Microalgal biotechnology at the turn of the millennium: A personal view

I was grateful – and indeed honored – to have had the opportunity to provide the opening presentation for the 1999 International Conference on Applied Algology based on my personal views. Microalgal biotechnology at the end of the millennium – and after some fifty years of much research, requires some ‘soulsearching’, for I cannot help a feeling of disappointment over the fact that Microalgal Biotechnology after so many years is still in its infancy, a sort of esoteric endeavor with a ‘great future’, which somehow does not get off the ground. One reason for the disappointment in the progress made in mass cultures is rooted in the reasons why I was originally so enthusiastically attracted to microalgaculture close to 30 years ago, in the early 1970s. The prospect of a novel method by to save the hungry and poor part of humanity excited me: Here was a worthwhile goal in life, a fantastic scientific challenge. After reading the works done in the early 1950s (Burlew, 1953), I adopted what I perceived as the ‘Microalgae Doctrine’ according to which microalgalculture, in suitable geographic regions, can augment and even replace, cost effectively, conventional agricultural productivity. In spite of the many good reasons given for the superiority of algae over horticultural crops, by the early 1980s, it became very clear that mass production of microalgae as an agricultural commodity, providing e.g. protein, starch or oil, was a distant dream, not to be reached in the foreseeable future. Indeed, the false alarm of an impending food crisis, forecast by the United Nations Advisory Committee (Anonymous, 1967), which predicted an acute shortage of protein by the year 2000, only adds insult to injury. Hence the sober view held by some that microalgal biotechnology has a limited future, confined to specialized, relatively expensive products, which naturally have a rather limited market. Personally, I still believe that in the long run, phototrophic microorganisms will play a role similar to that which heterotrophic microorganisms have today. The basic idea of using solar energy to produce photoautotrophic or mixotrophic cell mass for food, feed and industrial chemicals, particularly on marginal agricultural resources such as sea water along coastal dry lands, is as valid as ever. It is nevertheless obvious that the coming of age of microalgal biotechnology has proved a very slow process. What is holding this technology back?