The 'chemputer' that could print out any drug

I would like one bakers dozen of these please

 

Mad scientist makes drug machine.
Phrm company's kill him and burn his notes.
Pharm company's keep making billions and letting poor people die.

 

I'd think a GM Ephedra Sinicia that produces Methamphetamine would be more practical.
In fact, doesn't Phil Dick have a similar joke near the beginning of Scanner Darkly? " Hey,man, I just bought a Methedrine Plant"?

 

As much as i wish this were real it sounds more like BS

 

^ true that. If this theoretical machine could create complex compounds requiring many steps of chemical processing like combining reagents of specific ammnts at specific temp and pressure, solvent washes and purification, etc etc, then why would it not be able to make any compound at all? Like rare earth metals and precious metals and gemstone. It seems like it would have endless application, if only the tech was there to support it. Yes it's a ridiculous idea in terms of our technology today, but the computer and internet was a ridiculous idea in 1950. Just something to consider.

It wouldn't be able to make elemental metals such as the sought after gold and silver, but conceivably alloys and such.

This is totally do-able. There are a hell of a lot of kinks to work out - like the whole thing except for the concept - but I don't see why with enough engineering, both physical and molecular, this wouldn't be possible.

 

Do you have any chemistry background? Like, at all? This is entirely unfeasible. If making pharmaceuticals was that easy, and could be done that cheaply, then it could be done even cheaper using the same tech but with economies of scale. Distributed production is a brilliant model for certain things (i.e. widgets), but drugs? At absolute best it's an incredibly expensive novelty; at most realistic, it's unfeasible.

Please explain which drugs are made of alloys? And also, how would one print an alloy from constituent metals?

 

Do you have any chemistry background? Like, at all? This is entirely unfeasible. If making pharmaceuticals was that easy, and could be done that cheaply, then it could be done even cheaper using the same tech but with economies of scale. Distributed production is a brilliant model for certain things (i.e. widgets), but drugs? At absolute best it's an incredibly expensive novelty; at most realistic, it's unfeasible.

Please explain which drugs are made of alloys? And also, how would one print an alloy from constituent metals?

It's feasable but not now and not by us. I imagine such alien machine to have an ink made of all atoms in the periodic table and to print it would accelerate 6 carbon atoms for example and collide them geometrically against a solid vibrating, charged surface that would vibrate in a way to form a benzene ring, so when the benzene ring is formed, the machine detects it and keeps adding stuff. It should do this process 100,000,000 times a second.

 

Not expecting this to create any drug like he said it would, but his concept is workable for a variety of them I'd imagine.

 

It's feasable but not now and not by us. I imagine such alien machine to have an ink made of all atoms in the periodic table and to print it would accelerate 6 carbon atoms for example and collide them geometrically against a solid vibrating, charged surface that would vibrate in a way to form a benzene ring, so when the benzene ring is formed, the machine detects it and keeps adding stuff. It should do this process 100,000,000 times a second.

I don't even know where to begin with this.

 

I don't even know where to begin with this.

I'd go with calling it not even wrong and leave it at that.

 

I just ate that acid you faxed me lmao

 

This guy looks like a grandiose douche bag.

 

Not even wrong. Bingo. Building "atom-by-atom", which is, incidentally, not a thing that we can do outside of simulations, is not 3D printing.

 

How would this "printer" make drugs more available to people that cant get them now? Diseased uganda children cant afford vaccine but theyre gonna be able to buy this printer to solve their problems?

And, if they cant logisticly get the drugs to the people who need them then how do they expect to get the printers and inksdelivered and such?

 

Not so far-fetched I think. After all they can print bits of bone for implantation now.
If the machine could print at the atomic level it could do just about every chem in the organic lab for the price of a little hydrogen, oxygen and carbon, and nitrogen.

 

Do you understand the the issues with why that just can't work? Do you you remember that individual atoms don't really behave quite like a bowling ball that has a defined position and velocity in space, and more realistically can be seen as a "smear" that sort of exists in many places at once but also not really in any one of them? As such, it's sort of meaningless to say "Let's print a benzene ring by spraying atoms together at JUST the right angle and velocity" There is no exact solution for the Schrodinger equation for a system more complex then a single hydrogen atom. Not to mention, how exactly do we spray single ATOMS around? We need a net charge in order to spray little bits of stuff like that around, that means we need to ionize the atom into a nucleus, which means its no longer really able to treated under the concepts of chemistry and instead moves into the concepts of particle physics, which as I explained above, are somewhat different and kind of weird.
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all of yous are complicating this a bit. Scenario: say you wanted the machine to make ethanol and the only precursor in the machine was methane. Is it not possible to engineer a reagent-free alkylation then oxidation?

 

^Ethylene would be better than methane. With methane, cracking, fractionation, then hydration could give you ethanol. But it's much simpler to just use yeast and sugar, even on an industrial scale. It's easier to let nature do the hard work. Organism had billions of years to perfect their syntheses. But I'm no chemist or engineer.

You Youtube link was interesting. AFAIK CO2 is not yet practical on an industrial scale to replace more common solvents. But I could see that thing being useful for some stuff, like the extraction of essential oils or the deoxygenation of a benzylic amino alcohol. Xenon from sand? Hmm, maybe it'll stop being too damn expensive for anesthetic use:D.

 

Do you understand the the issues with why that just can't work? Do you you remember that individual atoms don't really behave quite like a bowling ball that has a defined position and velocity in space, and more realistically can be seen as a "smear" that sort of exists in many places at once but also not really in any one of them? As such, it's sort of meaningless to say "Let's print a benzene ring by spraying atoms together at JUST the right angle and velocity" There is no exact solution for the Schrodinger equation for a system more complex then a single hydrogen atom. Not to mention, how exactly do we spray single ATOMS around? We need a net charge in order to spray little bits of stuff like that around, that means we need to ionize the atom into a nucleus, which means its no longer really able to treated under the concepts of chemistry and instead moves into the concepts of particle physics, which as I explained above, are somewhat different and kind of weird.
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Of course the barriers to such technology seem insurmountable to us, but when I was a child computer memory consisted of troughs of mercury zigzagging round the lab.

 

Imagine what a cigarette lighter or sharpie marker would seem like to a neandrethal 8)

Pcb's kinda look like zigzaggy mercury lol

 

Of course the barriers to such technology seem insurmountable to us, but when I was a child computer memory consisted of troughs of mercury zigzagging round the lab.

Maybe so, but when it was the case that mercury delay line memory was state of the art, an article suggesting a piece of apparatus you could buy at an office supply store for less then a months wage for a upper-mid class person being so fantastically advanced as to be like a jump from them delay lines to DDR3 overnight would seem absurd, no?

(altho even that did not require invalidating everything understood about basic physics as being utterly wrong)

That is what this article reads like...