Turning Plastic Into Protein

When Ting Lu and Stephen Techtmann were notified they were finalists for the Future Insight Prize awarded annually by Merck KGaA, the two scientists thought the email was a scam, said Lu, a bioengineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Added Techtmann, a microbiologist at Michigan Technological University: “It was an out-of-the-blue thing.”

But the €1 million grant the pair of researchers ultimately won for developing a way to turn plastic into protein powder was very real. The p…