Making Penicillin at Home | Hacker News Reader

Making Penicillin at Home

doomandbloom.net

178 pointsgscott75 comments

Not sure I’d risk this myself. However when I did chemistry at A level at school, with the intention of going into pharma for a bit, I did extract aspirin from willow bark. This is something you can do relatively easily and safely yourself. Disclaimer: if you kill yourself it wasn’t my fault.

Thanks to my wonderful chemistry teacher I got a couple of hours at Glaxo and run NMR on it to validate it. Was an amazing experience even if it was a bit worrying getting the train there with vials of white crystalline substance on me.

Quick-link for those wondering how to do this (as I was):

https://home-remedies.wonderhowto.com/how-to/make-aspirin-fr...

To add, this wasn't the method I used. It was more "industrial". I don't want to describe it here as there are a number of problems with it.

Firstly, the output is near pure which brings dosage problems.

Secondly, the output isn't 100% pure and brings storage problems.

Thirdly, you don't have an NMR spec handy. If you do I am impressed :)

Heard about tea, and used boiled willow ends as rooting hormone (not sure if it worked any better or...) HOWEVER, one needs to be careful as dosage is not know when you mix stuff in your kitchen for human consumption. That scares me.

Just to be clear: There is no aspirin in willow bark. Willow bark contains salicin which metabolizes into salicylic acid (which is still different from aspirin, ie. acetylsalicylic acid).

> salicylic acid

I could be wrong, but isn't that the main ingredient in Stridex? I used to have oily skin (before changing my diet) and I could've sworn that I used salicylic acid as a chemical exfoliant.

Yes. Also the active ingredient in Wart remover, though at higher concentrations (2% for stridex and 17% for wart remover). Good at melting skin I guess.

Which perhaps illustrates why it's not so good for your stomach and why, therefore, aspirin (same properties without stomach issues) was a breakthrough.

Aspirin isn't especially great on your stomach either.

It is much better. That's the point...

I would think that illustrates why willow bark tea is better than aspirin for your stomach...

Which it turns out not to be. Too much salicin can still cause stomach bleeding, says the internet.

Just want to note for the record that I wasn't making a quality claim about aspirin; just noting additional information regarding salicylic acid.

Yes, it's a common acne medication.

Yes. Some people even use crushed aspirins to reduce acne in a pinch. But it's probably not a good idea, as they are not meant to be applied to skin.

Reminds me that to do just about anything, you need tools, and most importantly measurement tools. Metrology is subtle. I'd love to know how to make sub milligram scale.

Something a little more stable than http://sci-toys.com/scitoys/scitoys/mathematics/microgram_ba...

ps: More like https://erowid.org/psychoactives/hardware/hardware_info1.sht...

You could cheat, and make the stuff in bulk, then just use a little of it.

Saw this DIY one a few years back on youtube, looks like the Erowid one, thought it was a neat build - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n90whRO-ypE

YouTube just dug up a a real nice breakdown that Ben Krasnow did - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta7nlkI5K5g

I see Ben Krasnoz I click

I agree, it annoys me that good quality 1mg scales can be readily acquired for around $30, but dropping down one order of magnitude further to 0.1mg costs at least 15-25x more. As sibling commented, the easiest solution is to just multiply the recipe by 10x. Doesn’t work for everything, but it’s generally worth it unless you are doing a lot of chemistry work.

closest price for high precision scale

310 $USD

https://scaleman.com/sartorius-ay123-milligram-digital-scale...

10x more than, then the base of $30

A good way of doing without a precise scale is to do what cocaine users do: push the substance so that it's arranged in a regular linear shape, and then you can measure lengths instead of weights. Makes it easy to fraction tiny amounts of powdery substances.

The big breakthrough with penicillin wasn't discovery it was mass production. Many fungal species produce it, but it took an extensive search to find one that produced a lot of it and then "genetic engineering" (via mutagenesis) to produce a variant which made enough to make the whole thing feasible.

Perhaps to combat drug resistance to human-facing bacteria, we should be promoting resistance in bacteria that infect fungi. Eventually, nature may lead us to the next step in the arms race.

You can also homebrew tetracycline beer like the ancient Nubians.

http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_REPORT/stories/2010/09/07/beer.ht...

I guess the trick is to obtain and maintain a healthy Streptomyces colony. Antibiotic laced beer should keep real well without refrigeration, too.

Actually found it more interesting that you can buy aquarium antibiotics without a prescription. But doesn’t antibiotics have a fairly short shelf life? Wouldn’t that be kinda difficult to stockpile?

Dry pill form antibiotics will easily last 10 years without losing too much potency.

They used to sell them on Amazon until they got wind of it. An old homeless friend taught me that trick, and as someone who was uninsured in the US for a long time (my health plan for most of the last decade was “worldwide, excluding USA”) I used it a number of times when treating minor infections (versus giving the urgent care $200).

Make sure you take a full course, in any event, and recall that many bacteria these days are resistant to Penicillin.

These days, I stock my prepper kit of antibiotics from https://www.alldaychemist.com, and they take bitcoin now too.

This whole article seems like an offhand way to get people to stockpile aquarium antibiotics. This guy is obviously on Big Aquarium Pharma's payrol.

Useful to know if you want to keep your digestion running predictably, without hidden disruptors: "One thing you might not know is that a lot of bakeries put a substance called a mold inhibitor on bread. This stuff, which is called mycoban, is going to suppress the fungus, so you should probably use bread that you baked yourself."

...with only 5 or 6 other hard-to-find substances. If you are stockpiling those items, why not stockpile penicillin itself?

TLDR: if, in a post apocalyptic world, your home laboratory is still running, you are able to grow penicillium or aspergillus cultures. These may, or likely may not, produce penicillin..

I'm curious about what, exactly, the people who take this seriously think they're preparing for.

In a scenario severe enough you're trying to make your own antibiotics, you can assume hospitals aren't functioning, which means civil society is gone.

You can't assume the government is gone, BTW: Every power vacuum will get filled, one way or the other, and there are plenty of unrecognized governments which are as governmental as they need to be to enforce their idea of order in a defined region.

Therefore... you, the prepper who was responsible enough to squirrel away tools and knowledge and supplies, are a target. If the government is trying to rebuild, it's going to be seizing supplies and, possibly, conscripting anyone capable of using those supplies who didn't have the good sense to leave when the getting was good. If the government isn't trying to rebuild... well, since when have gangs not looted anyone with stuff worth having?

It comes down to a survivalist fantasy, which amounts to one person, one family, one karass, against the world. A small, intimate group, as opposed to the granfalloon with guns which is called a military. Well... when a small group goes up against a big group, the small group is almost always fated to lose.

"Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society." --Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 1813. ME 13:333

People have been playing too much Fallout.

I think it’s more that people don’t exercise their survival instinct much these days as everything mostly just works. The biggest risk is not having toilet paper for the average person.

Thus some people construct scenarios to fill the hole.

For me, watching world war Z was stressful enough.

There's no such thing as too much Fallout :D

my son would agree....

The funniest ones for me are the ones who focus obsessively on some things while missing glaringly obvious others: The guy with 2 AR15's, a water reclamation system and 7 years of macaroni in his basement but is so out of shape he can't run up a flight of stairs.

Want to really prepare for TEOTWAWKI? Try jogging.

One of the two AR15s is for propulsion.

Even better, try gardening. Food and exercise at the same time!

What about cases like Katrina and Puerto Rico, where there are no local services but there are zero threats to the sovereignty of the federal government?

You don't need to survive Mad Max style for decades, you just need to make it a month or two until roads are open and power is back on. In this case having a stash of antibiotics could mean the difference between life and death for someone that's injured, and as the article points out there's no real good reason to grow your own when you can buy serviceable alternatives online.

Exactly. Living your life with zero buffer against fluctuations in the availability of life-critical materials is just as stupid as people who are prepping for zombie invasions. One guy thinks nothing will ever happen and the other thinks society is a transient entity. They are both fantasies. If you aren’t ready for earthquakes, fires, financial disasters and etc then you have a short attention span or you’re just lazy.

Besides all this, consolidation and integration of life-support is the way of the future. If you look at society as one big system, it makes a lot of sense to have lots of redundant units rather than all units depending on one central resource. Sole and batteries for example harden the whole country against equipment failure, terror attack, negligence and natural disasters. With a single power plant any instance of one of those things could bring down huge numbers of houses. Technology is making it possible to produce some of the things you need in home, so there is a funny convergence of preppers and technologists.

No idea why you've been d/ved, as you say, there's so many potential, but low risk, scenarios. Even in America and the EU we've all got a 0.5%, maybe 0.1% every year that something could go very wrong. Most likely is that it doesn't spiral, like the 2008 financial crisis, but there was a real, but small, chance that could have gone much worse.

His comment not only is ignoring real-life examples that have happened within his life time (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Venezula, Katrina, Puerto Rico, etc.), he's also postulating that these new governmental structures would magically spring up over night, rather than taking years or even decades to emerge.

I'm no prepper, but I do feel that I am knowingly taking a risk, albeit a very small one, by not being one. If I had a family to care for, I would definitely be more prepared with 3 months food and some emergency medical supplies beyond a first aid kit. It's a small enough risk that it will probably not happen for my generation or my country, but it does happen.

I also often don't buy insurance for things I think aren't worth it, but it's still a deliberate choice rather than sleep walking into it.

It's almost on the same risk percentage as Home Insurance, so if you're insuring your home, why aren't you 'spending' a little time each year prepping? Just because it's socially unacceptable, but home insurance is regarded as socially acceptable?

Doesn't even have to be something destructive like Iraq or Puerto Rico, Argentina comes to mind: serious economic collapse, maybe not Venezula-style, but enough that it disrupted things heavily.

I agree with the parent -- it's just insurance, and is a cost-benefit trade-off that needs to be evaluated in a similar fashion as flood insurance or the like.

There are a lot of what I'd call "psychological" or perception-based factors for doing things like hoarding guns and food, and it's easy to go overboard, but they're not fundamentally poor choices.

This is a great point. I recently had a small burn which ended up infected with golden staph.

If that infection had a happened and I couldn't get antibiotics, clean water, food, shelter, etc. for a month things could have gone quite the way south.

For those cases the only thing you need to stash is money- maybe some gold if you think money might become worthless. Because just leaving the place for somewhere else is a vastly better option than any survivalist fantasy.

http://www.shtfplan.com/emergency-preparedness/a-survival-q-...

Conclusion: trust only your family.

I live in the countryside. During winters (starting about this time of the year), the roads here are barely usable under normal conditions. We occasionally end up not being able to get to the store for two or three days due to heavy snowfall. We also have occasional power outages caused by heavy snowfall.

I'd say it's only a matter of time before we're hit by a severe blizzard and we need to manage on our own for a week or two. We do have antibiotics and other basic medical supplies at home, for such occasions. We also keep enough food and firewood for at least two weeks, sometimes more.

As for making one's own antibiotics, one of the most commonly repeated survivalist mantras is that one should always have and maintain a skill that will be useful in order to rebuild, in case society collapses. That way, if we do end up with zombies roaming the streets, Illuminati death squads chasing survivors, and a runaway AI trying to exterminate humanity, you will have something to offer the groups trying to rebuild.

Personally, I know how to make booze. My neighbors do, indeed, seem to appreciate that skill. :D

> In a scenario severe enough you're trying to make your own antibiotics, you can assume hospitals aren't functioning, which means civil society is gone.

The problem of the society is that more and more people count on "How to..." lookup on the Internet and can hardly imagine empty pharmacy or shop shelves.

I worry that the civil society is too much dependent on centralized services prone to interruption: specialized knowledge, production lines, banks, methods of payment, medical drugs, mobile networks, electricity, drinking water and petrol supply, government, ISPs, online services.

> It comes down to a survivalist fantasy, which amounts to one person, one family, one karass, against the world.

No, it is to help a community around you to survive a crisis. Local or global - that doesn't matter. I think the take away from all prep efforts is preserving basic tools, knowledge and skills in the society. In case of crisis, the prepared community can quickly rebuild basic services and sustain itself before a help arrives. Also it can share or barter with other communities.

I wonder if these should be diffused in secondary education.

> You can't assume the government is gone, BTW ...

Right. It'll be some mix of police, ex-military and professional criminals.

Edit: Reminds me of Harlan Ellison's A Boy and His Dog. The film adaptation was OK too.

Sadly it's easily possible to get into situations where the hospitals and society are "functioning", but civil society has decided not to give you any medicine. It seems to be an occasional problem in the US, but also happened during e.g. the Greek financial crisis.

Antibiotics are one thing, but I know several people who are dependent on insulin, and more who are dependent on more complex cutting-edge medication. This is why we need to keep the supply lines open, civil society civil, and international trade operating.

The fact that the UK is now seemingly going into "state prepper" mode for an avoidable self-inflicted disaster is starting to frighten me. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/brexit-no-deal-ins...

“it's easily possible to get into situations where the hospitals and society are "functioning", but civil society has decided not to give you any medicine.”

We are currently in such a situation in the United States.

Might not work so well if the apocalypse was caused by an antibiotic-resistant plague outbreak.

Also, I think this most likely produces Penicillin G, which has to be given intravenously because it's broken down by stomach acid...

Or could useful be spread on open infected wounds.

Only if the post-apocalyptic world still has sliced bread.

This would be more interesting if they provided methods for checking/controlling the quality of the result.

Huh. This is basically an advertisement for aquarium antibiotics.

Why aren't preppers building phage libraries instead? Isn't that more workable with limited resources than antibiotics production? You basically just need a DIY bacterial culture medium (such as soup stock), glassware, and dirt.

Is there a book that teaches you more about this stuff? I'm getting more and more interested in this after reading the cancer drugs people in China are making. This seems like a fun experiment to do at home for a weekend.

*How to kill yourself with fungal toxins because you fail to grow the correct species.

Not quite biology, but sulfanilamide is simple enough to synthesize at home, as is dapsone and maybe isoniazid. Most antibiotics (e.g. cipro) are way out of reach, though.

So.. who just bought a bunch of Fish-Mox?

Site is 503'd, unfortunately.

I thought most of the stuff you'd want antibiotics for is resistant to penicillin by now.

For the cuts and bruises mentioned, clean and bandage them and make sure your tetanus vaccination is up to date. Maybe make some calendula and/or yarrow extract, if you're into making your own remedies.

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