I’m going to die a very scary, traumatic death and so are a lot of the people who are closest to my heart—we’re all homeless, and we’re all drug addicts, and I have the special bonus of being (sort of) trans as well. I’m already seeing the ratcheting up of hatred for homeless drug users—I’ll be shot in the head and kicked into a pit, and my only hope is that I’ll be one of the very first so I won’t have to live with the pain of worrying about anyone I care about.
So yeah, while I agree that America’s collapse would be a W for humankind overall, it’s hard to fucking see that silver lining when things are that bleak.
I just want the rest of what’s likely to be a very short life to be chill. I just want things to be normal.
idk what that means either, but it sounds cool so i am upvoting it
If you make a drug with chemistry, it'll make a 50/50 mix of left-mirrored and right-mirrored molecules. Like your hands, they're mirror images but cannot be flipped to be the other one. Sometimes the mirror of the desired molecule is harmless and sometimes it'll cause massive birth defects or be deadly poison.
If you program a yeast cell to make that drug molecule it'll only make the desired molecule and not its mirror.
whoa that is cool af
A lot of pharmaceuticals have two (or more forms) that identical in chemical formula and mostly identical in structure, except one chiral centre is flipped. Sometimes that version doesn't do anything, sometimes it kills you. Classic example is one version of thalidomide is just a nice sedative, one version will be a total disaster to babies in utero.
Chemical processes can rarely distinguish between the forms, you can do some engineering to change up the racemic mixture to favour one form over another but you can't really get 100% of one form - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enantiopure_drug
But... cells do that all the time. Tons of proteins have tons of ways they could be folded. Same for an substance they excrete from a protein. They can distinguish between enantiomers very very well - that's what they've evolved to do! We can take advantage of that by inserting a vector teaching the bacteria or yeast to make one specific form of a substance. And they will, they just do the instructions they're given. They will excrete the target drug or med in a pure racemic mixture. We can take advantage of that, we just need to insert those vectors into yeast or whatever soonish and just grow em for "free" (absent the initial cost lol and the cost to wash the drug from the rest of the crap we don't want). That's what I mean.
A racemic mixture is a 50/50 mix of enantiomers
It’s a little known band called revolutionary optimism. You wouldn’t have heard of them
its entirely possible and people are already working on expanding access to certain medications with that. transformed e. coli and yeast are already used industrially to produce medications like insulin (a plasmid carrying the human insulin gene is forced into e. coli). theoretically you could do this with anything, just insert the human gene for it into some bacteria or yeast and they become little factories for it.