On Fri, 1 Sep 2000, No User wrote:

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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...

Or better yet, a flu that killed everybody without sufficient THC residue in their body.

Or a modified influenza (which I think is a retrovirus - anybody?) which actually splices your THC gene into the subject's own genes for good, perhaps with a promoter area borrowed from some suitably chosen selectively activated gene (say, the gene controlling lactic acid metabolism which could make for a high every time the person engages in anything physical). Whatever. Of course there are lots of variations. Actually I think that the post about THC producing oranges is a bit far flung. From what I know about THC, it's pretty far from a protein, which are the only things produced under the control of a single gene. I also think that oranges are not very close relatives of hemp, so it is unlikely that close enough precursors to THC would be present to enable us to produce THC with the addition of a single enzymatic cleavage stage or some such simple step. And from what I know about genetic technology, it isn't quite on the level of enabling complicated (i.e. considerably more than a single gene) biochemical syntheses to be transferred from species to species. In a word, I think the magic oranges might be legend. Of course, there might be shortcuts - instead of using recombinant DNA techniques, we could perhaps try to get cells with both orange and hemp cellular nuclei to divide. I don't think either of these particular plants is prone to accepting such a treatment (unlike, I think, rye). Sampo Syreeni <decoy@iki.fi>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university