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Comment by grinich | Hacker News Reader

I think most people don't realize the amount of genetic recombination and mutation that goes on in nature. It's the reason we have new strains of the flu each year, and similarity the reason behind the evolution which has shaped our global ecosystem.

It's a moot point that these amateur biohackers are able to synthesize different strains of E. coli or yeast. It's done in high school AP Bio classes across the country. I think this will only be a possible threat when genetic sequencing and synthesis becomes so cheap and fast that it can be done on the desktop by anyone. At that point, the same thing may happen to pharmaceuticals and medicine that has happened to software.

Could the methods to make Advil, Viagra, or similar drugs be under the GNU license? Free software -> Free chemistry?

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As much as I love free software, free media, and freedom in general, the idea of downloading a non-trivial drug from the internet, ./configure, make, make install, and consuming it sends shivers down my spine. And if it doesn't send shivers down yours, you've got about ten to fifteen more years to build up some more life-saving paranoia.

Chemistry is not the blocker on drug development; testing is. Our system isn't perfect but I can't see how open source can improve anything. Open source can barely scrape together the resources for a usability test and that's orders of magnitude easier than a drug safety trial.

The idea of putting something into my body, which I know nothing about or the ways in which it was synthesized or processed, sends shivers down my spine.

How much do you really "trust" pharmaceutical companies, whose sole mission is to profit at the illness of others?

I hope the same thing happens for drugs that happened to encyclopedias. People nowadays trust Wikipedia just as much as Britannica, if not more in some cases.

As for testing, that is indeed a trickier issue. But I guarantee you that if a person is suffering from an illness and cannot afford the drugs for treatment, they'll be willing to try any sort of chemistry that may help.

People nowadays trust Wikipedia just as much as Britannica, if not more in some cases.

Usually people who note this consider it a problem.

"How much do you really "trust" pharmaceutical companies, whose sole mission is to profit at the illness of others?"

You're propagandizing. The correct question is, "How much do I trust the pharmaceutical companies and all relevant regulatory agencies?"

And the answer is... not entirely. That would be stupid. On the other hand, they do in fact conduct drug trials, and so far I have not had a prescription for the mega-profitable drugs, so I'm not overwhelmingly concerned about whether or not they cheated with their antibiotic tests. I haven't needed an antidepressant, cholesterol medication (which I'm unconvinced actually help), or anything else that might actually be a problem. (And at this point I wouldn't touch a weight-loss pill; evidence would suggest at this point that whatever it takes to fool the body into losing weight when it wouldn't otherwise is virtually certain to mess with your heart, which is one of the prime reasons for losing weight in the first place.)

The question is some sort of binary "trust open source or trust the evil commercial interests!". It's actually "do I trust a possibly flawed system that still uses science, or am I so concerned about it that I'm willing to switch over to a system that can't afford to do science at all?" Some science is, all else being equal, better than no science at all.

"But I guarantee you that if a person is suffering from an illness and cannot afford the drugs for treatment, they'll be willing to try any sort of chemistry that may help."

Only if they are in a situation that can't possibly get worse. I support the aggressive deployment of possible cancer remedies in the cases where we can tell somebody has a week to live, for instance, which our government won't do. Very little can go wrong that is worse than doing nothing. But drugs can have arbitrarily bad side effects that only emerge for a small set of people, and throwing more drugs into the mix will only increase that number. And, best of all, while doctors know about the standard drug reactions, they'll know nothing about your home-grown concoction.

Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_epidermal_necrolysis

Installing something on my hard drive is radically, radically different than installing something into me.

I agree with your comment. I /do/ trust drugs like Advil, on a daily basis.

What I'm most excited about is that this sort of technology will hopefully free dependence on overpriced pharmaceuticals and bring the capability for invention to the masses.

Thanks for the thought-out comment. I heard Kurzweil speak a few days ago and the convergence of technology and medicine has been on my mind since.

"Open drug testing." If everyone already has little drug-replicator-dispensers attached to their desktops, they can sign up with much less hassle than a conventional drug trial to test something. A lower barrier to entry means that, further, you'll get way more people signing up, and therefore even better statistics and faster trials.

Of course, animal testing and such will still happen, and happen slowly; this will only speed up the trial once the drugs have been declared potentially safe for human testing.

i use simple chemistry recipes from the internet, like fertilizer, soap, making tofu and other simple stuffs

fear? don't! ... the beauty of chemistry is that you can dilute the concentration

so if a random guy say use a tablespoon of baking soda, try a teaspoon instead or use more water to dilute

the scariest thing i did was cleaning contact lens with baking soda (feaing it will make me blind) ... i'm not blind yet and found you can use saline (nacl) sterile solution to replace commercial solution

overall my costs decreased by a factor of ten

1 kg of baking soda can provide my basic cleaning (soap, toothpaste, contact lense, etc) for a year -- nowadays i don't go to personal health section (i used to go there every week whenever i go to grocery store -> 52 x 5 mins = 260 mins not wasted)

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