this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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I wonder how much of the coder mindset is behind the anarchist diy chemistry biohacking people (which seems to distress people who have actual experience in chemistry).
these people are full of shit. sofosbuvir contains single fluorine atom in such a place that its introduction requires either hydrogen fluoride (also as NEt3.3HF) or DAST (or other very friendly reagents like Xtalfluor-E) and even then, synthesis sucks balls as in has low-to-medium yield (15-50%) and requires extensive purification. you do not, under any circumstances, fuck around with hydrogen fluoride in your garage
relevant patent https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/search/family/051842422/publication/WO2016066283A1?q=pn%3DWO2016066283 first few pages for literature review, around 97-102 for procedures. these sub-50% yields are already heavily optimized
I honestly feel really bad when I see fairly respected leftists and journalists celebrate Four Thieves as something that could make a big difference for folks who are paying way too much for medicine (which is all of us) and enable a mutual support network of hobby chemists saving lives.
and then I look at it and that’s not what I see at all — it’s just a fucking cosplay anarchist (complete with cheap camo pants) with the type of opsec that gets the people around them arrested and an understanding of chemistry that will get people killed. and that fucking sucks! the part of me that’s susceptible to a dream like this thinks a 3D printer for medicine (per the marketing) is a great idea!
every other part of me is horrified. 3D printers barely fucking work and that’s our reliability target for fucking organic chemistry, a branch of science where it’s so easy (and sometimes necessary for a synthesis, as you pointed out) to produce chemical byproducts that give you fucking horrifying cancer if you’re lucky? and then the fucker just forgets or doesn’t know about yield and purification? this fucker calls his output “street drugs” and expects you to fucking bareback them without an appropriate validation to make sure you haven’t synthesized fucking poison in your little tin-foil-and-tape reaction vessel? and he sure as fuck isn’t giving test catalysts out with the pills he keeps throwing into crowds
one thing I’ve noticed from this most recent article is they forked some MIT designs for their synthesis discovery software and their chemical reactor. I’m not a chemist, any chemistry knowledge above was gleaned from YouTube and probably isn’t correct (let me know if I was way off), so I wanna know — is there anything at all to that for any drug, or is the idea as a whole just fucking terrible? I’m leaning towards the latter, but like I mentioned, I’m susceptible to this kind of dream.
It's interesting to me that they're named after four thieves. Not sure if it's a deliberate joke or just another manifestation of the anarchist herbalism tendency that seems to have developed in the last 20 or 30 years.