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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.
heterodoxy.cc/meowdocs/pseudo/pseudosynth.pdf
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Don't worry morphine is not temperature stable and will break down at bread-baking temperatures. But seriously, don't make bread with it. If you're worried about contamination of regular yeast, however, then remember only a really really small part of your yeast will not be wild-type. Unless you went out of your way to select for the genetically engineered yeast in your sample, you're getting plain old yeast (with maybe a trace of genetically engineered yeast after many years of this strain being commonly available). There's no reason to think that fermenting to morphine provides any evolutionary benefit to yeast versus fermenting to ethanol. So you won't be overdosing on opioid bread just yet.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
some bacteria
Pet peeve: Yeasts are not bacteria, they are fungi.
The story is deeper than that. The Chinese liked to get paid in silver for their products (tea, porcelain, silk). Unfortunately silver is what the British money was made of (the pound sterling meant a pound of sterling silver = 92.5% pure). So it was creating a currency shortage. Britain thus wanted a product to balance trade and stop the silver outflow. Opium was that product.
The Chinese didn't want their people hooked on Opium, so they made it illegal. British trading companies that supplied the opium (it was grown in India at the time) formed a cartel to bring it in illegally, thus becoming the first drug cartel. When their people got arrested and goods seized, the British government forced China to submit in what is known as the Opium Wars. They acquired Hong Kong in the process. Later, the now legalized trading companies needed financing for the ships to deliver the expanded opium trade. So they founded the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Company. Now known as HSBC, one of the largest banks in the world, it is no stranger to laundering money for cartels, because it was*founded* by drug cartel members. To this day they print paper bank notes (currency) for Hong Kong. This makes money laundering really easy, because they can give you a suitcase of brand new money, with no traceable history.