Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 244 posts

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#71

Post by fabian2k »

kragen wrote: post #56
dekhn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miniaturized NMR? can you explain how that would work?

Benchtop NMR spectrometers already exist (for decades now), and some are already cryogen-free, permitting room-temperature measurements, eliminating the dewar and cryogens which account for a lot of the mass and volume of traditional NMR spectrometers. We now have room-temperature superconductors, which might work to eliminate the bulky, heavy permanent magnets in current benchtop devices, though the pressures requir…

Benchtops are at 60-90 MHz field strengths. That is not really enough to look at more complex molecules, the bigger routine NMR spectrometers are at 400-600 MHz (and there are even larger ones, but those are not used for small molecules that much). And even then those benchtops cost something close to 100k USD, that's quite far from affordable.

The "room temperature" superconductors are not used at room temperature in these cases, they're still cooled down. And so far the only spectrometer I know of where they are used is the still extremely new 1.2 GHz Bruker. And that one is almost certainly somewhere between 10 and 20 million USD. The new superconductors are low temperature superconductors, not room temperature. And even then they still work better at lower temperatures. At best you can remove the liquid helium from the system and use liquid nitrogen only, which is an advantage but still really far from room temperature.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#72

Post by tablespoon »

ur-whale wrote: post #13
tablespoon wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DIY versions are normally more expensive than mass-produced equivalents. So either this DIY version has atrocious quality, or $600 is far too expensive. (Judging by the prices in normal countries, $600 is far too expensive!) Yeah, the answer is $600 is far too expensive. IMHO the answer is some kind of regulation (e.g. limiting the profit margin on generics or even drugs more generally), or some kind of boutique go…

> IMHO the answer is some kind of regulation IMHO, the solution is actually less regulation. If any company could enter that market with being sued into the ground, you'd get top notch a quality product for a fraction of the price before you could finish spelling epinephrine.

> IMHO, the solution is actually less regulation.

> If any company could enter that market with being sued into the ground, you'd get top notch a quality product for a fraction of the price before you could finish spelling epinephrine.

I doubt it. IIRC, EpiPens are off-patent, and the only thing holding back competition is the need to demonstrate the competing product is safe, reliable, and equivalent. I even believe a competitor product was withdrawn from the market because it was delivering an unreliable dosage.

So if you remove the regulations, you'll probably get a flood of corner-cutting crap that's dangerous. That's likely especially true for an emergency use item like an EpiPen, which literally sits on a shelf unused unless there's an emergency (leaving a big opportunity to sell defective items undetected by consumers).

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#73

Post by dgb23 »

trutannus wrote: post #26
hirundo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was left questioning how a developed country can mess up so badly that some people feel this is their only option. Regulatory capture.

That and market failure.

I'm not sure if life saving medicine should or even can be understood through economic equilibrium. This is ultimately a question of ethics, politics and sheer survival. This isn't a market in the first place and it doesn't help that we pretend it is.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#74

Post by tastyfreeze »

camillomiller wrote: post #67
dekhn wrote: post #12

I know a bunch about pharma. The folks who are doing this and saying it's cheaper are often completely neglecting costs that are borne by corporations: the initial R&D, but also the immense amount of quality control and regulatory compliance. I've also talked to the biohackers. S ome of them are smart, careful, and just get stuff done in the lab. Then there are the attention hogs who inject themselves on youtube (typ…

Just to frame all this a bit better: in Italy epipens cost… wait for it… ZERO - nil - nada. You have a diagnose of anaphylactic shock risk? You get epipens. Public healthcare pays for it, therefore everyone pays for it with their taxes. Without a prescription, you can get one for around 75€, which is already considered criminally expensive. This is true for thousands other products. So please now tell me again how r&…

I'm confused. Isn't this like saying I bought you lunch with money I took from you last year so your lunch was free?

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#75

Post by kragen »

dekhn wrote: post #63
kragen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Benchtop NMR spectrometers already exist (for decades now), and some are already cryogen-free, permitting room-temperature measurements, eliminating the dewar and cryogens which account for a lot of the mass and volume of traditional NMR spectrometers. We now have room-temperature superconductors, which might work to eliminate the bulky, heavy permanent magnets in current benchtop devices, though the pressures requir…

benchtop NMR doesn't solve this problem, it's not powerful enough. If you had improvements to NMR they would actually go first to other things than doing chemical analysis of anarchist drug batches. IE there are other industries that will buy all your machines if they existed. The real question is why would you EVER use NMR for just about anything? It's really high cost and the total value of the data is lower than j…

What are the companies, or at least the industries, that would buy all the machines?

Ultimately what everyday people will end up using is whatever is cheap and works well enough. Right now NMR isn't cheap, and neither is FT-IR or XRD, but these things change over time. Benchtop NMR is already good enough for distinguishing between significant classes of contaminants that could be in your purported insulin.

I'm typing this on a 50-gigaflops computer, which is faster than the Cray Y-MP Los Alamos had back in the 01990s, and people routinely buy teraflops video cards now, any one of which is faster than ASCI Option Red, if you remember that. I just drank a mass-produced soft drink out of a can made of aluminum, the metal Napoleon III preferred to gold to exhibit his wealth. Last year Chinese companies brought three covid vaccines to market within six months of the disease's discovery and started mass vaccinations, though most observers had predicted a minimum of 18 months. SpaceX is routinely landing reusable rockets on their tails now, and the world's energy infrastructure is rapidly shifting from fossil fuels to solar.

Things change. Today's science fiction is tomorrow's old news.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#76

Post by Tenoke »

chillingeffect wrote: post #62
kragen wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also worth mentioning that albuterol and similar inhalers used to be an exception to the prohibitions on CFCs (these inhalers an't used in large enough volume to do significant ozone damage), but due to lobbying from the companies that made them, they no longer are. Why would a company lobby to outlaw its current product? Well, they had patents on "improved" CFC-free versions, allowing them to exclude new entran…

That's what I call Metacapitalism.

Seems odd to call it that as there's little 'capitalism' in it. It's abuse of state regulations rather than market forces.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#77

Post by Qem »

petermcneeley wrote: post #5

Not an Anachist but I wonder how much of the danger here is due to the law. Ideally they would simply be selling the epipencils and doing testing etc but there is no way they would be able to do this. So instead the best they can do is create DIY kits. I wonder how far they can legally push the DIY kit. Can they ship you supplies with the kit? Can they ship you expresso-like packs for your DIY machine?

Well, if people can even successfully defend against murder charges if they acted in self-defense, to preserve one's own life, why should they not be able to defend against piracy/drug laws if the alternative is death? Some medicines are too expensive, in absence of a proper public health system, and being unable to pay means certain death to some people.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#78

Post by kragen »

nwiswell wrote: post #47
kragen wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly making it happen will require a revolution in manufacturing, which may or may not already be underway, but making it happen for software required decades of continuous revolution in semiconductors and telecommunications. Some kinds of analysis machinery, like GC, ICP, and DSC or DTA, are probably inherently fairly large; other kinds, like FT-IR, other kinds of spectrometry, TLC, HPLC, other kinds of liquid ch…

> Some kinds of analysis machinery, like GC, ICP, and DSC or DTA, are probably inherently fairly large; other kinds, like FT-IR, other kinds of spectrometry, TLC, HPLC, other kinds of liquid chromatography, XRF, XRD, and NMR, can be miniaturized and mass-produced Many of the types of analysis listed here are elemental analysis only, which are useless for trying to identify pharmaceutical analytes or determine their c…

> Many of the types of analysis listed here are elemental analysis only, which are useless for trying to identify pharmaceutical analytes or determine their concentration.

That's mostly true, but if a pill has significant amounts of lead, arsenic, and mercury in it, you know something went wrong, and you shouldn't take it. Even XRF might be enough to allow you to safely use lead-based or arsenic-based catalysts in your synthesis.

> Out of all of these, microfluidic liquid chromatography is the least science fiction. There's plenty of literature about it but nobody really "has it working", and the reality is that it's not likely to ever have the same capability as benchtop HPLC.

Thanks! Can you think of any other plausibly miniaturizable general-purpose analysis techniques? Those are just the ones I came up with off the top of my head. I think microfluidic liquid chromatography doesn't actually have to run faster than the bear, just faster than color-changing DanceSafe test kits.

As for science fiction, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29816434 talks a bit about how today's science fiction is tomorrow's old news.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#79

Post by trhway »

jjoonathan wrote: post #68
kragen wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to be able to discuss ideas on their merits instead of being confronted with factional applause lights like "anti-vax".

Arguments like "clearly fail to control the spread" are low effort Gish Gallops that need to be treated as such. Publicly slugging it out in the weeds grants an optical stalemate to an argument that deserves to lose. Do this a million times in a row and you can launch an entire contrarian movement off vapors -- which is exactly what we have seen.

I don't see any arguments beside cheap meta and labels from your side (which seems to be pretty characteristic of the people pushing the current vaccine campaign).

>Arguments like "clearly fail to control the spread" are low effort Gish Gallops that need to be treated as such.

The failure to control the spread has been obvious for at least half-a-year for anybody doing simple arithmetic on public numbers (and like others i have commented on that as far back then). Now beside being obvious, it is also confirmed by a proper scientific publication

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y

" A person who was fully vaccinated and then had a ‘breakthrough’ Delta infection was almost twice as likely to pass on the virus as someone who was infected with Alpha."

"Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus."

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#80

Post by tastyfreeze »

GuB-42 wrote: post #45

I remember a few years ago, someone made a suggestion, that, because a lot of these overpriced drugs are paid by insurance companies. So why don't insurance companies contract an independent lab to make their own medicine instead of paying ridiculously high prices for out-of-patent medicine? Of course, it would be a proper lab, with certifications and quality control, not some guy's basement, so it would be expensive…

The big insurance companies own, at least in part, the large pharmacies. Manufacturing drugs adds a risk bundle of appeasing regulators and liability for adverse effects from the drugs made.

Insurance companies are happy to be the buyer and seller as that is plenty profitable without the legal risk.

Post reply on HN