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Genetically Engineered Yeast Makes It Possible To Brew Morphine

Posted by samzenpus on from the let-it-rise dept.

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.

43 of 333 comments (clear)

  1. Sudafed by jdavidb · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Forget morphine - could I just get a way to simply, legally obtain sudafed without rigamarole at the pharmacy?

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    1. Re:Sudafed by countSudoku() · · Score: 5, Funny

      We KNOW what your up too, Pablo Escapebar! The cops are on their way to your drug lab to confiscate your chems, inhalers, and any other paraphernalia like shaving razor replacement packs and Q-tips. The jig is UP!

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    2. Re:Sudafed by damn_registrars · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Forget morphine - could I just get a way to simply, legally obtain sudafed without rigamarole at the pharmacy?

      I recall someone posted the directions for how to make sudafed from crystal meth. Being as the latter is easier to buy than the former, you could start with that. For obvious reasons I'm not going to search for that method myself.

      I don't recall if you get drain cleaner back out of it or not, though.

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    3. Re:Sudafed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Fun fact: the word is "rigmarole," not "rigamarole."

      I know nobody cares. Further evidence for this: nearly everyone gets that wrong.

    4. Re:Sudafed by russotto · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Pseudoephederine is already produced from yeast.

      Of course, if it becomes cheaper to produce opiates from yeast than from current processes, trying to keep the yeasts secret or locked up will be futile. The stuff reproduces itself; all it takes is one well-bribed or entrepreneurial employee.

    5. Re:Sudafed by Holi · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Fun fact, doesn't change the fact that its spelled wrong.

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    6. Re:Sudafed by garyisabusyguy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Whole new angle on home-brewing and probably a heck of a lot less obvious than a field of poppies growing on your property

      I thought that the development of coal-tar based opioid synthesis processes in the US was supposed to support the wholesale eradication of poppies and black market production of opium and heroin.

      That obviously failed because farmers want the income, so in the EU they allow farmers to grow poppies, then purchase the entire crop in bulk for use in their pharmaceutical processes. This allows the farmers to get the income and reduces the opiates in the black market

      When will the US stop deluding itself and simply purchase bulk poppies from farmers in Central and South America who simply want a source of income? This will reduce the number of people who trade in the black market and reduce the opium available for heroin production

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    7. Re:Sudafed by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Insightful

      all it takes is one well-bribed or entrepreneurial employee.

      Or one employee that believes in personal freedom, and also realizes that yeast produced opiates will shut down the cartels, hurt the Taliban, reduce violence, and pretty much make the world a better place ... unless you are either a criminal or a cop.

    8. Re:Sudafed by Anon-Admin · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Someone should read history.

      Drug laws in the US are less than 100 years old. It was the late 1930's for most of them. I would suggest you read the arguments in congress while debating the law. It seems that the group FOR the law was arguing that these substances empowered the lesser races. (Im making it polite and not using the slang they used)

      Drug laws in the US had more to due with racial control than they did with helping the addicts.

      Just to make a point stoners are considered "lazy, irresponsible, thieves, untrustworthy, etc" All the same stereotypes used to describe blacks in the 30's, 40's, and 50's.

    9. Re:Sudafed by FictionPimp · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Or worse, this shit becomes like wild yeast and the next time I brew beer I have to worry about creating a drink full of dope instead of just worrying a wild fermentation might just make it taste bad.

    10. Re:Sudafed by drkoemans · · Score: 3, Funny

      Slashdot needs to change it's subheading to be a bit more inclusive. News for nerds, pedantry, advertisements, occasionally stuff that matters... in that order.

    11. Re:Sudafed by swb · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act was passed in 1914, but the impetus started closer to 1901.

      While it's a common theme in anti-drug control rhetoric to blame racism for drug bans, I think the race/drug tie-in is possibly something that happened later and not a prime mover for the origin of drug controls. I think once drugs were already illegal, the laws were adjusted in ways that made them more effective tools to use against people deemed undesirable.

      Personally I think the laws against drug use were probably at least as much motivated by industrialists who saw drug use as an obstacle in using low-skilled poor people in the new mass-production factories. Prior to the assembly line, I think a fair amount of industrial work was little more than scaling up the work of skilled artisans, people who probably had internalized a certain amount of self-discipline and work ethic. They were probably also drunks, too, but by virtue of their holding a skilled trade they were sort of self-selected into the group of people who could more or less hold their liquor.

      Once you got the assembly line and mass production involved, the growth in industrial employment required large workforces of unskilled workers from the lower classes of society, a demographic at the time that came from cultures where alcohol use was high and who probably used drugs and alcohol more like a crude anti-depressant tonic against the fairly harsh standard of living of being poor in the late 19th century.

      But you can't build an industrial empire with people who see a subsistence living under the influence as more desirable than industrial wage slavery, so better to criminalize their substance use and make work a slightly more palatable option than prison.

      It was really no different for the Harrison Act -- the impetus was some Protestant religious figure appalled with opium-consuming native savages in the Philippines who knew that he wasn't going to convert them into good little Protestants if chasing the dragon and lying in the sun was an alternative.

      I think a lot of the opposition to marijuana legalization really boils down to this -- a lot of moral cluckers who worry that if Johnny smokes pot, he won't be enthusiastic about going $150.000 in debt for a college degree and buying a house in the suburbs -- he'll think that it'd make much more sense to, in the words of Grandmaster Flash, "...learn to smoke reefer and be a street sweeper."

      Society *needs* bodies on the treadmill to keep it going. People who use substances tend to give a lot less of a shit about the treadmill.

    12. Re:Sudafed by meerling · · Score: 4, Insightful

      True, but for a large scale operation you are going to want to have a bioreactor for both efficiency and scale, not to mention reducing the dead giveaway large quantity of people to tend the more manual methods.
      Further complication include issues with production of the new substance possibly interfering with the lifecycle of the host itself. (That's the yeast if anyone didn't get that.) And let's not forget the separation and purification of the desired product.
      You do know that they use microbes to make a number of different things, such as human insulin and interferon? Just look up some of the history of those developments, and you'll get a hint of some possible difficulties. Besides, there was a market for large quantities of cheap human insulin & interferon, while the previous methods of production were horribly inefficient and could never even come close to the demand.
      I'm going to hazard a guess that the criminal cartels would be opposed to this technology because it would be more expensive to the them to set up, would require workers of a higher skill & training, would cut out entire chunks of their existing structure, and would be easily capable of flooding the market and suppressing prices.
      Besides, other than banning the opiate producing strain, which only takes one leak to effectively neutralize that ban, what are you going to do? Ban genetically altered strains of microbes, and tobacco? Sorry, but I'd rather shoot the asshole that tries to do that, my life depends on one of those products, and so do a LOT of other peoples. Maybe you just want to ban the research into making illegal products. That would be a little better, but still futile. Eventually it will be easy enough to do that a talented high school student will someday succeed. Additionally, if it's not banned worldwide, someone will eventually do it someplace it's not illegal, and then there is the distinct possibility that it will get loose.
      Of course, there is still something people are not looking at, their strain produces morphine, a controlled, but legal, substance. Yeah, it can be turned into heroin, but so can all the legal morphine which is usually made from FLOWERS that people grow! It's used in medicine. I was once in a hospital ward and I was the only patient not receiving morphine. (The reason for that doesn't matter.) So there IS a legal trade in the product produced by that yeast, but because it can be used to make an illegal one, some people want to ban it. You know, that's not a wise path to tread upon. If something can be banned because something illegal can be made from/with it, how long until everything is banned? You know politicians, give them an inch, and they'll run you over with your own vehicle and drag you a mile down the road.

    13. Re: Sudafed by guruevi · · Score: 4, Funny

      Budweiser/Miller make beer? With yeast? I always thought they made it with water flavored with leftover hops from a real brewery.

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    14. Re:Sudafed by rea1l1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The US was founded as a republic, a structure designed solely to protect & defend the rights of the people.
      Today, this organization is used to limit and suppress the rights of the people through intimidation and force.

      Society does NOT need bodies on a treadmill unless you're using society as a massive global offensive weapon.
      Most working individuals within a "modern" society DO NOT PRODUCE A PHYSICAL PRODUCT.

      "We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living." -- Buckminster Fuller

    15. Re: Sudafed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And the products which replaced it are useless. I notice the party of small government has yet to get the government out if that part of our lives. The whole behind the counter/mandatory ID thing is one of the most intrusive, idiotic things in the history of this country and a testament to the social, economic, and freedom disaster that is the war on drugs. End it.

      As to this situation, how about we, you know, stop locking people up for wanting to briefly escape the miserable reality we force on too many and start offering proper treatment (including proper pain treatment where applicable) to those who need it? Addiction is no joke, but the crimes that go with it are largely the government's creation. They empower these drug dealers the same way they empowered gangs during prohibition. In a way they deserve each other, but we all end up paying for it.

    16. Re: Sudafed by amiga3D · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's like we're incapable of learning from our mistakes and just keep repeating them over an over endlessly. How I wish people could just quit saying "they should make a law." That horrible, ignorant phrase has caused more harm than any other.

    17. Re:Sudafed by DanielRavenNest · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. Taliban tally... by harvey+the+nerd · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...in other news, so many Taliban are going to divorce their 3rd and 4th wives due to low opium sales.

  3. Major changes in many countries by amorsen · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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    1. Re:Major changes in many countries by amorsen · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

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    2. Re:Major changes in many countries by garyisabusyguy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Unfortunately, the one effective treatment for opioid addiction is Ibogaine, and medical study or application of it in America is illegal because it is a schedule 1 drug

      Yippee for 'Merica shooting itself in the foot for over 200 years

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    3. Re:Major changes in many countries by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Insightful

      oh, I dunno...figuring out how to not ensure demand stays at 100%.

      An obvious first step is to start treating addiction as a medical problem rather than as a criminal problem. Maybe we should spend less on police and prison guards, and more on doctors and nurses.

    4. Re:Major changes in many countries by garyisabusyguy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      We already did eliminate the need to grow opium and all opioids used in American pharmaceuticals come from a coal-tar process.

      This was supposed to bring about the end of illegal opium and heroin, but has not had the effect because it is very hard to get people to stop growing a plant that they can get paid lots of money for.

      Countries like Hungary allow farmers to grow a limited amount of poppies, which are purchased for use in the European pharma industry. This allows the farmers to make money and keeps it from becoming heroin

      There is no reason to believe that creating new ways to synthesize opioids will reduce the growing of poppies

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    5. Re:Major changes in many countries by dj245 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      In Canada (at least in Sydney, Nova Scotia), addicts get their fix right at the hospital. For free.

      It seems stupid at first, but it is extremely effective in reducing all kinds of crime related to drugs and addiction. Nobody there is breaking into houses or summer cabins looking for painkillers or goods to pawn. Nobody is stealing car stereos and pawning them to finance their habit. The number of people mixing dangerous chemicals in their house or garage is reduced. Why bother with all that when you just go to the hospital and get your legal high for free? Product originating from Taliban-controlled areas can't compete with free.

      If Marijuana is more your style, they have medical marijuana laws and lax enforcement of recreational use. The end result is that local people grow it in their basements, cutting out any foreign supplier or middlemen. Marijuana isn't free, but I have yet to hear of any case where someone broke the law in order to get money to buy weed.

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    6. Re:Major changes in many countries by garyisabusyguy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You are playing word games

      An addict can either pay for heroin, or pay for a substitute like methadone (assuming that they want to get off of heroin)

      If they decide to use heroin for their addiction, then they are criminals because there is no legal way to get heroin in America.
      This is very expensive and in many cases requires that they either steal from others, or sell heroin themselves. These are both criminal activities

      We have a lot of 'prevention' activities going on right now. They seem to be ineffective. One big problem with them is that they have created a large blackmarket infrastructure that is particularly good at finding and supplying new customers.

      Portugal has decriminalized all drugs and as a result reduced the number of new users, which is to say that decriminalization is the path to prevention

      Try selling that idea in America

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  4. Yeah good luck with that! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!

  5. Reshape prohibition by edtice1559 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re: Reshape prohibition by Dunbal · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Who gives @#$*( if people start brewing narcotics at home.

      The same people who take the time to airbrush and blur out a boob on a Picasso, that's who. The best part is this kind of person thinks it is doing the world a favor.

      --
      Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
    2. Re: Reshape prohibition by HornWumpus · · Score: 4, Funny

      Most people still die in hospitals. Avoid them if you can.

      --
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  6. They can't stop tons of heroin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  7. Fan-tastic! by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  8. Here you go.... by Ellis+D.+Tripp · · Score: 5, Informative

    heterodoxy.cc/meowdocs/pseudo/pseudosynth.pdf

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  9. Imagine auto-brewery syndrome with this... by Rhacman · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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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    1. Re:Imagine auto-brewery syndrome with this... by slew · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Now imagine this with a yeast that produces morphine...

      Or just a standard yeast infection...

  10. Why fight it? by bistromath007 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Let's just make opiates the opiate of the masses. They're way more effective than what we've been using instead.

  11. Destroy the cartels by ChrisMaple · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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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  12. What can you do about it? by MikeRT · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:What can you do about it? by Khashishi · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A lot of people who abuse drugs do so because their lives suck. Maybe they don't care about their long term health because they have no hope for the future and don't care if it kills them. Efforts to penalize them for using drugs simply makes their lives suck more and their future even more hopeless.

  13. All your genes are belong to us! by pla · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  14. Re:the inevitable by Dunbal · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  15. Triticum aestivum spelta by tepples · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  16. Re:the inevitable by BronsCon · · Score: 3, Funny

    Damn.

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