Homebrew Morphine or other drugs?

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The last thing we need is the drug squad smashing down our front door and storming in screaming just because they saw us walking out of a homebrew shop with a brewing bin and some sugar.

This is not a great development in my opinion, unless the special yeast is kept under wraps for use by sensible organisations.
 
Not a great development for homebrewers, no.
but this has the ability to revolutionize medication production... it could bring cheap drugs for healthcare in poor countries and help a LOT of people.
As to special yeasts being kept under wraps, vector injection of DNA in yeast is a relatively easy procedure (A-level biology has plasmid injection of DNA into bacteria); it is entirely plausible that someone could do it themselves given the know how/instructions.
 
Not a great development for homebrewers, no.
but this has the ability to revolutionize medication production... it could bring cheap drugs for healthcare in poor countries and help a LOT of people.
As to special yeasts being kept under wraps, vector injection of DNA in yeast is a relatively easy procedure (A-level biology has plasmid injection of DNA into bacteria); it is entirely plausible that someone could do it themselves given the know how/instructions.

Yes the developments in bio science are mind boggling and I'm right out of my depth in that area. Maybe they can modify a yeast and make a new class of anti-biotics out of sugar. We have a lot more need of that than of morphine which we already have in plenty. Come a year or two we will be back to the Dark Ages as far as infection control goes, unless we get some brand new anti-biotics. More and more bugs are resistant to what we now have.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=i...tance&gws_rd=cr,ssl&ei=3mdbVYKbEcyqswGV4YDADg
 
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Yes the developments in bio science are mind boggling and I'm right out of my depth in that area. Maybe they can modify a yeast and make a new class of anti-biotics out of sugar. We have a lot more need of that than of morphine which we already have in plenty. Come a year or two we will be back to the Dark Ages as far as infection control goes, unless we get some brand new anti-biotics. More and more bugs are resistant to what we now have.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=i...tance&gws_rd=cr,ssl&ei=3mdbVYKbEcyqswGV4YDADg

Have faith my friend :pray:
 
Not a great development for homebrewers, no.
but this has the ability to revolutionize medication production... it could bring cheap drugs for healthcare in poor countries and help a LOT of people.
As to special yeasts being kept under wraps, vector injection of DNA in yeast is a relatively easy procedure (A-level biology has plasmid injection of DNA into bacteria); it is entirely plausible that someone could do it themselves given the know how/instructions.

Being a cynical sod: "but this has the ability to revolutionize medication production... it could make even more profits for the pharmaceutical companies who don't give a $h1t about healthcare in poor countries and make a FEW people even richer
 
Probably not, since their production is on a huge scale, but what it does do, is alow the poor countries or even every third world village, to make their own local drugs.
This would mean less profit for big drugs companies.
 
When people talk about the profits of drug companies, they usually don't take account of the costs of developing new medicines which are mind bogglingly enormous. It typically costs a billion pounds to take a new drug from initial discovery to a potentially marketable drug, and most fail somewhere along the path and create a huge loss of money.

One of my sons works as an engineer at GSK. The regulatory burdens although necessary to ensure public safety, also stifle innovation. The only drugs that can be developed and manufactured at anything but a financial loss are the sort that people take all their lives after an illness develops. This is the main reason why we now have only one class of antibiotics which is not subject to bacterial resistance problems. People only take a single course of antibiotics and medical authorities will lock away any new class of such drugs to stop resistance developing so any drug company investing billions to develop a new wonder bacteria killer will make nothing at all out of the process and be left with a huge loss.

People love to bad mouth the drug companies these days. Maybe they have forgotten how life was before Pfizer developed Fleming's discovery that Penicillin mould killed off bacteria. There was sixteen years between Fleming's accidental find and Pfizer being able to release the life saving drug onto the market. We struggled with it for a decade in Britain and couldn't make the drug in anything but pitiful quantities. Pfizer developed techniques to make it cheap and plentiful. I would certainly be dead without it and so would one of my sons.

Also - I see little chance of backyard production of drugs in brewing bins being anything but a dangerous disaster. We all know how easy it is to get a brew of beer wrong.... I do anyway. :)
 
I agree about how much money it costs to develop and test a new drug, but what i absolutely despise is the re-patenting of the same drug with different functional groups which are biologically inert, or even increments of increase which are so small that several drugs trials are performed in parallel so that if one produces statistically significant, it is due to variation, as the other 19 are not significant.
This has been going on for decades, and it is disgusting as it often leads to a maintenence of drug price even after the original patent has expired, they produce what is medically speaking the same drug but marginally different (not more efficient), and stop other companies producing the drug at significantly reduced cost to the customers. This happens a lot in america, but worldwide and those who suffer are people who cannot afford the still expensive drugs.
 
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