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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!"
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!
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)
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?