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Coffee's Caffeine-Producing Gene Isolated
There is a broader implication though: It's known that many drugs come from or are discovered in naturally occuring plants and then synthesized. If the genetic basis for these types drugs can be discovered and replicated, you could turn the human body into it's own pharmacy. Maybe synthesizing salicin internally could be as effective as taking aspirin? (and less irritating for your stomach) Or maybe if the fundamental genetic operations that synthesize chemicals/proteins is discovered (the microcode of cells?) you could even synthesize chemicals that don't occur naturally. Perhaps in the future a "pharmaceutical organ" will be hacked into the human body specifically for this purpose.
Of course there's the other side to this, where people will want to synthesize certain chemcials in opiates or marijuana ... Fun to speculate about, at least!"
I want that gene grafted into my pancreas!
** Sig-a-licious **
What's the point of drinking coffee then?
I mean what's next...non-alcoholic beer?
;)
"I'm not a procrastinator, I'm temporally challenged"
Wasn't there a few sci-fi books in the 70's about a society where children are created that do not sleep? What kind of society does slashdot think would be created as a result (seriously)?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
What would be the point of taking a pill to make your body naturally produce caffeine than taking a pill of caffeine? Still need to take something. And if you just want something that drips into your synapse 24 hrs. a day, why don't you just create something to coax your body to make it's innate productivity enhancers? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that the way brain-affecting drugs worked was that they were analogues to internal chemicals, meaning that they bind to the same receptors, but are not actually those chemicals.
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
Desire is not an occupation.
If I were cleverer I would come up with a way to convert this to a song along the lines of 'Rock the body'...
Like 'Who's got the Knowledge to Hack your Body?!'
Come on, someone run with that idea.>:)
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Then what's the point? We'd get accustomed to levels of it in our blood stream and it wouldn't be as effective. Unless we make more. I can see it now. Instead of Blood Alcohol Content, we'll be measuring Blood Caffeine Content.
Excuse me sir, can you walk this straight line while touching your nose?
And do you think Coke and Pepsi will really let this happen? Unless they work it so that their drinks are the way the genes are spliced into our own, I don't think so.
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
This would bring a whole new meaning to the term "wired with caffeine".
.sig
Hmm, if you could have your body produce drugs on demand, that would be really cool.
"Hey man...wanna get high?"
"Sure...hold on a sec" (turns on his marijuana-producing gland) "wheeeeee"
Not reading
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
So does this mean that we will finally be able to have a pure caffiene drip that's affordable for those late-night code sessions?
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
get drunk
And have it released in a circadian cycle? (like in the middle of the night. Wake up, Hot Mama, Daddy's home :)
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
rather than putting the gene in your body, which sounds kinda gross, why not add it into every other food and beverage item available.
mmm.. caffinated pickles...
-Spazimodo
Fsck the millennium, we want it now.
Fsck the millennium, we want it now.
Millennium Crisis Line: 0890 900 2000 [calls cost 50p/min]
All right! Let's get started researching the alchohol, niccotine, and THC producing molocules right away!
They'll get sued by Starbucks & Juan Valdez for violation of copyright protection under the DMCA
Does anybody know if it is healthier to take caffeine in extracted, pill form than drinking it in coffee? I would imagine the impurities present in coffee are partially responsible for some of the side effects.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
A Mr. Coffee is REALLY a Mr. coffee
How Jaded Are You?
Anyone who's a long-distance runner knows the sweet feeling you get after a long run and how you get irritable and a little depressed when you don't run for a few days. This isn't so different from when my father used to get headaches without his morning coffee. We were both addicts: him to caffeine, me to endorphin.
It seems hacking your body so you get your morning caffeine without drinking coffee is like hacking your body to get endorphin with the requisite run. I think both of these miss the point: caffeine is only a pleasant side effect of people's very pleasurable coffee ritual just as endorphin is a pleasant side effect of doing something good for your body. To get these things without the work turns these rituals into just "using drugs". If the only reason people drank coffee was to get caffeine, we'd just start smoking crack cause it's much more effective and not much more expensive than Starbucks!
Naturally caffeinated potatos (or potatoes)... caffeinated celery... caffeinated parsley... caffeinated beef (mmmm)...
So does this mean that we can start lacing other stuff with caffeine? Cutting the grass just became a nighttime job.. You don't have to bother with actual coffee for your caffeine anymore..
Hmmm... I wonder if they could isolate the THC gene from cannabis sativa, then I could be permanently out of my tree...
I think I met a lawyer the other day who's already done this, judging by his dopey demeanor. I'll bet the bastard's patented it already too!
Alan.
Didn't you teacher ever teach you that its "i before e except after f". Geez, kids these days.
And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
Berke Breathed
As the poster points out, many drugs are first discovered in plants/animals and then synthesized. This is what makes the loss of the rain forest and other areas of great genetic diversity so scary, imagine the great potential for new drugs and treatmeants that is lost along with them.
Ever since I read that the Joy of Cola was just a caffeine buzz I stopped drinking any caffeinated beverage.
Brian
Microsoft is Evil
Guess so, Microsoft have been doing it for years now.
-- Soruk
i can't imagine what would happen to dracula!! --drunk drank drink
"it's not much, really" said the horse.
Caffeinated fruit. Strawberries, bananas, grapes, oranges, you get the picture. Be healthy and get your wake up effect. Or just caffeinated tomatoes to help make Bloody Mary's better.
Caffeinated coffee beans. What?, you say, aren't coffee beans already caffeinated? Yep. But who says you can't enhance the genetic sequence to get the Super-Caffeinated bean?
Caffeinated malt, barley, and hops for the perfect all natural Beer for a little of the hair of the dog that bit you and a quick pick me up.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Say you body DID produce caffiene, after awhile your body would either become toterle or emune (god I can't spell) to caffiene to such an extent that you body would have to produce more, which it would come to toterlate as normal. Till one day you body would be in a state that caffiene would no longer have any noticeable effect (reguards of the dose). Then what the hell would you do for a caffiene buzz? Crank?
I would still donate my body to science for this. 3 hours to no sleep sounds like fun!
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
For info on caffine.
Thank you for not thinking.
If we had the ability to produce our own caffiene or any other chemical, that wouldn't really accomplish anything, since our bodies would just eventually build up a resistance to whatever our "PharmaGland(tm)" produces. The only way this could be practical is if we could limit what our PharmaGland(tm) produces, ie. you only get your medicine for a week and then it cuts off.
But controlling what our body produces would require either chemical controls (essentially more medicine) or constant genetic re-engineering of the PharmaGland(tm). And as any geneticist can tell you, you can only alter a set of genes so many times before they start to fall apart.
P.S. It's my name. I thought of it first. I'm filing the trademarks for PharmaGland(tm) right now. I have so little, don't take this away from me.
If you could have a way to turn drug production on and off, this might work. But chances are the way to toggle production would involve some other drug, which brings in its own complication.
However, there is something to be said for natural drugs instead of the synthetic "equivalent". Many people complain that (pills and tasty treats containing) lab-created caffeine irritates their stomach more than natural caffeine.
Perhaps we can set up the human-organ-producing pigs to also produce caffeine. Then my new heart will be pre-adjusted to my addiction.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
Novicaine was created by a bunch of chemists who had decided to try and synthesize cocaine. At the time, cocaine was commonly in use as a pain killer for things like nasal surgery (!) and dental surgery, but it was hard to get it in a pure form. So the chemists tried to synthesize it. They ended up with something that worked better - and differently - than they expected, but they didn't end up with cocaine.
Synthesizing any sort of a chemical involving large amounts of carbon is fiendishly difficult, as you can get something that is chemically equivalent and yet doesn't behave the same. And then you can get something that is chemically identical, right down to the way it folds, but is chirally different.
Anyone know if chirally opposite caffeine works on the brain? I'll stick with my coffee plunger until then.
Genetic Ubergeek Manipulation Project (GUMP) has just announced a breakthrough in gene therapy. They were able to splice the caffiene gene into the human genome.
"We are pleased to announce that the human body can manufacture caffiene. At this time we are only able to get mucous membranes to generate caffiene, but we are sure we'll be able to get other tissues to secrete this all important chemical in no time," said the groups founder Wally Heemuckle. Despite his rather haggard appearance (he looks like he hasn't slept for twelve days) he was able to continue, "And the cure is also just around the corner."
Other company employees were seen blowing their noses frequently, and placing the used tissues into bins labelled "To be processed".
This is Horatio Hornblower from passive 7, know one nose your news like we do. Goodnight.
-Adam
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Kinda looks like Killroy...
NecroPuppy
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
Aside from wanting to be the first person on my block to have a cyberjack i would probably want to be the first person i know to have a "caffine implant" Coffee takes a good half hour to an hour to kick in fully. Now if i could have a caffine implant in my brain to release directly into my nervous system... "honey your going to be late for work again" *rubs temple*"YEEEEEAAAERRGHHYeaa!!!!" (shot of large man running out the door with car keys in hand) Instant caffine implant? hell sign me up. -you see young child, sometimes the mongoose..she dont always win.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise. -Fight Club
Speak for yourself. While I may catch heat for saying it, I ingest very little caffeine in a day. I'm not being judgemental, if you want to drink it, that's fine. But don't make it sound like all hackers are made with the same mold. Some of us drink Sprint and code with the lights on.
Perhaps... perhaps they will even create a medication that will lower my caffeine tolerance back to mortal levels. I haven't gotten a coffee-buzz in years. I only get messed up and neurotic if I don't have enough coffee, and that's no fun. I like coffee.
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
Somehow I'm not seeing the merit in endowing the body with the ability to produce caffeine. It's a pretty poor substitute for something the body already creates: adrenaline.
Rather, wouldn't it be much easier to get kids to eat their broccoli if they knew it was caffeinated? Heck, I'd eat it...
--ian
Hmmmm. Creating our own painkillers as a replacement for aspirin? Let's extend the logic and see where this takes us.
As an insulin-dependant diabetic, I'd love to be able to tell my Generic Organ Implant[tm] to act like a pancreas and start kicking out insulin. (Given that my real pancreas is as useful as a paperweight as far as sugar conversion goes, and useless even as a paperweight given that it's sitting somewhere behind a kidney.)
Of course, given the technology to do that, I could presumably send the same message to my real pancreas, waking it up and telling it to earn its damn keep for once.
But let's extend this idea even further. Reprogrammable Organs! The body's own equivalent of FPGA's! Say I've been slacking on code and am running behind the product's shipping schedule -- I just tell my pancreas to hold off on insulin and start behaving like a brain to increase my programming speed. In the meantime, I revert to injecting insulin. Or tell one of my leg muscles to act like a pancreas, since I'm not using the legs anyhow (I'm sitting in a chair coding, remember).
The make-yer-own-apsirin idea is pointless anyhow. We already manufacture our own painkillers. They're called endorphins; a lot of painkillers are just synthetic endorphin analogues.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
In his "Culture" novels, the people have the ability to produce hundreds of pharmaceuticals in their genetically engineered glands. Nice to see it so close to happening in Real Life!
I guess I'll gland some Active and get back to work....
it appears as though you yourself incorrectly spelled the incorrect spelling of the word you said was "misspelled".
I could actually have my body produce it's own beer. This could be the greatest thing since beer goggles.
I am currently not obliged to divulge that information as it might compromise the agents in the field
Instead, have glands that we can "control" in some fashion. When we need the caffiene, we have the gland make it. When we need the medicine, we have the gland make it. When we don't need it anymore, we turn it off.
How many want to bet that the first real world use of this technology will be to insert viagra producing genes into porn stars?
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
This has obvious military implications, and could very well be the "stim-packs" of science fiction, except it would be internally generated. Perhaps we'll hack into us abilities that we've only ever thought would be applied externally. Characters like Wolverine from the X-Men - a science-fictional character born with natural abilities, can now be recreated. Imagine a navy seal behind the enemy lines with a bullet-proof vest. Against non-armour piercing bullets, he'll be practically invincible (save for head-shots). He could endure bullet wounds which hit the chest without stopping for a beat (except from recoil). He could take the place of 10 men on the battle-field, and he wouldn't have to carry much technological gadgets (pain suppressors are all built into his organs). Great way to complement the Land Warrior program.
:)
Now, imagine a team of 4 of these guys walking right into Saddam's house, taking out all his guards, then forcing him to swallow a timed grenade wrapped in a condom?
YEAH!
...I am proof that intelligent beings are not always intelligent...
How to screw your body up with the byproducts of this sort of do-it-to-yourself chemistry. Aside from getting the body to do useless things like manufacture caffiene (when there's a perfectly good source of it in q-q-quadruple es-s-s-spresso) genetic research on other fronts have been useful in trying to find a cure for Juvenile Diabetes by getting a diabetics body to manufacture it's own insulin.
I'm also not sure our conscious minds are better at regulating compounds in our bloodstreams than bio/analog processes, considering how judgement becomes impared with acclimation to a compound. i.e. becoming chemically dependant rather than just psychologically.
IMHO these are apples and sausages issues, has any warmblooded creature been found which produces the common plant compound of Caffeine?
The original story I heard on this was to breed plants to grow caffeine free tea and coffee. Quite a stretch from this posts interpretations.
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I went to visit the US last month for the first time... I never had coffee that allowed you to see the bottom of the cup. YES, IT IS TRUE coffee in the US is horrible!!!
Being 7 hours jet-lagged and deprived of REAL coffee was not fun at all. After 3-5 cups (30cl cups) I had to go and sleep in the bathroom.
The strangest was seing people taking out the foam of expressos using some specialized metal cups... Expresso machines are supposed to make foam. The foam has to be thick enough to sustain a packet of sugar for a few seconds...
So, before you start knocking-in caffeine genes into the genome of your future children, please, please, please, start brewing better coffee.
JBv.
"Please stand still on your foot and touch your nose for 30 seconds."
or, if your pulse is over 200 beats/minute.
Fight Spammers!
Flash forward x years .. humans have developed ways for any needed drug to be synthesized by the body. Let's say it works like this ... you go to the doctor to take a pill. The pill itself is not the medication, but instructions for your body on how to actually produce the medication.
.. imagine recording your dreams. Possible once we figure out how the brain works. Stephenson, Heinlein, Dick, et. al. have been writing about this stuff for years.
.. to want to better understand yourself and your environment. So if we were going to create a new race of things, of beings, of robots, of organisms, we'd want them to have the same capabilities we did.
... beings who studied themselves until they understood ... and were finally able to recreate themselves.
So your body receives the encoded messages, begins producing the medication, and you never have to take that medication again. The pills could be tuned -- 'produce y drug for z number of days, but only when you're awake'.
<conceptualLeap>
What has been one of the leading end goals that technology has been stirving towards? The answer is 'understanding of the human body'. There's a market here
The other thing we're working towards is being able to replicate the human body's potential inside an artifical environment. I think this is a natural thing to do
So how can we preclude the fact that it hasn't happened already? How can we say for sure that we, ourselves, are not just by-products of similar beings
</conceptualLeap>
The workings of our bodies is nothing more than an operating system. Once we understand how it works, we'll be able to replicate it, just as we may have already been.
I wonder what the IRQ is for creativity?
What would this lead to? Soylent Green in regular and decaf?
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
If you don't smell like coffee when you sweat, you don't drink enough.
Decaffeinated coffee is the devil's brew
Fight Spammers!
the end of Mt. Dew civilization as we know it!
What will programmers drink now? Water?
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Trust me, you do NOT want to fsck with your cAMP levels like that. Get the levels just right, in the right tissues, and you could reproduce cholera toxin poisoning. Explosive diarrhoea anyone?
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
The idea that we could create an artificial organ that could produce drugs on demand is really intriguing. Taking some material from Steven R. Donaldson's SciFi quintilligy (five book trillogy) I could see where that would be quite useful.
Imaging such an organ under concious control of its host (via electrodes in the brain or some such mechanism). In a tough spot and need everything you can muster? Poof! Produce a ton of adrenelin and other support chemicals to maximize your speed/strength/etc. Injured? Poof! Dump endorphins into your bloodstream to keep you from passing out from the pain, so you can get yourself to a hospital. Cramming for the final or falling asleep on a long drive? Poof! Measured caffine to keep you alert.
How about self-preservation? Detects the body has gotten too much anestesia during an operation - put out some stimulants. Need to fake your death? Have it out out measured amounts of curarae to simulate death.
And for spies, a suicide pill they can't take away from you.
The possibilities are endless.
Of course, whenever you use something like this you'll pay the price later (fatigue, twiches, withdrawl, migranes) - you never get something for nothing. But wouldn't it be great to have the choice?
my body naturally producing THC?
sign me up.
But is the world ready for genetically altered java? First robots, then languages? What are they going to do, turn it into C#? (don't hit me) Jeff
God bless the teachers who try to hold class after caffeinated apples in the cafeteria. Or the bus drivers who watch helplessly as the kids raid their lunchbags for PB & Java sandwiches - just one or two quick bites before homeroom and they're loaded for bear... On the bright side, Little League sports will see a huge boost in scoring. Little Ricky's batting average will skyrocket once he starts doing a few handfuls of caffeinated sunflower seeds before each at-bat.
Was that out loud?
many athletes drink alot of coffee before events (not things like marathons though, coffee is also a diuretic [makes you urinate more]) to help enhance performance. what happens when people can produce caffeine on their own. the original poster suggests syncing it to circadian rhythm (sleep/wake cycle). what if you synced it to your adrenal gland? gives a new meaning to getting pumped up for something. or caused it to be activated but muscle activity? say good by to muscle fatigue, although the chances of really overworking something increase exponentially. could "caffeine adapted" people be banned from sports? i owuldn't be suprised. (a bit OT -->) hell, the IOC won't even let oplymic coverage be broadcast on the net, not even real-time scores and stuff. so either the IOC has tech-phobia, or the networks have so much financial influence that they don't want to piss off the networks
-justin
--Justin
There is not just *one* gene responsible for producing caffeine, or any biomolecule. They are all produced through pathways consisting of multiple enzymes, and some sort of complex regulatory system where the cell might produce another molecule that inhibits one or more of the enzymes, or it may just stop producing enzymes and the "assembly line" get's backed up.
I like that analogy. Each enzyme is like a laborer on an assembly line. What they've found here is one gene that makes one enzyme. Disable that gene and the assembly line can't procede past a certain point. You cannot just stick that gene in another organism, and expect to have a caffeine factory!
It is however done, that bacteria are altered to produce chemicals, however in these cases, we don't care about gene regulation. They can spew out all the insulin they can!
A side thought about what they're proposing here. Many of these pathways are down-regulated by end product. It's feedback inhibition, like a thermostat. But I see a possible problem here. Say you have a 2 step process going from compound A through intermediate B and finishing at product C
A--->B--->C
^ |
--------
(please excuse the awful ascii art)
product C, in high concentrations stops production of intermediate B, but if the step from B to C is stopped, say by removing the gene for the necessary enzyme, there's nothing to stop the production of B, you'll end up with tons of B which may taste bad, be unhealthy, something, and no A, which may be required for something else.
B BB B
B B B
A--->B-X->C
BBB B BB
BB BB B B
Just some thoughts
-Hatta
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Just like from HHGG, "How I climbed Mt. Everest with on a chemically induced quadruple-espresso"
I couldn't figure this one out either. I don't drink coffee but I've read that caffiene has a bitter taste, and figured that must factor in to the overall taste. And Barq's root beer advertises that it "has bite" which I figured might be due to the caffiene (not all root beers add caffiene).
As I remember the bitter taste was a factor that made caffienated H2O tricky. I don't know how they got around it.
I had thought about adding caffiene to other fruits and vegetables as another poster suggested but again you might have the same problem with taste.
Take the isolated caffiene gene, possibly make it 1000x powerful, splice it into some harmless E. Coli (the type that lives in your gut). Grow a huge batch of the stuff, then dump it into your enemy's water supply.
Result: The bacteria spreads throughout the population, including their leadership and military forces. Anyone who catches it runs the buzz from hell, sleep becomes impossible. After a week or so of sleep depravation, high stress, and fatigue, the majority of the population, including the military, collapses.
Similar possibilities exist with psycho-active components of marijuana, opiates, mushrooms, tobacco, etc. You could even isolate the gene in wine and beer bacteria that creates alcohol...
Of course there's the other side to this, where people will want to synthesize certain chemcials in opiates or marijuana ... Fun to speculate about, at least!
No kidding. Some day, it'll be feasible for someone to graft a THC gene into his own body so that he basically pisses marijuana. It's already silly for governments to wage war on a naturally occurring feral plant, but how much sillier will it be when it's no longer an external plant but instead one's own body? What'll happen when some enterprising and politically conscious person hacks his own genetic code so as to shit pellets with DeCSS engraved on them? Will his own offspring be contraband?
For some caffeine addicts, I could foresee dropping this gene into a harmless bacterium that produces a steadily decreasing amount of caffeine as time goes on. This would allow stimulants addicts (cocaine, amphetamines, methamphetamine, etc.) to get somewhat of a "buzz" without ever having to touch a caffeinated beverage.
"Even genius needs a competent technique."--Robert Fripp
Michael Crighton's book Terminal Man is about a patient with some kind of seizures who has wires inserted into his brain to trigger happy thoughts every time they happen.. The problem is that the happy thoughts become addictive, which drives him to have seizures constantly and commit random acts of violence.. Caffeine is also addictive, and the concept of having your own body create it is kind of scary.. After I quit drinking caffeinated drinks I got back the ability to stay up late and be 'hyper' by my self.. Try it, it's basically the same feeling without the withdrawals.
Let's think about this for a second.... If we could produce our own Caffine then what would happen to Jolt soda (the choice of the Hacking Generation)?
Good idea.
Instead of crack babies we can have COFFEE BABIES!
...I don't think this is a good idea.
Coffee without caffine is like beer without alcohol. Caffine and alcohol is why people drink this stuff.
Hmmmmm.... so we'll want to pass out and stay awake, interesting... (warning: Simpsons parody folows)
shhhoo tired....
CaffeineKickiningIn!I'mSoAwake!
Didsh I ever telll yoush that your beauti*hic*ful?
CaffeineAgain!I'mWired,I'mReadyToGo!I'm...
*thunk*
Strange thing is, I think I once heard something about a caffeinated beer...
-GreenHell
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
I only drank one pot of coffee today. I cut down to two pots of coffee a day.
I had no problem reading this.
Fight Spammers!
after all, Evolva's creators was not so far ahead of reality... May be one day I will throw stones and be invisible ...
Since my body is prolly already producing its caffine I might not care about this. I drink so much coke these days that my blood is probably 50% caffinated or more. You will hardly catch me without a coke in my hand.
Most hackers, sys admins and techies in general are prolly thinking the same thing.
Though it'd be nice for when I couldn't find a coke. Just need to find a way to make the process slow down or pick up as needed. Might have to install a dial. Only prob is if someone turns it up too fast by accident you might get seizures or something. It'd create a whole new series of medical problems (overdosing during pregnancy for instance)
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
This would actually not be good. If your body were able to internally produce and use up caffeine, you could eventually die. Everyone knows that caffeine starts to have a smaller effect on a person after they drink a ton of it. I'm just wondering how fast a persons body would produce and use it up? I mean, after 250 mg's of caffeine you get caffeinism, and start to feel sick. After 4500 mg's of caffeine, you could die /07/21/1818236.shtml )
( http://slashdot.org/articles/00
Alright, that said, I think this could really improve the state of decaf coffee. Currently, the way they make it is to (essentially) brew the beans once with an icky batch of chemicals that supposedly sucks out the caffiene, but leaves the flavor it. Yeah, right.
But, if they could just disable the caf-gene so the caffeine was never produced at all, then no intermediate step, and therefore better decaf! This would be useful for those times when you're trying to "cut down" because you're drinking 15 cups a day... switch a few to genetically engineered decaf, and you get all the yummy fun without all the speed.
With the isolated gene, they can figure out a way to naturally increase the amound of caffiene in coffee. That would be cool. Think of the productivity boost! We'd be like truckers on speed! Need to code 2000 lines in 8 hours? With super coffee, no problem!
Power corrupts... absolute power is kinda neat!
Teaching the human body to manufacture something like caffeine isn't as simple as just implanting genes from a caffeine-producing plant. You have to trick the body into manufacturing all the machinery for the whole metabolic pathway and somehow also make sure that the body presents a friendly evironment to that machinery. This sort of thing has been done in simple microorganisms and in mammals in a few cases, but it's tricky.
miles
I'm no coffee drinker, and have never been one. But why is it that when I drink coffee, it has no effect on me (that I can tell)? If I drank coffee and then went to bed I wouldn't have any trouble getting sleep. So in my case, there would be no point in having my own supply of caffeine :)
I lost me sig.
As tempting as producing my own caffeine sounds, there's just this unescapable image of a mad scientist running amok with my genes...
I'll just induce my own caffeine daze with Penguin Mints (Mmmm... the ambrosia of the minty gods...) and strong coffee. Yum.
(A little off-topic -- I where my CueCat would take me if I scanned the UPC on my Penguin Mints. I'm sure not booting to Windows ME just to find out, though. *shudder*)
Now another screwy thing to wonder about is what are the precursers to Caffeine? Think about it, they may taste really bad. Caffeine is an alkaloid (nitrogen contaning organinc molecule) and they all taste bitter (Think of tonic water without gin) and in general they tend to be toxic too. So now we get coffee beans that are full of precursers with nowhere to go.
Of the most common methods to decaffeineate beans, I'd say stick with super critical CO2. Mess with the temp and pressures to get a more exclusive extraction. Solvents stink, and environmental considerations need to be taken into account. So I dunno, I'll stick to leaded coffee for now. Besides, didn't someone publish that caffeine reduces the risk of Parkinsons disease?
As far as all of the "other" drugs/chemicals that could be produced, I don't think too much of that happening. I saw that someone posted that they were diabetic. As a 24 year veteran of that disease, the sheer number of monitoring and induction steps involved with normal pancratic functions makes my head spin. Considering the fact that we don't know how most prokaryotic bacteria (no nucleus) sense their environment, or what happens so that they can respond, not to mention redundancies for good measure. What a run on, but we don't know how to control these systems in bacteria, never mind people. Just some thoughts. R
C-a-f-f-e-i-n-e
We must respect evil, and we must make evil respect us.
A realistic use of this gene, other than figureing out how to prevent its environmental enabling, or just removing it, would be to have special bacteria produce caffine for our softdrinks; but then isn't there a synthetic method for caffine?
There might be a call to splice the gene into the adrenal gland if its malfunctioning, but I figure that this person's long dead before the "gene therapy" has a chance to help out.
-Daniel
Yes, it's true. We, as a race, have been hacking our bodies since we've had them. Many of you probably have similar daily hacks that you perfom, as do I, to tune and enhance the operation of our bodies.
We eat and drink caffeinated foods and beverages in an effort to enhance alertness and to defeat our own circadian rythms. We wear eyeglasses in order to improve on factory standard equipment and to protect these vital tissues from damaging rays whilst out and about in the Big Blue Room. Some of us even submit these oh-so-tender pieces of flesh to the awesome might of a laser for input correction and re-alignment. We wear an assortment of braces and supports to relieve muscle pain and fatigue, use caustic chemicals to enhance our physical appearance, and braces on our teeth to guide the growth and placement of what would otherwise be non-parallel placed mastication devices. And then there's the whole Pandora's box of plastic surgery...
See what I mean? I know, I know, you're saying "but I want to tune my endorphin output using a heads-up display in my peripheral vision!" Hell, so do I. That's just hacking at the next level. We have been hacking our bodies for so long, most of us using the equivalent of rootkits, that we tend to forget that we are doing it. When articles like this talk about getting ready to hack your body they do so by keeping all of the daily hacks we all participate in below the base-line of what is currently possible.
Humans will create something not because it is needed but instead because it is possible. Once these things are made and used widely then they are, in effect, just another part of the human body, or more accurately a module which can be elected for use or not. We are already hacking our bodies, just not at the desired level. This is good. For what good would a hack be that had no room for improvement at a later date? Boring, I say. So bring on the cybernetic implants, the gene therapy, the bio-computers peppered about my person and the nanites on the rampage within. Bring it on, and let the hacking continue!
ADH is the hormone responsible for water reabsorption in the lymph nodes (or something.) So if you have too much caffiene, you won't reabsorb much water, and then Nature will be calling much more often.
I'm sorry, AC's, but you seem to have me mistaken. I remember reading, either in a thread or in the original article, about being able to produce a chemical similar to the one found in aspirin. If one can create pain-killers or pain-nullifiers for the body naturally, it would boost the effectiveness of an army. And about dependence - it doesn't matter. The body creates it naturally (once its been hacked in), so we would be as dependent on pain-killers as we would be on blood cells.
...I am proof that intelligent beings are not always intelligent...
There are some things with which mankind was not meant to tamper. Among the most sacred of these is the caffeine of the Holy Java Bean. Beware lest thou anger the gods with this blasphemy! They will strike you down whether you spell "caffeine" correctly or not!
And the brethren went away edified.
Use any spare cycles to read Slashdot
Read Slashdot? Why not something useful like Seti@home or RC5?
I doubt, therefore I may be.
I... am *so* there. ;)
On a slightly more serious level, a lot of work would need to be done in terms of biochemical regulating mechanisms before this is feasible, in order to ensure that you don't live in a permanent state of caf OD (or worse), and also to ensure that you don't build up a tolerance to your "natural" levels. Why splice it in, after all, if you're only going to become resistant to its presence?
-TBHiX-
Coffee bean, coffee bean, so small and yet so mighty
Its gentle buzz, as warm as fuzz, by day or in the nighty!
--one of the few nights even I might admit to one too many cups of Turkish.
I'm wondering just how pervasive the US computer caffine cluture is internationally. I've been in the industry to 10 years here in Australia and my current project is the only one where not drinking coffee has been considered unusual.
If I were to work in the US what reation would not drinking Coffee (or some other caffine product) have? Or would it just be a social disadvantage?
Don't get me wrong, I like coffee, it's just that caffine doesn't keep me awake or make me more alert, if I drink too much I just get jittery/nervous. (BTW too much for me is probably 2 regular strangth cups in one day, or a few days of ahving one cup each day).
I, for one, would jump at having GM caffine free coffee.
for them to isolate the gene that produces THC in marijuana. It'd be great if my body could produce that naturally, hehe.
Your Momma's so fat she makes emacs look like nano!
Just for info, "oft-used" should not be hyphenated.
Just thought you should no that.
Of course there's the other side to this, where people will want to synthesize certain chemcials in opiates or marijuana ...
By "other side" I assume you mean "downside". Why do certain people insist on prying into the lives of others? Here is a clue for everyone who thinks drugs should be outlawed: We'll all be a lot happier if everybody would just mind their own business and worry about their own damn selves! Besides, legalizing drugs means less gang violence, less people in prison for non-violent crimes, less taxes to pay for innocent drug users in prison, and less crime in general. And, of course, much cheaper drugs (if that sort of thing interests you). Get a clue, people!
(My apologies for those who do have a clue.)
Caffinated beef! It's only a matter of time...
Now they'll be able to inject the genes into humans, so they'll be able to generate caffeine naturally.
--
Nobody seems to be asking relevant questions.
What happens when geneticly modified pollen 'infects' wild strains?
Could this be the end of coffee as we know it?
James.
well the organ thing would'nt realy work because you would simply become acustom to haveing it in your system. This is'nt mearly a psycosomatic effect, your body actualy starts accounting for it being there. if you take the same amount of caffene every day for a week, the caffene will no longer have the effect of wakeing you up, your body will it in ahead of time (but if you take the caffen away it throws everything all out of wack, generaly it gives you a headache) but hey, It sounds good.
gimme some o dat!
I'd much prefer chloriphil (I know, I can't spell)
sure, green skin wouldn't be all that great.. but then you could actually make energy from the monitor glow... put a plant-lamp over the desk and never need to sleep again.. Make your own oxegen too.. hmm, mabie you'd be able to do without breathing then??
of course it'd probably never work, but it'd be cool if it did...
First Off, Caffeine Faq. Needless to say, this story sort of threw me. From my understanding, caffeine works by inhibiting cAMP phosphodiesterase, a protein which degrades cAMP, also known as cyclic adenosine monophosphate. Now, cAMP has various functions in the body, including acting as a second messenger for various hormones, including epinephrine. Abnormally high levels of cAMP isn't something one wishes to have all of the time, and the idea of a 'caffeine gene' sounds wreckless and irresponsible. This suggestion is on par with suggesting the insertion of genes, which code for proteins capable of synthesizing rat poison. Both are laughable. The insertion of such genes, or a "pharmacy" organ don't really make any sense. Just thought I'd share what I know with you, and bitch at you in the process. If you are at all interested in learning more about caffeine, cAMP, or pretty much anything medically related, go to the NIH and follow the link to PubMED. There you will find a search engine which will search nearly all of the abstracts(summaries) of articles in the national library of medicine. sorry if I was rude.
It should be noted that it is spelt "caffeine," not "caffiene."
Cheers!
M. Piedlourd
Caffeine is not the best thing for a human body. Normally your body will sleep when it needs to as long as it is in an area that your mind perceives as "safe". Staying up way too late is not good.
Caffeine tricks your body into not sleeping when it knows it would do your body good to sleep.
Because of the school schedule that is not in sync with teenager's circadian rhythms, many teens are turning to caffeine to push their bodies to the limit. Teens are alert later than older and younger people and are sleepy later. The bus comes too early to allow enough sleep since teens fall asleep later.
As a high school junior, i find it necessary to use this drug in order to be able to think through homework. But I am currently petitioning the school board to change the schedule.
.Just a brief note about why people with AD(H)D can take a central nervous system stimulant like methyphenidate (ritalin) and it has the reverse effect of creating 'calm'.
The results of studies on people with ADD using PET scans (Positron Emission Tomography) showed that part of the brain was actually working *less* than other parts of the brain. The PET scan is able to detect the use of glucose by cells and the scans showed that regions in the frontal lobes were less active in ADD sufferers than in the people without ADD. These regions are responsible for impulse control and attention (what was i talking about?)
The way I look at the problem is messages that must get processed in these regions get slowed down and so the message queue for the whole brain gets out of whack -- sort of like a network where one machine processes messages slower thus slowing down the whole thing.
As to the theraputic action of ritalin (or other stimulant) the notion is it boosts neural activity in that region allowing the traffic to flow smoothly again.
Now whether the ritalin only boosts those cells in the frontal lobes *or* the rest of the brain too is something I'm still trying to find out...
Just my 2 cents.
-
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Oliver's Law: Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
On second thought: The idea of sticking the caffeine gene in the human genome proposed earlier is not so unbelievable (except for the small ethical/technical matter of germ line therapy, which I will leave well alone ;-). Caffeine in coffee and tea is synthesised from purines with a few methylation steps along the way, not uncommon stuff in human anabolic pathways. However it would be
a good idea to set-up an automatic expression control system, so when your brain starts releasing sleep inducing peptides, such as GHRH, at some inconvenient hour of the morning, these same sleep peptides could activate some transcription factor (TF) that bumps up expression of the caffeine synthetase enzyme (and associated pathway enzymes) in a big way, meanwhile you could remove the caffeine gene from coffee and swap it for some chemical that inhibits the caffeine up regulating TF, that way you're default setting is alertness and you'd drink coffee to get to sleep.
I'd do the same kind of thing with THC, only in this case THC will get up regulated by some drug no one will ever illegalise like aspirin, so popping standard painkillers would get you stoned...
If you do not have the power to change something, then change the way you think about it! - Anonymous
Hacking a body to make it perform better instead of optimally is a bad thing.
You say the human body could syntetize caffeine itself but you could be much more friendly with your body by sleeping some time, even like Dali's flash sleep.
Look at the "Tour de France": Most of its performers are taking loads of alien drugs and though they finish in the Tour's few first, finish completely stoned out of the competition.
It is because of the current level of competition and because of the mediatic heavy fire that people feel likle beating more and more records not even because of the original sane thing that people call challenge or self-improvement but because they need recognition that people won't usually offer them if they just happen to be only cool.
So, yes, of course, you could make your body synthetize coffee, drugs or even adamantium but it will still secrete shit on a dayly basis and you'll still have to do with this.
What will be the next improvement ? Hermaphrodism ?
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
OK, either I've missed something important, or most of the other posters have. Here's the deal, IMHO:
/. post linux reference, as an analogy: It's like deciding you can run linux programs on any computer that has a processor, since taking out the processor makes your computer not run linux programs.]
/., but it'd be really nice if anybody read the article.
:)
They've identified a gene that, when removed from a coffee plant, will cause that coffee plant to not produce caffeine. The gene itself does not produce caffeine, in fact it's likely it has *nothing to do* with the production of caffeine (but doesn't 'Caffeine Gene' make a great headline for the mass media?), but if you remove it from this plant it stops the plant from making caffeine. The jump from identifying a gene that can *stop* caffeine production in a specific plant to identifying a (single!) gene that can cause caffeine production (in any organism!) is something akin to deciding that you can make anything (i.e. a bicycle) move at 60mph down the freeway just by adding spark plugs, based on the evdence that removing the spark plugs from a car makes it *stop* being able to go at 60mph down the freeway. [Required
Then, the submitter makes the further jumps first to caffeine production regulated by existing natural rythms, and then to generic synthesis on demand, and then to artifical 'pharmaceutical organs'. Along the way he provides exactly zero thoughts on the biological feasability of any of these. It's to be expected that a topic as non-computer-related as genetics wouldn't have the same level of conversation you normally see (or dread?) on
Anyways, I know I'm taking this way too seriously, as I would want to be at the top of the list if there were ever a real possibility of a mod to produce caffeine internally, but if you stop and think about it there's really not much chance of seeing it in our lifetimes (unless someone manages to actually 'cure' human aging). And even if there was, it probably wouldn't have anything to do with the research described in this particular article
-Jade E.
P.S. On the other hand, I could have lost our little game, and be totally wrong. That tends to happen when I post at 1:30 AM after having slept for about 6 hours in a week.
Now, with this discovery, I'll be able to make my fortune. I'll simply implant the gean into cattle and hey-presto I can start to make caffinated cheese - just think, all those geeks out there staying awake after luch. (It would certainly help avoid that post lunchtime slump.) But that's not the real masterstroke. In 5 years time I'll rip off all the health freaks selling then decaf cheese at vastly inflated prices. hahahahahahaha
> I'm wondering just how pervasive the US
> computer caffine cluture is internationally.
Seen from Denmark the coffein obsession is an American phenomen. Everybody here drink some disgustingly strong tasting coffee in absurd quantities, and the idea of decaffenated anything (coffee, tea, cola) is meet with puzzlement. Why would anyone want that? The point being, most people here are coffein junkies, and don't know it or recognize it as a problem.
Nerds are probably *less* coffein-addicted than the average population, simply because cola contains much less coffein than coffee.
IANABC. I am not a biochemist. 8)
=Blue(23)
LITTLE GIRL: But which cookie will you eat FIRST? C. MONSTER: Me think you have misconception of cookie-eating process.
The reason that drugs "work" in the human body is because the the molecular structure of the drug fits a natural "keyhole" somewhere.
:)
Basically the body has natural recepticle's for natural hormones... drugs fit those keyholes - often imperfectly. Your body thinks caffeine is adrenaline and acts (mostly) accordingly. Your body naturally produces adrenaline, and it works a hell of a lot better than caffeine.
I like caffeine because I can get a rush while still being a computer slug, but I understand the difference.
I suspect if we could turn on and off adrenaline like we drink coffee, the body would develop some resistance...
caffeine isn't a nutrient
long-term ill effects
topic alert? what's next, "exciting ginseng news"?
it's nice to see yet *another* recklessly-psyched-about-genetic-engineering story heading
And in case I glossed over the first point, CAFFEINE IS NOT A NUTRIENT:
It's not particularly good for you... it can cause considerable discomfort... can be dangerous when combined with other things and activities which are also reputed to "provide energy"... does odd things to blood vessels... can cause ulcers and irritation of the stomach walls... etc etc.
I'll stick with adrenaline, thanks
(not all that healthy either, but at least it's evolved in tandem with humanity,)
keete
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keete
and as such, it has gone the way of sci-fi. The article's intents mean that they have isolated the gene which stimulates caffiene growth. However, with all the talk on /. lately about the Human Genome Project, sci-fi oriented minds are going the other direction with this information. instead of admiring the fact that the scientists can grow decaf coffee by REMOVING the gene, /.'rs are interested in INSERTING the gene.
to pull off some other's analogies that i have seen. "if you code this way" then does REMOVING useless code ever HURT the application? Now then, take this the other way. Look at feature creep. Does this ALWAYS HELP the program? As a lead programmer for a large company, I have had more complaints about our GUIs having too many features, and how can we keep the mem req's down. So we are constantly combatting Feature Creep, b.c ThisManager wants MORE features, and ThatManager wants LESS features. Who Decides?
also, the same comment has been on several threads, and may or may not bear repeating (i think it does, obv.) **seeNote** if the body gets that chemical on a repetitive basis, it will ignore the chemical. i would personally like to see a model of DEVICE controllable by remote which is minute in size, and can produce chemicals by way of taking particles out of the bloodstream. i think this would be helpful. because as it can filter out chemicals, it could reinsert them also. or maybe have it intercept in the intestines?
-Note- don't you hate when the boss sends you out of the building on an errand when you are in the middle of a post?
2^3 * 31 * 647
...that before the operation to get my Generic Organ Implant[tm] I wouldn't like to hear:
Hello everybody!
These opinions are my own and not necessarily
These opinions are my own and not necessarily
the opinions of God or any other supreme being.