Bringing science to life

BY JESPER LØVENBALK HANSEN

The story of Copenhagen’s 150 year old agricultural university – which today is called the Faculty for Life Sciences – is also the story of Denmark’s development from a bankrupt agricultural state to a bioscientific stronghold

During the last 150 years Denmark has developed from a bankrupt and starving nation to a world-leading food exporter. Photo: Scanpix Denmark.

We want to live longer and better lives, but one sixth of the world’s population are eating themselves to death while another sixth are starving. We know that we must protect the environment and conserve resources, but we consume more than ever before in history. We are focused on wellbeing and the good life both now and in the future, but how will it be created?

These are some of the dilemmas and questions that researchers and students are attempting to answer at the University of Copenhagen’s Faculty for Life Sciences. So explains the faculty’s dean, Per Holten-Andersen:

“Life science is the science of everything to do with living. It is our food, our lifestyle and welfare. For example, the food industry today is as much an experience industry as it is production. In our part of the world we rarely eat only because of hunger, just as we now use land for a lot more than food production. There is an enormous economic potential in our land and nature,” says Per Holten-Andersen, who points out that it is no coincidence that the life science industry is one of the world’s most rapidly increasing growth markets.

To strengthen the Danish life science environment, three of Denmark’s oldest universities merged last year and created a new cross-disciplinary faculty. The dean of the new faculty, Per Holten-Andersen, was previously the head of Denmark’s Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University, which for 150 years has occupied the same buildings in Copenhagen that the Faculty for Life Sciences now occupies.

“As the Veterinary and Agricultural University, we chose to merge with the University of Copenhagen and the Danish University of Pharmaceutical Sciences and create Scandinavia’s largest university. One of the reasons we did so was because Copenhagen has one of the world’s largest concentrations of pharmaceutical, health and food industries and one of the most highly trained workforces in this field. So Copenhagen already has a very strong brand in life science,” says Per Holten-Andersen, who thinks that the university merger consolidates Copenhagen as “one of Europe’s largest life science clusters” which today represents one of the cornerstones of the Danish economy. A status that has been achieved not least because of the food industry, comprising giants like Arla Foods, Carlsberg and Danish Crown, which collectively accounts for 25 per cent of Denmark’s GDP and employs a quarter of the nation’s workforce.

A BEATEN NATION
The fact that Denmark was to get a number of strong universities in food, agriculture and health at an early stage in its history is due to what Per Holten-Andersen describes as “political due care” at a time when the country was forced to its knees. Because, as in so many other places in the world, the country’s modern history is actually founded on the smoking ruins of a catastrophe.

During the 1800s, Denmark lost Norway and the southern Swedish regions of Skåne, Halland and Blekinge to Sweden. The Danish navy and merchant fleet were seized by England and finally Denmark was vanquished by Germany, which also took a geographical bite out of the country. Denmark was a beaten nation.

“Denmark had just lost very large areas of land, the state was bank rupt, and we were plagued by famine with a very high mortality. The country was in a situation where we couldn’t supply ourselves with food. We reached a low point in those years,” explains Per Holten-Andersen.

Politically it was decided to get the country on its feet again through massive development of the sole potential of the flat and mineral-lacking land: namely agriculture. So through the 1800s, three universities were established to restore the Danish nation through technology and science: the Technical University of Denmark (1829), the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University (1858) and the Danish University of Pharmaceutical Sciences (1892).

“From a political perspective, it was a visionary act to open three universities, and it quickly delivered results,” says Per Holten Andersen, who adds that from the end of the 1800s Denmark had again became self-sufficient in food. “And today Denmark produces food for 30 million people, but we are only five million,” says Per Holten-Andersen.

THE NEW COPENHAGEN SCHOOL
Although the food industry is the flagship of the Danish life science cluster, the refinement of food in Danish agriculture is closely associated with the parallel development of the Danish pharmaceutical and life science industry. According to Per Holten-Andersen, the Danish welfare model with its free education and free health insurance has nurtured a growing domestic market in the medico and healthcare industry, which has catalysed the development of pharmaceutical pioneers such as Novo Nordisk, LEO-Pharma and Lundbeck.

At the Faculty for Life Sciences, research is currently conducted in everything from food and drug development to climate challenges, sustainable energy and the economies of developing countries. The work is both about looking at economic opportunities in new markets and helping to solve a number of the problems the world is facing.

The Faculty of Life Sciences offers 17 masters degrees in seven overall categories: 1) animal, ethics and welfare, 2) climate, energy and environment, 3) food and health, 4) plants and natural resources, 5) politics, economics and developing countries, 6) forest, rural and urban development, 7) biotechnology

And that is the foundation on which the relatively new Faculty for Life Sciences will build. There is also a need for visions – and Per Holten-Andersen has them.

“My personal ambition is to help create Denmark’s international university par excellence, which is a world leader in several fields. The university will acquire a completely new business profile and business collaboration compared to previously. It will have one of Europe’s most attractive campuses and study environments, located in one of Europe’s most attractive capitals. The realisation of this can make Copenhagen into an international research and educational metropolis, that can lead one’s thoughts back to the ’Copenhagen School’, centred around the Bohr Institute in the 1920s and 1930s,” says Per Holten-Andersen.

Food for astronauts and French fries cooked in water

BY NADIA LOUISE KRISTENSEN

With a helping hand from the world of technology, a number of Danish companies and universities are learning to understand and adjust foods so they become healthier and safer. In Denmark, foods are being developed for, among others,
a very special target group – namely astronauts.

No way can we have foods that make crumbs – because crumbs float around and cause havoc in the machinery. And foods must have a long shelf life – because the target group has no shopping mall close by. These are just two of the requirements NASA stipulated to the Danish dairy giant Arla Foods, when the company was commissioned to formulate foods for NASA’s astronauts. The weightlessness that astronauts experience in space also means that their bodies age faster and their muscles atrophy.

“Simply stated, there are two options for improving the physical condition of astronauts: exercise and food. There are limited opportunities for exercise in space, but we can do something about food, and milk is perfect in this context. Milk contains lots of protein, calcium and vitamins that are important for optimising the functioning of the body in space. Our challenge was to make products that compensate for the problems astronauts encounter when they are in space,” says Henrik Jørgen Andersen, who is head of research at Arla Foods.

Out of the project grew four products, two of which have already been on a trip into space. Yogurt in several taste variants, Milk bites, that look like small balls of marzipan and provide the same nutrition as a large glass of drinking chocolate, and a chocolate milk powder that contains D vitamins, calcium, fibres and yogurt with beneficial lactic acid bacteria. One of the challenges Arla met was to make the right coating for Milk bites so that they make no crumbs – but the coating recipe is a secret. All the products consist of 100% milk and can keep for at least two years at room temperature.

INTEREST FROM ARABIA
It is not only astronauts who can benefit from the products. Many elderly people suffer from the same problems as astronauts and cosmonauts: osteoporosis, muscle and joint problems, and intestinal diseases. Furthermore, several Arabian countries have shown interest in the space yogurt because it keeps well in hot climates.

“We have learned something about how we can develop products for risk groups –young people who do not drink enough milk, and elderly people who get problems like osteoporosis. This time it was the vision of food for astronauts that provided the development momentum, but it could just as well have been another group,” says Henrik Jørgen Andersen.

The dairy giant still supplies foods to NASA and is now also collaborating with the European space organisation to develop a milk component that can strengthen the immune system in people subjected to stressful environments, like astronauts in space.

Arla Foods is also part of the NanoFOOD consortium, a collaboration between Danish companies in the food industry and research scientists at the University of Aarhus. One of its focus areas is to develop foods by means of nanotechnology, an area of research in which Denmark has made significant advances – not least because universities have been quick to establish their own research centres.

’Nano’ usually relates to something much smaller than the naked eye can see, that requires highly specialised manipulation tools. With nanotechnology, foods can be studied at the very smallest scale – to the benefit of quality, shelf life and our health. The taste and consistency of foods turn out to be determined by what happens at the nanoand micrometre scale. For instance, nano-sized salt crystals have been synthesised that have the same taste strength as much larger amounts of ordinary salt. Nanotechnology can also be used for example to encapsulate important nutrients in food, so they taste better or are more easily taken up by the body.

FROM FOOD TO IMPLANTS
At Arla Foods and other food companies, the technology is used to improve the understanding of foods.

“We use nanotechnology to get a better understanding of individual food components. We are learning why they taste, feel and look as they do. And with that understanding we can become better at producing foods that consumers want,” says Henrik Jørgen Andersen.

So far it has created fertile ground for something very different to human food. In collaboration with the NanoFOOD consortium, Arla has discovered that milk proteins applied to implant surfaces improve the likelihood of an artificial hip being successfully implanted without rejection problems. In the long term, they also hope that milk proteins can be used to ward away bacteria in, for example, toothpaste.

But nanotechnology has more potential uses than understanding foods and using them for other purposes. It can also be used to make food healthier, so people with a sweet tooth can be satisfied without developing rolls of fat.

It can be part of the solution to a welfare problem that WHO has already dubbed an epidemic: obesity. The population of both Europe and USA is growing – not upwards but outwards. More than 50 percent of Europeans are overweight or obese, while in the USA the figure is 64 percent. But despite campaigns and warnings of lowered life expectancy and poorer life quality, French fries, chocolate and soft drinks are still going into our shopping trolleys and then into our stomachs.

It doesn’t just mean larger clothes sizes and less years to live – it also has major economic consequences. In Denmark alone, obesity costs the healthcare sector DKK 1.5 billion annually.

Imagine a future where chocolate is healthy due to the use of nanotechnology. Photo: Scanpix Denmark.

NOT JUST ’LIGHT’
One of the companies working with nanotechnology is Aarhus-Karlshamn, a Danish/Swedish manufacturer of speciality vegetable fats. The company’s production includes fat for chocolate.

“If people were to eat healthily, they would stop eating chocolate all together, but that is unlikely. One third of chocolate consists of fat, and by understanding the structure we have the opportunity to change it and make chocolate, if not healthy, then less unhealthy,” explains head of research at Aarhus-Karlshamn, Karsten Nielsen. According to Karsten Nielsen, consumers have become a demanding group. That is also why ’light’ products are on the decline because they don’t really taste the same and are often filled with additives.

“If for example we can get water to behave differently instead of making a new additive, we can then make chocolate with less fat that tastes the same and fulfils consumers’ requirements,” says Karsten Nielsen.

But according to Leif Schauser, secretariat director of the Nano-FOOD consortium, the great challenge is to convince the critical and demanding consumer that ’nano’ is not a new additive or a new genetically modified product. This is despite nano being simply an expression of a very small size.

“The biggest challenge is the population’s overall acceptance of using technology. There are two trends. Food should be as healthy as possible, and as natural as possible – and those two things do not always go together. Preferably, food should be both healthy and natural. The trend in the industry is therefore to go for natural ingredients. Because consumers mean everything when we produce these foods,” says Leif Schauser.