This week’s guest blog is written by Juan Carlos Rosa-Medina, BRI’s Market Development Manager. Juan Carlos recently caught up with Dr. Jason Shih, Chairman and Co-founder of BRI and winner of the World’s Poultry Science Association Research Award and the Evonik Degussa Award for Achievement in Poultry Science. Prof. Shih retired from the Department of Poultry Science at NC State University last year and he and his wife spend part of the year in Asia and the rest of their time traveling around the world and playing with their grandson in North Carolina. This blog is the first of two parts – this week Prof. Shih talks about his early years and how he came to develop the technology behind BRI’s Versazyme and Valkerase products.
Juan Carlos: You're well known as an innovator in the poultry nutrition area, but some people might not know you actually studied Botany in college in Taiwan. What prompted you to come to the US and switch your career focus to Animal Nutrition?
Jason: As a Botany student in Taiwan in the early 60s, I was able to see the boom of Biochemistry, so I pursued a Master’s degree in that field but soon realized that if I stayed in Taiwan, my career options in that field would be limited. So, I applied for and was awarded an assistantship at Cornell University and in 1969, I brought my wife and young son to the US so I could pursue a Ph.D. in Biochemistry there. After I received my Ph.D. from Cornell four years later, I had the opportunity to work as a Post-doctoral Fellow in Bacteriology with a Nobel Prize nominee professor at the University of Illinois. How I ended up in the field of Poultry Science has much to do with my next position, working as a Senior Researcher with legendary poultry nutritionist Dr. Melton Scott at Cornell University. It was a very productive time and I was able to publish three papers in one year’s time. Soon after that, I was lucky enough to be offered a faculty position by the Department of Poultry Science at NC State University and in 1976, I moved down to Raleigh, NC and began studying the environmental issues related to anaerobic digestion of poultry waste.
Juan Carlos: So how did you make the transition from poultry waste to poultry nutrition?
Jason: This story has now become a bit of a legend among those who know me and my work, and there are probably several versions out there. But here’s the real story - a hen in the layer house where we were conducting anaerobic digestion studies expired (died) and was inadvertently transported into the waste digester. When we opened the digester we couldn’t find a single feather, so I hypothesized that there was a bacteria that was able to break down the feather protein (keratin) and use it to grow. After several attempts, one of my graduate students found the bacteria. I was so excited that I told him “forget about biogas!”, now it was the about patenting our discovery and developing an industrial application for animal nutrition. Initially, the idea was to use the keratinase enzyme on feather lysate and then directly on the feathers, which would make the feather meal production process more efficient and economical. Sometime later, still thinking about what the keratinase could do, I asked one of my students to add the enzyme directly into chicken feed, and lo’ and behold, the birds grew bigger without consuming more feed.
Thus, it was through these serendipitous discoveries and almost another decade’s worth of hard work at BRI, that today we have opportunity to offer to the poultry industry two very different and completely novel products, the Versazyme enzyme feed additive for animal diets and the Valkerase keratinase-based enzyme for efficient feather meal production.
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