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Frog Cells Turned Drug Detectors
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Saw on Webdrift that New Scientist has an article on color-changing frog cells and that they could be used to drug test athletes. Apparently the cells are particularly good at detecting opiate drugs, and you don't even have to know which one you're testing for!"
I'm not a doctor or a pharmacologist, but since when have opiates been a performance-enhancing drug? The article seems to make a leap from catching cheaters in sporting events to testing for opiates. I didn't see anything connecting the two. The only point it made was that opiates can be used in rehab, which is obvious, but I've never heard of someone gaining a competitive edge by being smacked out on morphine.
OK, so Brett Favre had a good season while high on hydrocodone, but I doubt you'll see many players from other sports where speed, agility and mental clarity are more important than avoiding pain using these drugs.
My mother always used to tell me: If you can't find anything nice to say, say something bad about Windows.
I don't like the idea of testing people for opiates without knowing *which* opiates you are testing for. Prescription medication or poppy seed bagels could be a major problem if this becomes a widely used testing method.
Hopefully they will only use this as a primary test, and use more discriminating tests to distinguish *which* opiates are present in people who test positive
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
The last paragraph of the article says:
The sensor has other uses too. Since it changes colour with any chemical that acts like an opiate, it could be used to screen chemical compounds for useful opiate drugs, says Bayley.
I would have thought that this was more valuable to society - the ability to rapidly screen thousands of compounds for potential activity of a specific type. The process sounds like it may lend itself to similar screening of compounds of other types which bind to cell membrane receptors. But these researchers apparent first thought was about how they could use it to identify evil drug abusers, including people abusing something never before seen which has the same effects. Maybe there's more money in helping find drug abusers.
"Bite me, it's fun!" - Crowe T. Robot