Available September 29, 2026:

Co-founder and CSO of Molecular Garden. Plant cells grown in steel tanks that produce a plant's chemistry without ever farming the plant — the same molecules batch after batch, independent of land, season and weather. A 2040 where the plant that makes your sunscreen never leaves the ground.

Alessandro De Simone did not set out to work on plants, or on biology at all. He enrolled in geology in Bari because his hometown university had no astronomy course, disliked it within months, and switched after a former high-school teacher mentioned a new field that put engineering inside biology. His cohort of fifteen were, in his words, the guinea pigs. He left Italy on a Potsdam scholarship he won as the only applicant, and spent the next decade teaching bacteria to eat methanol made from captured CO2 instead of sugar grown on farmland.

Then he reversed his own field's bet. A message on LinkedIn introduced him to plant cell culture, a discipline he had never heard of after ten years next door to it, and he concluded that microbes were the wrong factory: a microbe plays one note, a plant cell plays the whole chord. Molecular Garden grows the cells rather than the plant. A scrap of needle goes onto media of water, sugar, minerals and hormones, where it forgets how to be a leaf and becomes an undifferentiated dividing mass. Moved into liquid, that mass is a fermentation that scales to a steel tank. The plant's defensive chemistry, the UV filters, the antioxidants, the aroma compounds is switched on not with heat or insects but by adding molecules that tell the cells there is danger nearby.

Asked about 2040, he starts somewhere unremarkable. A woman in southern Italy puts on sunscreen and a deep red lipstick, and does not know that either pigment came out of a tank. Then it gets domestic. In the kitchen his daughter stops a batch she started days earlier in a container that looks like a coffee machine, tips the blueberry cells into a smoothie and drinks it. Cell lines wait frozen in a library. The monocultures kept alive for a single molecule - vanilla, rose oil, sandalwood - are gone, and so is the jasmine field in Egypt harvested by hand at night, often by children, because the flower's scent is strongest in the dark. You take the plant once. After that it stays in the ground.

Episode 1 of Grown, not Made.