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.

  • TerminalEncounter [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    23·
    4 months ago

    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.