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Genetically Engineered Yeast Makes It Possible To Brew Morphine
PvtVoid writes: The New York times reports that newly developed yeast strains will soon make it possible to create morphine from fermentation of sugar. While no one has claimed to make morphine in lab from scratch yet, concerns are already being raised about potential abuse. According to the Times article: "This rapid progress in synthetic biology has set off a debate about how — and whether — to regulate it. Dr. Oye and other experts said this week in a commentary in Nature Chemical Biology that drug-regulatory authorities are ill prepared to control a process that will benefit the heroin trade much more than the prescription painkiller industry. The world should take steps to head that off, they argue, by locking up the bioengineered yeast strains and restricting access to the DNA that would let drug cartels reproduce them.
Forget morphine - could I just get a way to simply, legally obtain sudafed without rigamarole at the pharmacy?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
... which will inevitably make it into the wild, and then ...
...in other news, so many Taliban are going to divorce their 3rd and 4th wives due to low opium sales.
If we eliminated the need to grow opium, a some countries would find their economies transformed. Imagine Afghanistan without opium financing various criminal factions. We just need to figure out how to make cocaine without coca, and Middle America would be changed too.
Of course that relies on the secret getting out. Otherwise we are still stuck with the morass of violent crime.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I think its inevitable that the drug cartels will find a way to get this. The answer to the drug problem is legalisation and regulation, treat addiction as the disease it is!
Hopefully this reshapes our modern prohibition. Whether or not laws change, this stuff will now be manufactured in small facilities. No need to control large swaths of land. The opium farmers will go from terrorized to abandoned. Don't know whether that will be good for them or not. No more smuggling loads around the world. Just import some bacteria and start producing. Should increase competition in the market, too, and drive the price down. Less lucrative to control the inner city distribution points so those areas will go from terrorized to abandoned too. Should be interesting to see this unfold. I hope for the best.
The world should take steps to head that off, they argue, by locking up the bioengineered yeast strains and restricting access to the DNA that would let drug cartels reproduce them
How would they restrict them to something that someone with enough money couldn't buy their way around? Being as the drug cartels have no shortage of money, it seems like a pointless move.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Heisenberg!
But they can prevent even a few spores from getting into the hands of the cartels.
Truthfully it would be the cartels who would fight a desperate drug war to keep this production democratizing yeast out of the hands of home brew street dealers and junkies killing off their trillion dollar middleman industry and their other side of the drug war profits with it.
This is dangerous as it would take all of the violence and money form the heroin trade.
mankind's freedom and her communion with nature.
Now buying homebrewing gear will join buying hydroponic gardening equipment on the list of 'completely legal things most likely to cause the DEA to batter down your door and shoot your dog.'
That'll be fun.
I can foresee the future, home recombinant DNA kits to add drug genes to yeast proliferate on the dark web. Government outlaws home use of yeast, no more home brewed beer or bread making.
And all our soldiers will have died for nothing, since that is why they are there, to keep the pipeline open.
heterodoxy.cc/meowdocs/pseudo/pseudosynth.pdf
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And thus begins the war on yeast. Soon yeast will be heavily regulated, soon you will need a state issued license to bake anything. Bakers will be closely watched by the DEA's special yeast proofing unit. Amatuer bakers will have their assets seized and will be forced serve 30+ year prison sentences.
Also, it takes a good guy with a yeast to stop a bad guy with a yeast.
I'm not sure how they hope to contain such a yeast strain. Sure, they can lock it up *now*, but for how long will that last? It'll only take a single corrupt employee, or group of employees, being offered more money than they could ever hope to make in several lifetimes. Then it's out in the wild. Unless they plan on building in some kind of critical vulnerability in the strain, any home brewer can replicate the yeast with ease. Even if they do build in a critical vulnerability, it'll be an "addon" and thus, possible to disable.
I foresee another "War on Drugs" coming, where the objective in unobtainable. Fortunately after the first round of funding, the objective becomes irrelevant ( of course, the cynic in me is YELLING that the objective IS the funding..but I digress ).
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
While I know first hand how devastating drug addiction can be, it is about time we abolished the DEA and repealed all the laws making drugs illegal. We could spend one quarter of the money on treatment programs and end up with fewer drug abusers than we've managed with the "War on Drugs". Ted Cruz and his cronies like to point to the "War on Poverty" as being an abject failure because after 50 years we still have all these poor people. Well, isn't the logic just as valid? After 50 years we have millions in prisons and jails, violent drug gangs, police corruption, etc. Perhaps it is time to try something different. In fact, the two kind of go hand in hand. With poverty we should look to actually fostering employment via training and subsidies for employment and a lot of the drug problem goes away right there. With the drug situation we focus on treatment and funnel the treated into job training. For those who want to snort cocaine or shoot heroin, well, they seem to go right ahead and do just that now, drug laws or not.
Decriminalise drugs and there's suddenly no reason to deal with criminals to get your preferred recreational pharmaceutical. This ought to drop prices and even reduce related crime like thefts to fund the habit. Then this whole yeast thing is not a problem either. Not that I particularly care about this, as even with legal drugs gratis for all I'd still refrain.
But the discussion is focusing on the wrong thing. The problem is criminality around drugs, where you could have safe legal supplies and high quality help on hand instead. That would be a much better proposition than hitting rock bottom before getting shipped off to rehab, or jails full of addicts with really poor --but always some-- supply and inevitably such niceties as very poor needle hiegiene. Most of the problems of drug abuse are the result of poorly thought-out countermeasures, not of the abuse itself. Scientists ought to be smart enough to recognise this and debate that instead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
"Auto-brewery syndrome, also known as gut fermentation syndrome, is a rare medical condition in which intoxicating quantities of ethanol are produced through endogenous fermentation within the digestive system."
Now imagine this with a yeast that produces morphine...
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Yes, I'm sure the Crips and Bloods, and the south of the border cartels, are just full of Republicans.
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Let's just make opiates the opiate of the masses. They're way more effective than what we've been using instead.
Easy home brewing of mind-degrading drugs is the drug cartels' worst nightmare. Cartels disappear almost overnight as US citizens can brew drugs at far below the cartel cost of production.
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The genome will be on pastebin faster than you can say "DeCSS".
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
If it works out and is economical compared to the old methods (and that's a heck of a big "if"):
There are a lot of illegal opium poppy growing operations that would have to drop their prices, use other means (killing those running brewing operations) or go out of business.
I can't say I'll shed many tears for some of the leaders of those groups.
You are a fool, it is the way of your kind.
At this point, anyone who uses hard drugs in the US is doing so after years of being told all of the nasty things they do to your body. There's no curing that level of stupid. There's a percentage of the population that in the absence of morphine, will abuse bath salts and model glue. No law can fix that complete lack of long term thinking.
...that this call for regulation has been brought to us by a drug cartel?
I mean, if it was that easy, then no one would need the cartels anymore.
Entrepreneurs that love guns and gold crosses, hate gays and regulations, and don't care about the effects of their business on the environment or their customers? Sounds like the green party to me ;)
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There's already a drug with many harmful effects that is widely abused, that was legally (as in, the Constitution was modified) banned, and is made by yeast.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
While most people still work in the present-day information age and think they're clever, and some people think 3D printing is some sort of revolution, and some hard-core minority thinks the 1960s Space Age fantasies are real, the real game-changing paradigm-shifting game changing stuff will come from the biology revolution.
Prepare for weirdness.
and restricting access to the DNA that would let drug cartels reproduce them
One problem there - Humans contain the DNA for producing morphine. It works so well precisely because out body already uses it to regulate our natural pain response.
to deal with symptoms instead of causes. The drug cartel is only so powerful and dangerous because the laws banning these drugs make it extremely lucrative to trade them. Although... legalizing would be easier said than done, given that you would make a number of law enforcement personnel entirely redundant if you could achieve it, not to mention piss off many misguided people who still think they can impose control of these things through law. When will they see that their short-sighted views are responsible for this monster? Probably never.
So these people think that locking it up will keep it out of the hands of cartels? These are the same cartels that hire engineers to dig tunnels and build micro-submarines. All of a sudden they cannot hire scientists? Stupid.
Given the amount of sense I've come to expect from regulators, I'm sure sugar is about to become a controlled substance...
I'm honestly surprised it has taken this long for drugs to be made this way. Well, not that many aren't already, but ones that the average person would be interested in making, that is... really anything that isn't toxic to yeast ought to be doable.
You betcha, just ask Freeway Ricky Ross...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%...
about the conduit that he was apart of between Central America and the mean streets of LA as part of the Iran Contra fiasco
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Fascinating
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Do a little reading on Iran-Contra and the role drug money played. See also how the same approach was used to fund an illegal war in Laos by the CIA, Panama, Mexico and a host of others.
Here's a starting point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
You want yeast DNA?
Lick your hand.
Lick your feet.
Lick your *beep*.
And the best thing D.N.A. is a puzzle, but a very logical one.
When you have watched bio engineering students doing their *basic* experiments with basic yeast you will be astonished what they can achieve by just playing around.
DNA is a perfect self assembling puzzle you will quickly see how things work out.
Basically what I want to lay out is that there is not just even the slightest chance of succeeding to conceal that information from drug makers, because they will find out otherwise because in DNA if it works .. you can redo steps or start variations and your own research.
So yes, the cartels will find a way and hey .. they won the war on drugs haven't they?
Also in case genetic engineering is too complex there is still Afghanistan.
1.) So you have many (and I mean many) "underpaid" bio engineering students.
2.) Decent equipment makes everything easier, but you can built that equipment, that knowledge cannot be subdued(it's too widespread)
3.) You have "fungus"(yeast) DNA everywhere
4.) Variations - If you want to find an unknown strain .. go to a brothel, public toilet, the more cultures clash .. the more variations you will find in one spot.
5.) you have scientific journals (and you also have a black list of crap journals)
6.) Money = Resources (Hey we are talking here about drug cartels that have no problem to just loose cocain worth being 200 mUSD)
7.) We have a black pharma market that produces counterfight - and at a 50% chance high quality - drugs for old mens problems from industrial scale made basic chemicals. And nobody can stop them - or wants to.
I can see the Super Bowl commercials now. It'll be like that Farley/Sandler bit on SNL, except the gays will be substituted with heroin models.
I seem to be the only one so far to make the connection to narcobeer. Alan Cole and Chris Bunch wrote a series of military sci-fi (The Sten Chronicles) in which narcobeer is the drink of choice for low status migrant workers. Corporations in the sci-fi equivalent of mining/single industry towns would encourage the consumption of it as a means of controlling the "migs".
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
Fun fact: Spelt (Triticum aestivum spelta) is a subspecies of wheat that has become more popular over the past couple decades for needing fewer fertilizers than common wheat. Thus "spelled" has come to be spelled "spelled" to distinguish it from spelt.
And America south of 49 degrees north latitude has been not an English colony for nearly 240 years.
... build large industrial crematorium and air tight shower rooms?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
You may be having an XY problem. You say you want Sudafed but what you most likely want is a decongested nose. I'm no physician, so I'll just tell you what worked for me: I switched from pseudoephedrine tablets to oxymetazoline nasal spray. Brands include Afrin, Sudafed OM, and store brands. To avoid dependency, I use it in one nostril in the morning and the other at night.
Now you can literally drink to numb the pain :).
The whole idea is just DRM on meth. It is just information, and you can't lock up information.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
In a way these gangs have a lot in common with Republicans. They believe in acquiring wealth by whatever means necessary, they protect their turf and that of their friends from anybody else who may want to compete because competition is abhorrent to them, and they care not one bit about the consequences of their actions for others as long as they get their way.
The similarities are kind of striking really.
Thing drug cartels dont have enough money to finance their own bio and genetics research?
Shouldn't it have said:
"The world should take steps to head that off, they argue, by locking up the bioengineered yeast strains and restricting access to the DNA that would let competing drug cartels reproduce them."
http://mescaline.com/misc/index.html
Preliminary Feasibility Study for The Biological Production of L-Dopa, Mescaline and Tryptamines by Intact Recombinant Yeast Cells Using Only Common Amino Acids as Precursors to Bioenzymatic Synthesis
Overview
I intend to present here a culling of existing and proven laboratory techniques for the recombinant transformation of microorganisms to the purpose of their production of pharmaceutical compounds which at the present time are only being made via organic syntheses using legally restricted and costly chemicals, and chemical procedures both difficult and dangerous to utilize for the layman not extensively trained in traditional organic synthetic methods.
Genetically transformed yeasts and e. coli cultures are currently harnessed on an industrial level to make such varied compounds as human insulin, opiates (see references) and cytokines and other immunological artifacts. There is every reason to believe that provided with a moderately equipped recombinant genetics lab and the use of these proven techniques, that yeast cells could be made to produce in high yield tryptamines such as DMT and psilocybin, mescaline and other drugs. I chose to start with tryptamines and phenethylamines as they are simple molecules, which are almost identical to their biosynthetic precursors: the ubiquitous amino acids tryptophan and tyrosine. THC, LSA, and other restricted compounds could also be made in this fashion, but with much, much greater difficulty as they are very much more complex molecules and their biosynthesis is not explored in great detail at this time. With such a recombinant yeast (and I chose yeast over e. coli due the simplicity of yeast culture, i.e., bread and brewing techniques considered-- and also due to the total lack of pathogenicity of cervesia yeasts in general and the fact that yeasts are eukaryotic) all an untrained layman would need to produce these compounds in a pure yield would be: one transformed yeast cell, a bucket, warm water, sugar, amino acids and 12 hours-- and simple acid base extraction techniques to separate the pure psychedelic compounds from the waste materials. Even given theoretical restrictions on amino acids such as those currently imposed on tryptophan, these amino acids are present in almost all living tissue and could be obtained from such. The yeast would utilize its foreign dna inserts to code enzymes that would biochemically substitute the molecular groups that create mescaline or DMT from their amino acid precursors as part of the transformed yeast's metabolic routine. It is not unrealistic to expect a gram or two of pure material from such a 'brewing' effort, in theory--and perhaps more with the use of a pH balanced, aerated fermentation chamber.
In addition, several useful pharmaceuticals could potentially be made by precursor strains of such a yeast, including L-DOPA, a valuable medicinal compound. L-DOPA is one hydroxyl group (one cactus enzyme) away from tyrosine; it is one further aromatic hydroxyl group and three methyl groups and a decarboxylation away from mescaline. A yeast transformed with only one of the cactus enzymes would produce L-DOPA. I hold out the potential to royalties from such an organism to a prospective funding agency as another reason to support this project: biologically manufactured L-DOPA would be hundreds of times less costly than that which is currently made by pharmaceutical companies using expensive traditional methods which, unlike enzymatic synthesis, create a toxic waste stream. Bioenzymatic synthesis is totally clean and extremely efficient. Also enzymes almost always produce a single enantiomeric species, though that is not a consideration here.
Considerations
The following techniques would most easily produce tryptamines, as DMT is created from tryptophan by the work of only two enzymes: one enzyme decarboxylates the L-alkylaminocarboxy chain to an ethylamino chain which is then N-methylated by the second enzyme. The decarboxylation gene is already known and commer
No self-respecting drug addict would use franken-morphine!
I'd just like to point out to all those mentioning it that you really don't want opiates in your beer. It's a good way to stop breathing.
The fact that it can be done. What one man can create/invent, so can another. And you can bet somebody's going to duplicate it and it will get on the Darknet. (Silk Underground Biohackers, perhaps?) And after that, every government in the world will react the way they have to things like filesharing, namely, they'll piss into the wind and tell us it's salt spray.
In a way these gangs have a lot in common with Democrats. They believe in addicting people with handouts and then using that addiction to assist them to accumulate wealth and power by whatever means necessary. They protect their turf by framing their opponents as evil people who don't deserve respect, because compromise is abhorrent to them, and they care not one bit about the consequences of their actions for others as long as they get their way, the ends justifies the means.
The similarities are kind of striking really.
This thread is making me wonder, Is it feasible we will someday see a USB-like device for home organic synthesis, like a 3-D printer but for products of organic chemistry?
Impossible? Waiting to happen?
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
AKA "Big pHarma" (yes, I did that deliberately), what about those who actually need the chemical yet are priced out or legaled out due to BP's greed and the terminal myopia of the legislature? Don't they get to grow their own?
I grow my own elder and willow, you get some amazing stuff out of those. Including a form of aspirin out of the willow bark that doesn't cause my throat to close.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
restricting access to the DNA
What a joke! Do they plan to introduce DRM-enabled DNA?
The record of the drug war has been phenomenal -- every weekend around 22 black males die in drug turf battles across the USA.
The legal industrial complex in the tax and spend social utopias is making so much progress. When they catch an armed gang banger, they can no longer afford to cage and feed them. They just release them back to the streets with zero time, another felony conviction, see you in a couple weeks, no room at the Inn. It's really working out well for America.
More laws and regulations -- on yeast -- are practically guaranteed to take the drug war to an entirely new level of success.
will get even stupider.
The drug war needs to be made as impotent as possible.
Beyond that, one thing that would be quite interesting is if long term medication could be administered by adding the bacteria to your gut. So it just bred down there naturally turning some of your food on a regular basis into whatever drug you need.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It is perfectly legal to grow poppies. They grow very easily and is practically a weed. Since it is so easy, why would one want to use yeast?
Except if you actually read the pages you're linking you see the drugs didn't get shipped to LA as part of the "Iran Contra fiasco". Despite the screeching from Crazy Maxine, the stories directly linking Iran Contra to drugs in the US turned out to be poorly sourced bullshit.
No need for the pharmacy; just press print
New research into 3D printers could mean cheap, personalized medicine — but could it also mean greater access to recreational drugs?
No need for the pharmacy; just press print
Researchers at the University of Central Lancashire have filed a patent for a 3D printer that can create personalized medicines. [Image credit: Rob Ireton]
Everyone from toymakers to the military is clamoring to use 3D printing. The medical industry is no exception. Your dentist might soon print off an incisor for you, or maybe your new replacement knee or hip joint will be fresh from the printer. Even kidneys, blood vessels, skin and ears can now be 3D printed (including a living replica of van Gogh’s missing ear).
But researchers are still exploring a particular medical application for 3D printing, one that might have the broadest application: medicine itself.
In late October, a research team from the University of Central Lancashire in England announced that they filed for a patent on a 3D printer that can fabricate pills. The printer would be able to reproduce existing drugs, like common painkillers and allergy medicines, but the real coup lies in the printer’s ability to produce more complex tablets tailored to a patient’s specific dosage needs, using a new chemical “ink.”
Demonstration of a 3D printer fabricating a tablet using the drug-polymer “ink” developed by researchers at the University of Central Lancashire.
There are multiple types of 3D printers, but the most common type pulls filament from a spool, heats it up and prints out the final product layer by layer, from the bottom up. These filaments could be made of various materials, including rubber, plastics, polyurethane (used in insulation and bathroom sealant) and metals.
The key challenge in 3D printing medicines is creating a new type of filament, a set of chemical inks, for the printer. These inks were at the crux of the University of Central Lancashire team’s innovation: the researchers invented a drug-polymer filament system that can be inserted into 3D printers to accurately carry out complicated tablet designs.
The basic idea behind pharmaceutical ink systems is similar to that of everyday printers. Just as most regular printers use four tones — cyan, magenta, yellow and black — to create innumerable combinations of colors, a 3D drug printer would assemble complex molecules by combining simple chemical compounds and other common ingredients in drugs, such as vegetable oils and paraffin. These simple compounds would contain elements such as carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, which make up the skeleton of most drugs. The 3D printer could then carry out chemical reactions to stitch everything together.
“If you were looking to make a sugar, for example, you would start with your set of base sugars and mix them together,” Lee Cronin, a chemistry professor at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, told the Guardian.
Cronin also wants to develop the technology to custom-print medicine. And Cronin and the University of Central Lancashire researchers are not alone in trying — many others, in both private industry and research universities, are pursuing the same goal.
In 2012, Cronin delivered a TEDGlobal talk on 3D printing drugs. “The idea is that we want to have a universal set of inks that we put out with the printer, and you download the blueprint, the organic chemistry for that molecule, and you make it in the device,” Cronin explained in the talk. “Ultimately, it could mean you could print your own medicine.”
A few years ago, Cronin and his colleagues created their own prototype of a 3D drug printer for under $2,000. Their machine works by first printing a customized reaction chamber using bathroom sealant filament, and then using chemical filaments to print out medicine within the chamber. Each chamber is uniquely suited for the chemical process needed
Hobbits are fictional. I was addressing the plausibility of the fiction, not particulars of the geography. People who go barefoot and raise animals are likely to catch pathogens by stepping in the animals' feces. This risk is present whatever the continent.
without the need of poppies, Afghanistan's Worst will lose out their major funding source
There has been practically zero progress on handling the demand side. Doing so would require a radical rethink of how Western countries deal with drugs and drug addiction. This is not likely to happen in the next 20 years at least, and it is stupid to condemn other countries to 20 more years of violence by keeping our focus on limiting supply.
Legalize anything consenting people want to take. H, coke, booze, nicotine, drain cleaner, laxatives, aspirin, bullet to the brain, who cares? Gut organized crime, slash prison populations, minimize the police (state) and strangle official corruption. Boost entrepreneurs and tax the hell out of it. It's a bright new world waiting for us. Remember: puritanism is that terrible feeling that somewhere out there, someone is having fun!
Apomorphine is a blocker for the effects of morphine like substances. Don't understand why it isn't used here in the USA,
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Now we need the whats and how to do it and a chart that equates dose with weight. Or however that's figured out. And knowing the shelf life.