We don’t often consider using do-it-yourself projects as a hedge against the apocalypse. But [The Thought Emporium] thinks we should know how to make penicillin just in case. We aren’t so sure, but we do think it is a cool science experiment, and you can learn how to replicate it in the video below.
If you want to skip the history lesson, you need to fast-forward to about the six-minute mark. According to the video, we are surrounded by mold that can create anti-bacterial compounds. However, in this case, he starts with a special strain of mold made to produce lots of antibiotics.
You may not have all the gear he uses, including a bioreactor to generate liters of mold. Even with a lot of mold, the yield of penicillin is relatively low. Since Purina doesn’t make mold chow, you’ll have to create your own food for the mold colony.
All the work he did wound up producing 125 milligrams of drug. Obviously, if you are going to save the post-apocalyptic world, you are going to need to scale that process up.
If you are the sole survivor, maybe your AI companion can help out.
Only until the apocalypse. As the song says, “When the states and the cities fall … Black power and alcohol [and penicillin].”
Black powDer, maybe? What you said is not quite the same :)
Blue bread mold, the story must be told, nothin’ keeps ya livin’ like the blue bread mold!
It’s been a while since I’ve run into a Leslie Fish reference in the wild!
Would it?
Its just mold.
… i say that ignoring the fact that mushrooms and weed are illegal in a lot of places despite growing readily even without intervention
Now for that pesky insulin … older patents are all in the public domain …
Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_artichoke
That’s inulin, missing the “s”. Fartichokes do not treat diabetes although may be a healthy dietary choice.
Haha fartichokes… ain’t that the gospel truth. I think the cure is to tie up a diabetic so they only eat those and stay away from the sugary cocktails and donuts and eventually achieve a normal metabolism again. Obviously only works with the vastly most common form of diabetes, not the congenital ones… but in the heckin’ epic SHTF TEOTWAWKI apocalypse, I suspect that form of diabetes would very quickly become rare no matter what you did
IMHO, also back to the willow bark, from whence the “original aspirin” was created.
It’s hard on the stomach, which is why the invented aspirin.
Just ask your friendly, local butcher for a couple hundred pounds of pancreases.
Now I can activate my allergy whenever I want!
Why would it be illegal?
Selling it, or administering it to someone would definitely be illegal. But making it?
And in specific circumstances, such as giving it to someone in an emergency to save their life, I don’t think the legality would matter. Such as in New Orleans right after Katrina, when emergency services were spotty.
Not saying it’s not bad…
But you need to travel.
The USA is free, compared…(e.g. # of people arrested for posts in UK.)
Someone will bitch about no free beer in USA.
The one wealthy people from around the world come to for the best care without sitting on a waiting list like they would in their own socialist utopia?
Nope, that’s France (a socialist country). In your country, wealthy people take a jet to go to Geneva or Paris for care because of both the efficiency, the immediateness and the price (let’s say it, it’s cheap in Europe because its people was smart enough to understand that a healthy people is more productive than a fentanyl fed mass, and you can have an order of magnitude cheaper drugs when you have laws to limit cupidity).
Lol wut? No wealthy person or even a person with remotely decent insurance is going to find care cheaper and better in France. The whole “American system is utterly broken” meme is really overdone. Even if you don’t have insurance at all, the hospital is required by law to care for you. My wife works at a county hospital and regularly cares for homeless people.
Exactly. I’ve heard first-hand from Canadians how terrible their system is, and that people regularly come across the border for care. (And that was before they just started suggesting that people just have themselves killed. Oh, sorry, “euthanized”. That sounds so much better than “state-sponsored culling of undesirables”.)
we have a money extraction system that has a side effect of some medical care for some people.
On the article topic: I’ve read that we put more person-hours into developing penicillin and raising drug yield than we did into developing atomic weapons during WWII because in all previous wars more people died of injury related infections than died in combat, by a factor of 5-20x, and we realized that if we could fix that we’d do vastly better.
Useful resource, adding this to my “Rebooting Modernity” files.