The questions come thick and fast from the 309 delegates: How will the public perceive ‘lab-grown’ food? When will we be able to feed the starving and the poor? What will cultured foods cost? When will they be as cheap as regular food?

At San Francisco’s first Cellular Agriculture Conference, the one question that isn’t asked is the one that everyone had already been asking in their heads: “When will cellular agriculture products come to market?”

That’s what delegates talk about at lunch and in chats in the corridor. The answer depends on who you ask. Two to three years with larger investments, says one person. A few decades, no matter how much investment there is, says another.

From the huge range of answers to this key question, I realise that I’m at the birth of an industry. Today is Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975. It’s Elon Musk at the Mars Soceity dinner in 2001. It’s Mark Zuckerberg and Moskowitz and Saverin at Harvard in 2004.

I know this sounds hyperbolic, but a glance around the room and at the names on the panel reveals a who’s who of cellular agriculture and bio-fabriaction. There’s Andras Forgacs from Modern Meadow (which has just received $40M series B funding and is prioritising making lab-grown leather over lab-grown beef – for now). There’s Mark Post of Mosa Meats who produced a lab-grown burger at a cost of $330k in 2013. There’s Uma Valeti of Memphis Meats – you’ve likely seen the YouTube video of the company’s $30k lab-grown meatball. There’s Paul Mozdiak of NC State University who’s creating the first cultured chicken meat. Just there you probably have the four most important people in lab-grown meat in the world.

Then there’s Arturo Elizondo of Clara Foods, making cultured egg protein, and Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandhi of Muufri, creating cultured milk. That’s your two most important companies in lab-grown dairy in the world.

Then there’s the companies that show the breadth of imagination that biofabrication of animal products allows for. Gelzen makes animal-free gelatine; Afineur makes fermented coffee; Sothic Biosciences produces chemical reagents for the pharmaceutical industry normally sourced from Horseshoe Crab blood; Pembient is growing rhino horns to try to eliminate the black market for the real thing.

And from the UK we have Bath University’s Marianne Ellis, scaling up tissue engineering for cell therapies as well as cellular agriculture, and Abi Glencross of King’s College, figuring out how to growing beef in thick slabs in the lab.

There’s another question that I hear raised a number of times during the day. And this one also points to the infancy of cellular agriculture and it’s potential to put a ding in the universe… Why not focus on encouraging more people to move to a plant-based diet?

Mark Post nails the answer to this during one of the panel discussions. It’s not that humans need meat, he points out, it’s that we want to eat it. Persuading people otherwise will fall on many deaf ears. That’s why we need cellular agriculture, to produce meat without animals and create a post-animal bio-economy. Traditional farming uses huge amounts of water and it takes many times more kilos of plant food to produce a kilo of beef. Intensive animal farming and animal slaughter is a system that allows for the spread of animal diseases and food-borne bacteria.

The UN’s lists 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. Number 2 is to “end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture”. No.15 is about sustainable use of land. No.14 is about sustainable use of oceans. This is where the big vision of many cellular agriculture supporters comes into play. But it’s also where this nascent industry is starting to rub some people up the wrong way. Some farmers see CellAg as a threat to their livelihood.

The truth is that as we get good at meat production that doesn’t require animals, the multi-national agricultural corporations will sit up and take notice. They’ll include CellAg as part of their portfolio, just as global energy producers have invested in renewable fuels. This leaves the long-term role of small-holding farmers as an unknown quantity. CellAg is a technology that has the power to do so much good, and also the power to disrupt an existing way of doing things. How that will play out over time, no one can say right now. When this is raised at the conference, Marianne Ellis talks about working with the farming industry who are stewards of the countryside. It’s a nice perspective.

By 2050, there will be 10 billion people on Earth. What we need is an efficient, scalable, production-line system to feed people to compliment the methods we already have. The vast majority of the room believe cellular agriculture is that answer. If we get really good at CellAg, could we create that efficient food production line? If so, then we might help fix the UN’s No.1 Sustainable Development goal for 2030 – “End poverty in all forms everywhere”.

It’s a big lofty goal, but looking around the room at the Cellular Agriculture 2016 conference, it’s clear there are the brains and the will to aim for big goals achieved through small, specific scientific breakthroughs. There are also some practical problems that need solving, and these are teased out from the speakers and panellists throughout the day.

Problem 1: We need a cost-effective growth medium.
Much of the basic bio-technology needed to grow animal products has been in place for decades, and is used to create pharmaceutical products such as insulin. This means you can open a lab supplies catalogue and order the right medium if you are growing, say, a protein for medical use. Currently there is no low-cost growth medium that combines the right animo acids, glucose and other goodies needed to grow meat cells. Someone needs to make one and supply it.

Problem 2: We need a bio-reactor.
You brew beer in a bio-reactor. You grow yogurt in a bio-reactor. But there isn’t a bio-reactor suitable for growing meat. You need one that works on an industrial scale.

Problem 3: We need cell lines.
For other types of cellular biotech at scale, you can start your work by ordering your starter cells from a supplier catalogue – just like how you might buy your yeast cells to kickstart a batch of home-brew beer. At the moment, to grow meat, you need to visit an abattoir and get your own sample cells. Or you use fetal cells. If there are cell lines that can be bought from a catalogue, CellAg scientists get a ready supply of easy-to-access and safe-to-use cells from a variety of animals we might want to grow meat from.

None of these are necessarily ‘big’ problems. But they haven’t been solved yet. What strikes me about the quality of people in the room today is that just by asking random people I meet by the water cooler about how to solve these problems, I find the answers might be relatively easy.

For example, over a late afternoon lunch I meet Elizabeth Kylin from Sunrise Science Products which makes yeast media and other speciality media for cell culture. She says she was listening to the need for a growth medium and that it needed to contain amino acids and glucose and that it seemed simple, so she went online on her mobile to check that really was the chemical makeup required. She tells me her company could make a decent growth medium. And as she already supplies at least one of the companies in the room, she already has a way to sell in her product.

In the morning break, I meet Jake Hartnell of Common Garden, who makes control systems and sensors for biotech firms and AgTech companies. After hearing about the needs for a decent bioreactor, he’s keen to get in touch with one of the New Harvest team as he believe he could help solve this problem. I introduce him to NH’s Chief Development Officer, Gilonne d’Origny.

In my 10 hours at the beautiful Golden Gate Club in the centre of the Presidio, overlooking Golden Gate bridge I don’t happen to bump into anyone would could create commercial cell lines. However, I would bet you $100 someone in that room can and will.

But this new science isn’t just being moved forward by the speakers and the delegates in attendance. This is New Harvest’s day to celebrate too. It isn’t enough to have already funded the likes of Clara Foods and Muufri and to watch those companies progress and enjoy the limelight. It isn’t enough to create the industry’s most important event yet – a kind of High School Prom for STEM geeks. New Harvest – the research institute for cellular agriculture and public face of bio-fabrication – has three big announcements to make all of its own. NH’s Isha Datar delivers the morning’s keynote and accounts that:

• It is opening a lab in the EU. Research Strategist, Daan Luining, will head New Harvest Labs based out of Leiden, The Netherlands starting in the Autumn, to drive forward key CellAg research.

• New Harvest is funding the first cellular agriculture PhD in the US. Natalie Rubio holds a B.S. in Chemical & Biological Engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder and will begin her research in cellular agriculture at Tufts University in August under the supervision of Professor David Kaplan. David Kaplan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, and the Director Bioengineering and Biotechnology Center at Tufts University.

• Isha is one of three Fellows joining the Shuttleworth Foundation program this September! The Shuttleworth Foundation provides funding to three outstanding individuals who are unafraid to re-imagine the world and the way we live in it. Isha was selected from a highly competitive pool of applicants for her work with New Harvest, which lies at the intersection of ethical and practical issues, enabling broader research in cellular agriculture and bringing in the levels of accessibility and transparency that the field requires.

These are three very important steps for the world, and not just for New Harvest as, currently, New Harvest is the only research institute in the world dedicating funds and effort to the advancement of cellular agriculture.

New Harvest is shouting loudly from a small, but rapidly growing, platform. And its impact is being felt. In 2015, startups like Memphis Meats, Muufri, Clara Foods, Afineur, and Gelzen, attracted over $20 million of investment. In 2016, Moderm Meadow alone has the $40 million investment to grow leather without animals. It’s not merely a private investment in a single startup, it’s a vote of confidence in the world of cellular agriculture and the ability for this science to change the way we produce food and animal products.

The Cellular Agriculture 2016 conference is the butterfly that flaps it’s wings and causes storms on the other side of the world. The effect of the conversations in the room today will be felt for decades to come. As the Good Food Institute ‏summed up in its Tweet: “The science is there, the community is there, now is the time to build a better ag ecosystem”. Here’s to inventing the future…