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from the because-we-already-know-how-to-make-our-own-booze dept.
Forget those long lines at the pharmacy: Someday soon, you might be making your own medicines at home. That's because researchers have tailored a 3D printer to synthesize pharmaceuticals and other chemicals from simple, widely available starting compounds fed into a series of water bottle–size reactors. The work, they say, could digitize chemistry, allowing users to synthesize almost any compound anywhere in the world.
"It could become a milestone paper, a really seminal paper," says Fraser Stoddart, a chemist and chemistry Nobel laureate at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who was not involved with the work. "This is one of those articles that has to make [people] sit up and take notice."
[...] In today's issue of Science, [Leroy] Cronin and his colleagues report printing a series of interconnected reaction vessels that carry out four different chemical reactions involving 12 separate steps, from filtering to evaporating different solutions. By adding different reagents and solvents at the right times and in a precise order, they were able to convert simple, widely available starting compounds into a muscle relaxant called baclofen. And by designing reactionware to carry out different chemical reactions with different reagents, they produced other medicines, including an anticonvulsant and a drug to fight ulcers and acid reflux.
[...] But it remains to be seen whether drug regulators will go along with a new way of making medicines. To do so, agencies like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will need to rewrite their rules for validating the safety of medicines. Instead of signing off on the production facility and manufactured drug samples, regulators would have to validate that reactionware produces the desired medication.
Source: ScienceMag
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday January 22 2018, @11:38AM (4 children)
Yeah, if the big pharma firms don't kill this because it interferes with their profits, and goverment doesn't kill it because it interferes with their sensibilities, then you can expect the illegal drug industry to kill it because who the hell is going to risk arrest / death for buying ecstasy or LSD or whatever from some random dodgy geezer when they can just download and print their own, and know exactly what's in it?
If this could somehow being squashed by the incumbents though, the possibility for changing society is breathtaking. Some interesting possibilities for abuse too though: Could it be used to create poisons or chemical weapons? Date rape drugs?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @11:41AM
But you can also print
* a 3D prison for yourself
* a gun to kill yourself with
* [your brand name here, now only $7,99 a month]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Monday January 22 2018, @11:59AM
LSD [wikipedia.org] is a good test case for a chemputer [theguardian.com]. It's one of the safest recreational drugs in existence. The effective dose is measured in micrograms (with single-digit milligrams being more than enough to go fully cosmic). A single chemist can make millions of doses of LSD, but good luck distributing that to people who want it. If a "drug printer" or "chemputer" device typically has very low yields compared to traditional drug synthesis methods, it's still likely to be able to produce enough acid for one person, or even a ballroom of people. And it could do so without the user needing any chemical knowledge (or just very little and basic attention to the operating parameters and cleanliness of the device), while avoiding human mistakes that hurt yield or add unwanted byproducts.
It seems very likely that "incumbents" or the U.S. government will throw some roadblocks in the way to stop such a device from gaining traction. But if the device is cheap and simple enough, the roadblocks won't do much. If someone starts selling a $5,000 chemputer, they could be able to move a lot of them before the DoJ can find the legal reasoning to shut them down. They could also avoid being shut down by not shipping the device with presets/software that allow it to create recreational drugs right out of the box. They can let others do that for them, or upload files/software onto random sites or the dark web themselves. They can offer general yet extremely specific and helpful technical support on various forums without needing to link to the necessary files/software.
You could compare the above scenario to Cody Wilson's Defense Distributed activities [soylentnews.org], which have spawned countless headlines and some DoJ heat yet have not landed him in jail. Or Josiah Zayner's company The Odin [soylentnews.org], which sells CRISPR experimentation kits.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday January 22 2018, @12:18PM
One way for the individual to "easily" "print" drugs would be to use genetically engineered yeast:
'Home-Brewed Morphine' Made Possible [soylentnews.org]
Genetically Engineered Yeasts Produce Thebaine and Hydrocodone [soylentnews.org]
To my knowledge, the genomes of those yeast have not been published, and they aren't available outside of the small number of labs that work on them. If anyone knows any differently or knows any other drugs that have been produced by engineered yeast, let us know.
The yeast approach would be an imperfect way of producing the drugs you want, but maybe there are ways to extend the approach. For example, engineer a switch statement [wikipedia.org] in the genome that lets one strain of yeast produce up to 10 different drugs based on some external factor (such as a chemical or light trigger). You could see a problem happening with that approach, such as some % of the yeast mutating or not working properly, mixing a little hydrocodone into your LSD. But that could be averted by using a centrifuge or something else inside your machine to separate the desired drug from any unwanted components.
At least one proposed chemputer [theguardian.com] does not use any GMO yeast but simply uses novel approaches to chemical reactions in order to miniaturize them and combine steps into a single machine that could produce more than one drug:
Innovations like microfluidic channels [nature.com] are probably going to be very relevant for the hypothetical chemputer.
Just because a yeast strain or chemputer could create morphine [wikipedia.org] does not mean that the effort will easily translate to a general approach capable of creating thousands of molecules, including LSD, ibuprofen [wikipedia.org], VX [wikipedia.org], rophynol [wikipedia.org], TNT [wikipedia.org], etc., all in the same machine with a push of a button. But we could be moving ever closer in that direction, so expect the authoritarians in government to be keeping a close eye on this field.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by ants_in_pants on Monday January 22 2018, @10:45PM
people manufacturing/distributing LSD generally aren't in it for the money. Even the DEA recognizes this.
-Love, ants_in_pants