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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!

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

Juno Jove

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

(BrBa because of Walter's field of expertise)

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
Risotto

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

GeoWend

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

paraneural clone

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

Xandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

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

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

🤯

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.

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

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

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.

unusual zone of infecundity
@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
josemanuel

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

@ephemeromorph

Mx Verda

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

Ratta Kresch

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

Toilet full of bugs

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

Sean Randall

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

rica

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

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

Darth Osler

@ephemeromorph wait, what?

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

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.”

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

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

wakame

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

Riley S. Faelan

@ephemeromorph Needs to be worked into magic systems.

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.

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