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.

Comments

Re:Yeast Banned

[Applehu Akbar]

I prefer to think that the addicts will just quickly die off and get out of our hair. This will mean that we will have to go through a spike in crime while this happens, but that's what the Second Amendment is for.