This is despite Nature's recent decision to grant space for a couple of Political Science lecturers to chin-stroke about using yeasts to synthesise opiates, which is going to happen Real Soon Now. Different researchers have engineered yeasts which perform separate stages of the metabolic pathway of banging together a molecule of morphine, which means that combining all the stages in a single home-brew-kit is only a matter of detail, right?
Such are the awesome Political Science powers of extrapolation and hypothesisation that questions of 'concentration' and 'purity' evaporate in a subjunctive cloud of "Let's Pretend", with the simple word "feasible" exfolatiating into such predictions as
users would need to drink only 1–2 millilitres of the liquid to obtain a standard prescribed doseIt is not clear whether the Nature editors couldn't be arsed contacting anyone with actual expertise in biosynthesis to opine on the practicalities, or whether they reached out but failed to receive sufficiently hair-on-fire responses. How could they possibly have predicted that lazy churnalists would skip over hedging qualifiers like "feasible" and "in principle", and pebble-dash the story with an extra layer of hysteria stucco? -- coming up with headlines like
Home-brewed heroin? Scientists create yeast that can make sugar into opiatesThe rules of the Let's Pretend game allowed the authors to hypothesise that this in-principle opiate production will be undetectable and the
I am concerned by their lack of faith in my hypothetical dowsing-based detection technology.
5 comments:
I've tried unsuccessfully to eat a spinach salad of a scale that would mimic the effects of a Tylenol 3. To this day my wife still playfully refers to me as "Trail O' Green."
Actually, I believe it was the West (Coast of the US - specifically those dam' San Franciscans) that had a red tide, when the wonerful US govmint used Serratia marcescens as a pseudo-biological weapon, causing both a "red tide" and a spike in Serratiabacteraemia.
Also: opiates ain't hallucinogens. Recreational, yes, but hallucinogens - nope (to not repeat our Prime Mustelid, Toady Rabid).
I went off on a tangent, and CRIKEY.
Is there a full size version of that cartoon somewheres? I tried the great gazoogle, honest...
~
I would like to subscribe to your Cookbook.
ittdgy: ...ah. The Past. Another country. Same pain.
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