On Fri, 1 Sep 2000, David Marshall wrote:
>The boom of molecular biology may very well throw drug enforcement for
>a loop. For a simple example, assume that a drug-friendly biologist
>isolated the gene for THC, and spliced it into some other kind of
>plant. The result is a fruit or vegitable which has THC in it, which
>will make consumers high, but which is most likely very hard to
>distinguish from the normal version of that fruit.
In which case we will need to design a strain of bacteria which,
e.g., triggers apoptosis of cells with such a gene. Or creates suitable
concentrations of some reasonably strong biotoxin in an environment with
enough THC present. If we want to go easy on legitimate hemp growers, just
put in inhibition by some suitably-close-to-unique combination of cell
surface receptors of Cannabis Sativa. Probably not much more difficult than
extracting the gene in the first place...
>I guess they would ban genetics education then. I'm surprised that
>they haven't done something about the proliferation of dangerous
>chemistry knowledge in educational instututions and libraries yet.
Nuh. I think they should be happy about biology education - might one day
give them a nice young crackpot with the talent to create a drug user
killing flu...
Sampo Syreeni <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university
