I can work on and make an impact on." Courtesy of Lumafield But many anticipated that food chemists and psychologists could work together to develop satisfactory algae-based foods, such as steaks “made chewy by addition of a suitable plastic matrix,” as proposed by CalTech biologist James Bonner. One significant problem acknowledged even by its advocates was that algae was pretty disgusting. Major media outlets including the New York Times, Fortune, and Newsweek jumped on the idea, running stories that marveled at the idea of turning pond scum into dinner. They claimed they could produce 17,000 to 40,000 pounds of protein per acre compared with a paltry 500-ish pounds for soybeans. Immediately, Belasco writes, Carnegie scientists began dreaming about mass production of the stuff. The freshwater algae could convert 25 percent of solar energy into food brimming with protein, calories, and vitamins. embarked on pilot projects growing Chlorella pyrenoidosa. It was in this context that Carnegie Institution-sponsored researchers with the Stanford Research Institute and Arthur D. Numerous biochemists investigated proposals for artificial photosynthesis, hoping to improve on plants’ methods, which convert less than one percent of sunlight to usable food. Some hoped to synthesize carbohydrates, fats, and proteins from coal, petroleum, or even air. Many feared that agriculture couldn’t produce enough food to feed everyone, and not a few experts turned to ideas that until then had been the domain of science fiction. But, as American Studies scholar Warren Belasco writes, when algae-as-food first became a widespread dream in the years after World War II, it was viewed as a marvel, not of nature, but of technology.īy the 1940s, Belasco notes, the world’s population had doubled in just four decades, and it was showing no signs of slowing down. Today, we tend to think about these foods as appealingly “natural”-if not naturally appealing. Maybe you’ve heard that in a future in which climate change makes it harder to grow crops, we’ll all be dining on sustainable foods formulated from tiny algae or their giant cousin, kelp.
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