these people have created a diy lab reactor you can synthesise medicines with, but I can’t find how to make it anywhere. can anyone find out, or share from their own knowledge?
EDIT: this is a lab reactor for organic chemistry, not a bioreactor with bacteria
Their site seems down currently (it gives HTTP 504). Maybe it can be found on the Internet Archive, though.
The goal I agree with: readiness to make the essential medicines if they are inacessible. As for pharmacosynthesis - chemistry is hard. I would not treat myself with anything I homebrewed unless the need was immediate and great (e.g. “war or disaster has made medicine unavailable”).
Speaking as someone who actually likes chemistry for fireworks and special effects, and has studied how to build DIY batteries, electrolysers and fuel cells. I get things wrong too often (in pharmacosynthesis, once in a hundred times is unacceptably often) and lack the analytical capacity to detect my mistakes.
As a basic safeguard: before making a medicine to treat oneself (because treating others would require even higher assurances), I believe one should make it a hundred times and check the product without consuming any. Then, when the routine has proven to be unfailing, maybe actually use the product.
100% agreed, however one of the promising aspects of bioreactors is that once you got a genetically modified organism to produce the compound you want, with a stable marker to select against, then you have a relatively stable production method that doesn’t involve that much human error. Which is also why the pharmaceutical industry has been moving to such processes where possible.