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Toilet full of bugs

This is bonkers. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disapp Some pharmaceutical crystals can no longer be synthesised because they now spontaneously change to a more stable (but less medically efficacious) form. The more stable form acts as a seed crystal for the less stable form, and once this happens it creates a cascading effect, in which people who have ever worked with the stable form can contaminate an entire factory/lab and make it unable to reproduce the earlier form.

Edit: Yes, like Ice-Bloody-9. Enough!

30 June at 1:17 | Open on topspicy.social
40 comments
red

@ephemeromorph what's more interesting imo is that even tiny quantities of the second form being present in the atmosphere can completely prevent manufacturing of some substances

30 June at 1:32 | Open on wetdry.world
Juno Jove

@max @ephemeromorph
Kind of like a Breaking Bad Kessler Syndrome?!

(BrBa because of Walter's field of expertise)

30 June at 9:57 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
eri :vlpn_smol:
@ephemeromorph what i got from the article was that the issue is less that the new crystal doesn't work, but that the new crystal was protected under a new patent and therefore was not legally able to be made as a generic drug

god i fucking hate drug patents
30 June at 1:33 | Open on moth.zone
Risotto

@ephemeromorph this reminds me of how soda pop food coloring denatures.

30 June at 2:04 | Open on tech.lgbt
Alice I. Cecile

@ephemeromorph Ooh, like prions but for pharmaceuticals!

30 June at 2:06 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
GeoWend

@ephemeromorph Sounds rather Sheldrake-ian. (Morphogenic Field Theory)

30 June at 2:14 | Open on kosmos.social
paraneural clone

@GeoWend @ephemeromorph I remember something like this being mentioned in Zero Escape: The Nonary Games

30 June at 13:02 | Open on mastodon.social
Xandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

@ephemeromorph That section about how pharma companies use that to bar generics is *wild*.

30 June at 2:39 | Open on wandering.shop
petes_bread_eqn_xls

@ephemeromorph

by the time other companies began manufacturing, Earth's atmosphere was already seeded with microscopic quantities of paroxetine hemihydrate from GSK's manufacturing plants, which meant that anyone trying to manufacture the original polymorph would find it transformed into the still-patented version

🤯

30 June at 3:40 | Open on mastodo.neoliber.al
vifon

@petes_bread_eqn_xls @ephemeromorph That would be a fascinating legal case study. I'd expect infringing on a patent would require some intent on even creating a given patented thing (not necessarily being aware of the patent though). A compound randomly synthesizing in my room without my conscious action being a legal liability sounds beyond bonkers.

30 June at 11:42 | Open on mstdn.social
64 Islands Airship Co-op

@ephemeromorph the whole seed crystal idea is ominous and spooky, wow. as is the suggestion that we're constantly shedding bits of everything we've ever ingested, which of course makes sense

30 June at 4:08 | Open on cloudisland.nz
64 Islands Airship Co-op

@ephemeromorph "Researchers have tentatively suggested that [progesterone] form 2 became gradually harder to produce around 1975, based on a review of production difficulties documented or alluded to in existing literature."

positively lovecraftian implications.

someone's going to synthesize a thing and its going to cause one of our neurotransmitters to pop into a lower-energy polymorph that works the same but is several orders-of-magnitude more delicious-smelling to the old ones, crikey

30 June at 4:17 | Open on cloudisland.nz
Daniel Darabos

@airshipper @ephemeromorph Yeah this is wild. If one mL of a substance has around 10^22 molecules, and it's mixed with all the water on Earth (10^21 L), then every liter of water on the planet will have 10 molecules of that substance. It's roughly the same for air but I guess it mixes faster.

30 June at 10:57 | Open on mastodon.online
🐛
@ephemeromorph
old: we were promised flying cars, mars colonies and seamless virtual reality in the new technological order

bold: we were promised people carrying swords everywhere and society decentralizing into nomadic raider groups in this irreversible decline and failure of modern tech
30 June at 4:37 | Open on brain.worm.pink
heatdeath
Lien Rag
josemanuel

@lienrag That was the first thing that came to my mind, too!

@ephemeromorph

30 June at 10:53 | Open on qoto.org
Mx Verda

@ephemeromorph physics! But also, reminds me of the “false vacuum” thing. PBS Spacetime did a video on it

30 June at 10:08 | Open on lgbtqia.space
Sundew

@ephemeromorph Wow! It's not just esoteric chemicals either - Xylitol demonstrates this!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappea

30 June at 10:28 | Open on beige.party
Ratta Kresch

@ephemeromorph This reminded me immediately of Kurt Vonnegut's novel The cat's cradle en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice-ni

30 June at 10:35 | Open on mamot.fr
Toilet full of bugs

@obstsalat The article even mentions this as a fictional example!

30 June at 10:42 | Open on topspicy.social
Sean Randall

@ephemeromorph evidence that whoever is in charge has recompiled a few modules of the Matrix, I'd say!

30 June at 10:36 | Open on defcon.social
rica

@ephemeromorph This was a plot point in a game I played but I thought they were making it up what the fuck

30 June at 11:18 | Open on wetdry.world
nonspecialist

@ephemeromorph to quote:

“The only problem was that by the time other companies began manufacturing, Earth's atmosphere was already seeded with microscopic quantities of paroxetine hemihydrate from GSK's manufacturing plants, which meant that anyone trying to manufacture the original polymorph would find it transformed into the still-patented version, which GSK refused to give manufacturing rights for”

This is absolutely nuts

30 June at 11:25 | Open on aus.social
Darth Osler

@ephemeromorph wait, what?

"Earth's atmosphere was already seeded with microscopic quantities of paroxetine hemihydrate from GSK's manufacturing plants, "???

30 June at 11:38 | Open on med-mastodon.com
Yoav Kallus

@ephemeromorph “Lars Onsager used to tell a story about a glycerin factory somewhere in Canada. One winter it was so cold that the glycerin froze, and from then on no matter how thoroughly the place was cleaned, it was impossible to get rid of all the nuclei of solid glycerin. As a result, it was no longer possible to produce glycerin in its usual (metastable) liquid phase. They had to close the factory, he would say with his impish grin.”

30 June at 12:26 | Open on mathstodon.xyz
Stanislav Ochotnický

@ephemeromorph that's indeed bonkers...

Scientists who had been exposed to Form II in the past seemingly contaminated entire manufacturing plants by their presence, probably because they carried over microscopic seed crystals of the new polymorph

30 June at 12:50 | Open on cyberplace.social
OddOpinions5

@ephemeromorph
this doesn't sound like a real pharma problem, but a problem caused by our insane legal system and an FDA not up to the job

30 June at 12:50 | Open on mas.to
wakame

@ephemeromorph
Parts of the article read like an SCP entry.
:neocat_nervous:

30 June at 13:22 | Open on tech.lgbt
Agnieszka R. Turczyńska
Riley S. Faelan

@ephemeromorph Needs to be worked into magic systems.

30 June at 13:31 | Open on toot.cat
Toilet full of bugs

Muting this thread because people keep mentioning Ice-Nine. It's IN the bloody article! You couldn't be arsed to read more than the summary before getting desperate to tell me that you know a nerdy thing.

30 June at 13:48 | Open on topspicy.social
Martin Hamilton
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