Complex Numbers

Fun Guy

More science today. Not too much to say about it, because my energy's low, but I wanted to put this out there.

Yeast could soon make psilocybin cheaper than their magic mushroom cousins can  
New work could even lead to psychedelic intermediates not previously available in large quantities

I'm neutral on recreational magic mushrooms. Never tried them myself, but they don't seem to deserve the bad reputation that, say, opiods get, and of course they have different effects. But the research on the use of their components in mental health treatment seems compelling.

In recent years, many studies have highlighted the potential benefits of the drug for the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder and migraine, in particular the active component of magic mushrooms, psilocybin.

Migraines aren't technically a mental health issue, I suppose, but from what I've seen from people who deal with them, making them go away might keep people from going nuts.

The article goes into why it's hard to synthesize psilocybin -- it's primarily a cost thing -- and it's worth the read, but obviously I'm not going to copy everything here.

Now, researchers at the Technical University of Denmark have found a new, better vehicle to make psilocybin: baker’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

If you've been paying attention, you know what that is. It's the same little magic beasties that make beer. (Technically, ales but not lagers.) Hence the "cerevisiae" part of the binomial.

Whenever I read something like this, the first thing that comes to my mind is "Why not just use the appropriate mushrooms?" Well, the article explains that it's hard to control the dosage that way, and when you're doing clinical trials (or actual treatments), it's very important to have a handle on exactly how much of whatever substance you're metabolizing.

But I can't help but think that the issue here isn't so much dosage control as Puritanism; our culture has a deep-rooted bias against anything psychoactive. It might give people Ideas, including the idea that maybe it's okay to alter one's perceptions for a limited time. Hence opiods having been (partially) legalized, despite their negative effects, while it took a very long time to legalize cannabis, which has few negative effects (and don't give me "but driving..." because the labels on opiods warn against driving, too).

Anyway, I just find the whole thing interesting, especially the part about finding yet another use for brewer's yeast. Beer: is there anything it can't do?