Coffee's Caffeine-Producing Gene Isolated

matthewd writes: "Hackers everywhere should be interested in this AP article about the gene that is the key to caffeine production in coffee being isolated. (I also found another article that's almost a year old that is very similar.) Of course hackers wouldn't even be interested in coffee sans caffeine. However, once the genetic basis for caffeine production is isolated, the obvious application besides removing it from coffee is to insert this genetic codes into the human body, so that your body can produce caffeine on it's own (perhaps even regulated by the body's circadian rhythm). Everyone ready to hack their bodies?"

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!"

Comments

Starbucks might have something to say...

[swingkid]

They'll get sued by Starbucks & Juan Valdez for violation of copyright protection under the DMCA

Re:Starbucks might have something to say...

[quantum bit]

And will push to force people to use DeCAF...

my hopes for the future may finally be realized

[The_Messenger]

Now that we've found the gene, we need to integrate it into a new mutant breed of super-ultra-hyper-caffeinated humans. Perhaps my children will be able to live as I always wanted to, twitching and delusional 24/7, able to code for days on end without sleep. It's an amazing time we live in. *tearing up* God bless America.

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.

Substitution organs

[devphil]

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.

Re:kind of like a runner's high

[Ralph Wiggam]

Crack is considerably less expensive than Starbucks. Tastes better, too.
-B

Re:Life without sleep

[SEWilco]

One recent theory of sleep is that the bloodstream can't carry enough energy to the brain to sustain it. While awake, brains use bloodstream-delivered energy and stored energy. Sleep is needed to recharge the stored energy -- apparently it's stored in glial cells.

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?