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EIGHT thousand years ago, one of our ancestors had the bold idea to collect and . This was a game-changer: here was a beverage that was not only easy to obtain yet rich in nutrients. Through the centuries, milk in its many forms has become a staple in diets across the world.

Fast-forward to the 21st century and milk production is an industrial process in many places, but this comes at a large environmental – and if you ask me, ethical – price. It is my mission to create authentic animal-free milk.

I don’t mean plant-based alternatives such as nut “milks” and the strange chemical cocktails of emulsifiers and oils that are marketed as “cheese”. In fact, I was suffering through a particularly disappointing vegan bagel a few months ago when something occurred to me: the main things missing from its bland, runny cream cheese were a few proteins and a small number of the fatty acids that occur naturally in milk.

I thought: if only this cream cheese had those missing components, instead of the junk that was in it (and if you read the ingredients, it really is junk) then maybe more people would eat vegan food. Hell, if vegan milk contained real milk proteins – made from scratch, without the use of a cow – then the boundary between “milk” and “vegan milk” would itself be blurred.

“What if we could make real milk proteins from scratch without the use of a cow?”

When I got home, I started doing some research. I am a bioengineer and at the time my job was to design cell lines that produced large proteins with intricate three-dimensional folding. How complex were milk proteins, I wondered? It turns out that they are among the simplest proteins out there. There are four proteins in the casein family; each is on the small side of average and requires no complicated 3D folding.

Whey, the catch-all term for milk’s non-casein proteins, is a little more complex from a technical standpoint, but not by much. It is mostly made up of two proteins: alpha-lactalbumin (which regulates lactose synthesis in cows, but is just a flavour protein to me) and beta-lactoglobulin (a source of flavour and nutrition). The remaining 10 per cent of whey consists of blood serum proteins, antibodies, and other stuff that I consider to be dispensable in terms of milk’s flavour and culinary function.

Compared to a task like cultured meat – a huge tissue engineering challenge that is still the subject of active research – making these six key milk proteins from scratch seemed far easier. Yet nobody was doing it. Once I realised it was possible, I became determined to make animal-free milk.

How do we make this milk? Each of the key milk proteins has a known amino acid sequence that can be found in a free database. It is easy to convert the amino acid sequence into a DNA sequence, and it’s simple (if not yet cheap) to order this DNA from research companies. From there, you mix these genes into a population of yeast using a chemical or electrical stimulus to get the DNA into the yeast cells. Then the cells’ internal machinery starts churning out the proteins, a lot like brewing beer.

Of course, tasty milk isn’t complete without fats. Luckily, dairy scientists have already developed a method for combining healthy, plant-based oils with small, aromatic fatty acids – the same ones that give fresh cream its full, rich flavour.

And that’s about it – once you combine everything with clean water in the right ratios, adding pinches of sugar and minerals as needed to get the taste right, you’ve got a nutritious, tasty, white liquid. You’ve got milk.

From there, it is more of a business problem than a tech problem. How do you scale this process up and make sure it is economical? How do you get this milk on shelves where it can stand proudly next to “real” cow-extracted milk? And most importantly, how do you convince people that this new, strange product is the better one?

For me, that’s the adventure. This summer, I teamed up with Perumal Gandhi, a biomedical engineering graduate from Stony Brook University in New York, and , the executive director of , an international non-profit organisation, which aims to end factory farming through advances in science and technology.

Together, we applied for – and were accepted into – the world’s first start-up accelerator tailored for “synthetic biology” companies. It’s called , and along with seed funding and access to a team of mentors, the programme is providing my team with lab space at University College Cork in Ireland. We’re calling ourselves (get it?) and we have high hopes for our venture.

Right now, we are hard at work developing a proof of concept. Because we are crafting animal-free milk from the bottom up we can choose what goes into it, and what stays out. We’ll leave out lactose, which some 75 per cent of adults on Earth can’t digest. We will also omit cholesterol, for a product that won’t clog your arteries, no matter how much cheese you eat. And we will exclude all bacteria, for a product that needs no pasteurisation and requires no refrigeration. Sound good?

This article appeared in print under the headline “Milk without the moo”