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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!"
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"
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.
They'll get sued by Starbucks & Juan Valdez for violation of copyright protection under the DMCA
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!
Guess so, Microsoft have been doing it for years now.
-- Soruk
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.
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!
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.
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All generalizations are false.
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I like to watch.
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....
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.
What would this lead to? Soylent Green in regular and decaf?
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
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?
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
^ |
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(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!
It will be quite a challenge to alter the physiology and chemistry enough to solve that problem.
This theory arose out of the simple observation that not having to sleep would be a tremendous evolutionary advantage -- so why are there not more animals that do not sleep? Instead, it seems sleep is a biological imperative, so there is probably some very basic requirement for it. Even fruit flies sleep -- do you really think they need to dream or store many memories?
> 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.