Re: [DIYbio] Re: Political work: DIYbio vs. "alternative 'medicine'"

William Beeson <beesonwt@gmail.com> writes:

> Just to play devil's advocate on this topic and echo Cathal's comments...
>
> There are many potent, biologically active, compounds that are found in
> foods and plants. So many obvious examples: nicotine in tobacco, caffeine
> in coffee, or alcohol & resveratrol in red wine.

* On bioactive natural products

You may be interested by a paper I wrote recently about compounds seen
as panaceas. I have a tendency to put resveratrol on my list of
suspicious compounds with all kind of miracle effects (doesn't mean it
may not have an interesting use). The paper is open-access and can be
found here: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.jmedchem.5b01009

Most of the claims you will find about the new "cure-all" molecules that
you find in any health-oriented-food-store are based on in-vitro
bioassay data… You could get a grasp at what can go wrong from the paper
too and I can help if you need some other references.

Most of the "known" compounds and organisms have NOT been studied for
their bioactivity in a scientific way. And most of the studies that have
been done are not sufficient to prove or disprove any real benefit. The
rest of the studies are done on always the same molecules…

* On what DIYBIO people can do

So there is a lot left to do and I think that DIYBIO can clearly be part
of this adventure. Many experiments with Natural Products can be done in
a garage, like extraction, chromatography for analysis and purification,
testing on cells or microorganisms etc

I'm willing to help if someone is interested in learning the lab
techniques (I'm not really experienced with cell and microorganism
cultures so I may not be the best for that part).

Structural analysis is a lot harder to do in a garage, because equipment
like NMR, mass spectrometry and Xray diffractometer are not cheap
equipments (yet?). There is still the possibility of doing it the
old-way with chemical analysis using chemicals to break the compouds in
small parts and study these parts, testing for functional groups and so
on. But I know that some chemicals that were used are on the watch-lists
for drug manufacture or explosive manufacture (at least in US) and
others may be really hard to source. Not even talking about safety here.

* On traditional medicine

Also I wanted to note, there is a lot to learn, and that has been
learned from the study of traditional medicines. I think it is
irresponsible or maybe just simply a proof of stupidity to just throw
the baby with the bath water just because the water looks
suspicious. The fact is that traditional medicines are still the only
source of accessible medicine for a big part of the world. And this is
probably not going to change anytime soon. Many practitioners of
traditional medicine are really happy to have return of scientific
people on what they are doing and are ready to adapt what they are
doing. Also many are redirecting their patients when they know they have
nothing to cure that condition but allopathy (in the sense of
"occidental" or "modern" medicine here) can. I'm absolutely not talking
about the self-taught quantic-naturopaths and other scams here.

* Additional notes

To note also, NIH has a big program on complimentary and alternative
medicines (https://nccih.nih.gov/) trying to find what is worthwhile and
what is not (among other things). And this is not as easy as "just make
a simple assay", "just throw everything that looks like that", etc

J.

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