Modified yeast produce opiates from sugar

This falls under the "Synthetic Biology" domain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_biology is a decent introduction to the concepts.

See also the iGEM competition: https://www.igem.org/Main_Page the students who work on those projects often come up with really clever ideas and implementations, which has the potential to push the field along faster than if it was just academically funded professors and some startups.

Rather than directly replicating the experiment, it would be easier for the team to disseminate their cells to others, who could then grow the cells up, sequence them, and compare the sequence to a wild type yeast to verify the genes were included, then do a few other transcription experiments and blocking assays to show that the genes that got cloned in were actually the ones carrying out the synthesis.

So, since you're making a technical nitpick with a short detail of my comment, I'll apply the full flame of my technical capabilities. We'll start with the paper itself:

The abstract says " We combined enzyme discovery, enzyme engineering, and pathway and strain optimization to realize full opiate biosynthesis in yeast. The resulting opioid biosynthesis strains required expression of 21 (thebaine) and 23 (hydrocodone) enzyme activities from plants, mammals, bacteria, and yeast itself"

So the authors say that they discovered enzymes. This is consistent with my statement. Your statement is irrelevant; discovering a biosynthetic pathway is a distinct thing from discovering the enzymes that carry it out (but, I will agree that in many cases, when you discover a biosynthetic pathway you can identify the enzymes and genes that code for them at the same time. It's not necessary, though). What the authors did here is engineer a biosynthetic pathway.

Next statment that supports my position from the paper: "Also, key enzyme(s) that epimerize the (S)-benzylisoquinoline scaffold to the (R)-enantiomer, which is the biosynthetic precursor of the promorphinan and morphinan scaffolds, have remained unknown even after decades of study until recently identified by two groups (19, 20) and by our team as described below."

Note the above extract from the paper, if correct, completely abolishes your point. The authors cite their own recent work, as well as the work of others, which was required for engineering biosynthetic pathway.

Here is a link to the author's prior work identifying a required step in the process: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6245/309

At this point I rest my case. My original statement stands, as it does, and your criticism appears to be only a pointless and ultimately irrelevant nitpick of my statement.

Further, I would appreciate not using the term "burst your bubble". It's immature, and when said to a person who's been studying synthetic biology for more than 2 decades, who can read the primary literature, and compose a coherent reply, makes you look petty.

Fun fact - Although the tech might have improved, a lot of the seeds never used to get irradiated properly.

I'm wondering who's going to be the first politician or law enforcement chief to suggest we need to lock up sugar and require government issued ID to be presented before purchase...

Depends, if the technique is easy enough for individuals to accomplish, it becomes a health issue rather than a crime one, because nobody will need suppliers/dealers/smugglers.

The real problem is the middle-ground, where it's an easy production mechanism that criminal syndicates can control, but not so easy that individuals can do it without making payments. For example, perhaps the cultivation/extraction/concentration process is too difficult, or the strain is engineered to require a proprietary chemical to live--a reasonable safety precaution in any event--or the "root species" is kept secret while strains that self-destruct after a certain number of generations are used for production at scale or resale.

According to the report on the radio I heard this morning, the yeast itself is considered a controlled substance and its distribution is restricted in the same way as the drugs themselves.

With luck, and a bit of wisdom, by decriminalization and harm reduction: see Portugal's experience.