CDR: Re: Whipped Europenas

Sampo A Syreeni ssyreeni at cc.helsinki.fi
Sun Sep 3 02:48:16 PDT 2000


On Fri, 1 Sep 2000, No User wrote:

>> 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 at iki.fi>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university





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