9 ms·

Making Penicillin at Home

178 points by gscott 8y ago

jk27277 8y ago
TLDR: if, in a post apocalyptic world, your home laboratory is still running, you are able to grow penicillium or aspergillus cultures. These may, or likely may not, produce penicillin..
- msla 8y ago
  I'm curious about what, exactly, the people who take this seriously think they're preparing for. In a scenario severe enough you're trying to make your own antibiotics, you can assume hospitals aren't functioning, which means civil society is gone. You can't assume the government is gone, BTW: Every power vacuum will get filled, one way or the other, and there are plenty of unrecognized governments which are as governmental as they need to be to enforce their idea of order in a defined region. Therefore... you, the prepper who was responsible enough to squirrel away tools and knowledge and supplies, are a target. If the government is trying to rebuild, it's going to be seizing supplies and, possibly, conscripting anyone capable of using those supplies who didn't have the good sense to leave when the getting was good. If the government isn't trying to rebuild... well, since when have gangs not looted anyone with stuff worth having? It comes down to a survivalist fantasy, which amounts to one person, one family, one karass, against the world. A small, intimate group, as opposed to the granfalloon with guns which is called a military. Well... when a small group goes up against a big group, the small group is almost always fated to lose. "Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society." --Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 1813. ME 13:333
  - senectus1 8y ago
    People have been playing too much Fallout.
    - setquk 8y ago
      I think it’s more that people don’t exercise their survival instinct much these days as everything mostly just works. The biggest risk is not having toilet paper for the average person. Thus some people construct scenarios to fill the hole. For me, watching world war Z was stressful enough.
    - stale 8y ago
      There's no such thing as too much Fallout :D
      - senectus1 8y ago
        my son would agree....
  - noonespecial 8y ago
    The funniest ones for me are the ones who focus obsessively on some things while missing glaringly obvious others: The guy with 2 AR15's, a water reclamation system and 7 years of macaroni in his basement but is so out of shape he can't run up a flight of stairs. Want to really prepare for TEOTWAWKI? Try jogging.
    - mac01021 8y ago
      One of the two AR15s is for propulsion.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - ataturk 8y ago
      Only two? Most of the people you are describing have >100 guns and more ammunition than they could use in two lifetimes. And yes, they're disgustingly obese.
    - FlyMoreRockets 8y ago
      Even better, try gardening. Food and exercise at the same time!
  - jcims 8y ago
    What about cases like Katrina and Puerto Rico, where there are no local services but there are zero threats to the sovereignty of the federal government? You don't need to survive Mad Max style for decades, you just need to make it a month or two until roads are open and power is back on. In this case having a stash of antibiotics could mean the difference between life and death for someone that's injured, and as the article points out there's no real good reason to grow your own when you can buy serviceable alternatives online.
    - nuguy 8y ago
      Exactly. Living your life with zero buffer against fluctuations in the availability of life-critical materials is just as stupid as people who are prepping for zombie invasions. One guy thinks nothing will ever happen and the other thinks society is a transient entity. They are both fantasies. If you aren’t ready for earthquakes, fires, financial disasters and etc then you have a short attention span or you’re just lazy. Besides all this, consolidation and integration of life-support is the way of the future. If you look at society as one big system, it makes a lot of sense to have lots of redundant units rather than all units depending on one central resource. Sole and batteries for example harden the whole country against equipment failure, terror attack, negligence and natural disasters. With a single power plant any instance of one of those things could bring down huge numbers of houses. Technology is making it possible to produce some of the things you need in home, so there is a funny convergence of preppers and technologists.
      - mattmanser 8y ago
        No idea why you've been d/ved, as you say, there's so many potential, but low risk, scenarios. Even in America and the EU we've all got a 0.5%, maybe 0.1% every year that something could go very wrong. Most likely is that it doesn't spiral, like the 2008 financial crisis, but there was a real, but small, chance that could have gone much worse. His comment not only is ignoring real-life examples that have happened within his life time (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Venezula, Katrina, Puerto Rico, etc.), he's also postulating that these new governmental structures would magically spring up over night, rather than taking years or even decades to emerge. I'm no prepper, but I do feel that I am knowingly taking a risk, albeit a very small one, by not being one. If I had a family to care for, I would definitely be more prepared with 3 months food and some emergency medical supplies beyond a first aid kit. It's a small enough risk that it will probably not happen for my generation or my country, but it does happen. I also often don't buy insurance for things I think aren't worth it, but it's still a deliberate choice rather than sleep walking into it. It's almost on the same risk percentage as Home Insurance, so if you're insuring your home, why aren't you 'spending' a little time each year prepping? Just because it's socially unacceptable, but home insurance is regarded as socially acceptable?
  - arkh 8y ago
    http://www.shtfplan.com/emergency-preparedness/a-survival-q-a-living-through-shtf-in-the-middle-of-a-war-zone_10252011 http://www.shtfplan.com/emergency-preparedness/a-survival-q-... Conclusion: trust only your family.
  - ahje 8y ago
    I live in the countryside. During winters (starting about this time of the year), the roads here are barely usable under normal conditions. We occasionally end up not being able to get to the store for two or three days due to heavy snowfall. We also have occasional power outages caused by heavy snowfall. I'd say it's only a matter of time before we're hit by a severe blizzard and we need to manage on our own for a week or two. We do have antibiotics and other basic medical supplies at home, for such occasions. We also keep enough food and firewood for at least two weeks, sometimes more. As for making one's own antibiotics, one of the most commonly repeated survivalist mantras is that one should always have and maintain a skill that will be useful in order to rebuild, in case society collapses. That way, if we do end up with zombies roaming the streets, Illuminati death squads chasing survivors, and a runaway AI trying to exterminate humanity, you will have something to offer the groups trying to rebuild. Personally, I know how to make booze. My neighbors do, indeed, seem to appreciate that skill. :D
  - imhoguy 8y ago
    > In a scenario severe enough you're trying to make your own antibiotics, you can assume hospitals aren't functioning, which means civil society is gone. The problem of the society is that more and more people count on "How to..." lookup on the Internet and can hardly imagine empty pharmacy or shop shelves. I worry that the civil society is too much dependent on centralized services prone to interruption: specialized knowledge, production lines, banks, methods of payment, medical drugs, mobile networks, electricity, drinking water and petrol supply, government, ISPs, online services. > It comes down to a survivalist fantasy, which amounts to one person, one family, one karass, against the world. No, it is to help a community around you to survive a crisis. Local or global - that doesn't matter. I think the take away from all prep efforts is preserving basic tools, knowledge and skills in the society. In case of crisis, the prepared community can quickly rebuild basic services and sustain itself before a help arrives. Also it can share or barter with other communities.
    - agumonkey 8y ago
      I wonder if these should be diffused in secondary education.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    > You can't assume the government is gone, BTW ... Right. It'll be some mix of police, ex-military and professional criminals. Edit: Reminds me of Harlan Ellison's A Boy and His Dog. The film adaptation was OK too.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    Sadly it's easily possible to get into situations where the hospitals and society are "functioning", but civil society has decided not to give you any medicine. It seems to be an occasional problem in the US, but also happened during e.g. the Greek financial crisis. Antibiotics are one thing, but I know several people who are dependent on insulin, and more who are dependent on more complex cutting-edge medication. This is why we need to keep the supply lines open, civil society civil, and international trade operating. The fact that the UK is now seemingly going into "state prepper" mode for an avoidable self-inflicted disaster is starting to frighten me. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/brexit-no-deal-insulin-diabetes-stockpile-medication-novo-nordisk-eu-ema-sanofi-a8522276.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/brexit-no-deal-ins...
    - ada1981 8y ago
      “it's easily possible to get into situations where the hospitals and society are "functioning", but civil society has decided not to give you any medicine.” We are currently in such a situation in the United States.
  - ataturk 8y ago
    You're just trying to make yourself feel better or superior and you don't much like it when other people are better prepared, capable of looking after themselves, and otherwise self-sufficient, do you? It upsets you, doesn't it? It's okay, you're not alone. There are armies of government workers who behave like you. They want all of us to live on their plantations. Whether or not "prepping" is a useful activity, e.g. the stockpiling of goods, the MENTALITY of it is highly useful--that people can come around to the idea that there isn't secret knowledge that only a few can have, is what is most important. Democratized knowledge and being able to "make do" used to be a time-honored tradition in the US. It's only in recent memory that people have gotten too comfortable with just in time supply lines which, as we see all too often, can be gone in an instant. And then there's the cashless crowd, constantly pushing us away from being able to trade between each other without a third party involved. We never needed these assholes before and we don't need them now, either.
- ginko 8y ago
  Might not work so well if the apocalypse was caused by an antibiotic-resistant plague outbreak.
- arnsholt 8y ago
  Also, I think this most likely produces Penicillin G, which has to be given intravenously because it's broken down by stomach acid...
  - Angostura 8y ago
    Or could useful be spread on open infected wounds.
- AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
  Only if the post-apocalyptic world still has sliced bread.
oxide 8y ago
Site is 503'd, unfortunately.
Odenwaelder 8y ago
*How to kill yourself with fungal toxins because you fail to grow the correct species.
setquk 8y ago
Not sure I’d risk this myself. However when I did chemistry at A level at school, with the intention of going into pharma for a bit, I did extract aspirin from willow bark. This is something you can do relatively easily and safely yourself. Disclaimer: if you kill yourself it wasn’t my fault. Thanks to my wonderful chemistry teacher I got a couple of hours at Glaxo and run NMR on it to validate it. Was an amazing experience even if it was a bit worrying getting the train there with vials of white crystalline substance on me.
- ian0 8y ago
  Quick-link for those wondering how to do this (as I was): https://home-remedies.wonderhowto.com/how-to/make-aspirin-from-willow-tree-0142525/ https://home-remedies.wonderhowto.com/how-to/make-aspirin-fr...
  - setquk 8y ago
    To add, this wasn't the method I used. It was more "industrial". I don't want to describe it here as there are a number of problems with it. Firstly, the output is near pure which brings dosage problems. Secondly, the output isn't 100% pure and brings storage problems. Thirdly, you don't have an NMR spec handy. If you do I am impressed :)
- jk27277 8y ago
  No, you didnt. You extracted salicylic acid, a precursor of aspirin.
  - setquk 8y ago
    No I had some acetic anhydride available to me as well (back before it was scheduled). It was the whole job.
    - logfromblammo 8y ago
      And did your professor tell you a story about pipetting glacial acetic acid by mouth? I'm beginning to suspect that maybe it actually happened to someone else. Or maybe it never happened, and got invented from whole cloth to justify the purchase of thumbwheel pipette controllers.
dawnerd 8y ago
Actually found it more interesting that you can buy aquarium antibiotics without a prescription. But doesn’t antibiotics have a fairly short shelf life? Wouldn’t that be kinda difficult to stockpile?
- jjeaff 8y ago
  Dry pill form antibiotics will easily last 10 years without losing too much potency.
- sneak 8y ago
  They used to sell them on Amazon until they got wind of it. An old homeless friend taught me that trick, and as someone who was uninsured in the US for a long time (my health plan for most of the last decade was “worldwide, excluding USA”) I used it a number of times when treating minor infections (versus giving the urgent care $200). Make sure you take a full course, in any event, and recall that many bacteria these days are resistant to Penicillin. These days, I stock my prepper kit of antibiotics from https://www.alldaychemist.com https://www.alldaychemist.com, and they take bitcoin now too.
InclinedPlane 8y ago
The big breakthrough with penicillin wasn't discovery it was mass production. Many fungal species produce it, but it took an extensive search to find one that produced a lot of it and then "genetic engineering" (via mutagenesis) to produce a variant which made enough to make the whole thing feasible.
- tcbawo 8y ago
  Perhaps to combat drug resistance to human-facing bacteria, we should be promoting resistance in bacteria that infect fungi. Eventually, nature may lead us to the next step in the arms race.
kilpikaarna 8y ago
I thought most of the stuff you'd want antibiotics for is resistant to penicillin by now. For the cuts and bruises mentioned, clean and bandage them and make sure your tetanus vaccination is up to date. Maybe make some calendula and/or yarrow extract, if you're into making your own remedies.
agumonkey 8y ago
Reminds me that to do just about anything, you need tools, and most importantly measurement tools. Metrology is subtle. I'd love to know how to make sub milligram scale. Something a little more stable than http://sci-toys.com/scitoys/scitoys/mathematics/microgram_balance/balance.html http://sci-toys.com/scitoys/scitoys/mathematics/microgram_ba... ps: More like https://erowid.org/psychoactives/hardware/hardware_info1.shtml https://erowid.org/psychoactives/hardware/hardware_info1.sht...
- JulianMorrison 8y ago
  You could cheat, and make the stuff in bulk, then just use a little of it.
- jcims 8y ago
  Saw this DIY one a few years back on youtube, looks like the Erowid one, thought it was a neat build - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n90whRO-ypE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n90whRO-ypE YouTube just dug up a a real nice breakdown that Ben Krasnow did - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta7nlkI5K5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta7nlkI5K5g
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    I see Ben Krasnoz I click
- jsjohnst 8y ago
  I agree, it annoys me that good quality 1mg scales can be readily acquired for around $30, but dropping down one order of magnitude further to 0.1mg costs at least 15-25x more. As sibling commented, the easiest solution is to just multiply the recipe by 10x. Doesn’t work for everything, but it’s generally worth it unless you are doing a lot of chemistry work.
  - 75dvtwin 8y ago
    closest price for high precision scale 310 $USD https://scaleman.com/sartorius-ay123-milligram-digital-scale.html https://scaleman.com/sartorius-ay123-milligram-digital-scale... 10x more than, then the base of $30
amelius 8y ago
This would be more interesting if they provided methods for checking/controlling the quality of the result.
entwife 8y ago
Useful to know if you want to keep your digestion running predictably, without hidden disruptors: "One thing you might not know is that a lot of bakeries put a substance called a mold inhibitor on bread. This stuff, which is called mycoban, is going to suppress the fungus, so you should probably use bread that you baked yourself."
JoeAltmaier 8y ago
...with only 5 or 6 other hard-to-find substances. If you are stockpiling those items, why not stockpile penicillin itself?
logfromblammo 8y ago
Huh. This is basically an advertisement for aquarium antibiotics. Why aren't preppers building phage libraries instead? Isn't that more workable with limited resources than antibiotics production? You basically just need a DIY bacterial culture medium (such as soup stock), glassware, and dirt.
seymour333 8y ago
This whole article seems like an offhand way to get people to stockpile aquarium antibiotics. This guy is obviously on Big Aquarium Pharma's payrol.
syntaxing 8y ago
Is there a book that teaches you more about this stuff? I'm getting more and more interested in this after reading the cancer drugs people in China are making. This seems like a fun experiment to do at home for a weekend.
FlyMoreRockets 8y ago
You can also homebrew tetracycline beer like the ancient Nubians. http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_REPORT/stories/2010/09/07/beer.html http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_REPORT/stories/2010/09/07/beer.ht... I guess the trick is to obtain and maintain a healthy Streptomyces colony. Antibiotic laced beer should keep real well without refrigeration, too.
scythe 8y ago
Not quite biology, but sulfanilamide is simple enough to synthesize at home, as is dapsone and maybe isoniazid. Most antibiotics (e.g. cipro) are way out of reach, though.
pensketch 8y ago
So.. who just bought a bunch of Fish-Mox?
johnmathew7679 8y ago
We are offering cenforce 150mg. these medicines are mainly used to cure erectile dysfunction. Buy cenforce 150mg pills are used to treat erectile dysfunction (impotence) in men. If you have lost the capacity to have an entire sexual life, at that point you should take these pills for better physical connection. https://illnesssolutionpharma.wordpress.com/2018/12/11/it-is-possible-to-remove-erectile-dysfunction-use-cenforce/ https://illnesssolutionpharma.wordpress.com/2018/12/11/it-is... https://www.illnesssolution.com/product/cenforce-150mg/ https://www.illnesssolution.com/product/cenforce-150mg/
johnmathew7679 8y ago
Purchase cenforce 150mg | Make payment through PayPal & Credit card. Cenforce 150mg pills are used to treat male impotency life (Erectile Dysfunction). It is not recommended to take the drug on an empty stomach, or with abundant, fatty meals. You should take these pills for better physical connection, it available in our Unitedmen shop store. https://unitedmenshoppharma.wordpress.com/2018/12/11/remove-erection-issue-capably-and-essentially-with-cenforce-medicine/ https://unitedmenshoppharma.wordpress.com/2018/12/11/remove-... https://www.unitedmenshop.com/product/buy-cenforce-150mg-sildenafil/ https://www.unitedmenshop.com/product/buy-cenforce-150mg-sil...

178 points by gscott 8y ago

TLDR: if, in a post apocalyptic world, your home laboratory is still running, you are able to grow penicillium or aspergillus cultures. These may, or likely may not, produce penicillin..

msla 8y ago
I'm curious about what, exactly, the people who take this seriously think they're preparing for. In a scenario severe enough you're trying to make your own antibiotics, you can assume hospitals aren't functioning, which means civil society is gone. You can't assume the government is gone, BTW: Every power vacuum will get filled, one way or the other, and there are plenty of unrecognized governments which are as governmental as they need to be to enforce their idea of order in a defined region. Therefore... you, the prepper who was responsible enough to squirrel away tools and knowledge and supplies, are a target. If the government is trying to rebuild, it's going to be seizing supplies and, possibly, conscripting anyone capable of using those supplies who didn't have the good sense to leave when the getting was good. If the government isn't trying to rebuild... well, since when have gangs not looted anyone with stuff worth having? It comes down to a survivalist fantasy, which amounts to one person, one family, one karass, against the world. A small, intimate group, as opposed to the granfalloon with guns which is called a military. Well... when a small group goes up against a big group, the small group is almost always fated to lose. "Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society." --Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 1813. ME 13:333
- senectus1 8y ago
  People have been playing too much Fallout.
  - setquk 8y ago
    I think it’s more that people don’t exercise their survival instinct much these days as everything mostly just works. The biggest risk is not having toilet paper for the average person. Thus some people construct scenarios to fill the hole. For me, watching world war Z was stressful enough.
  - stale 8y ago
    There's no such thing as too much Fallout :D
    - senectus1 8y ago
      my son would agree....
- noonespecial 8y ago
  The funniest ones for me are the ones who focus obsessively on some things while missing glaringly obvious others: The guy with 2 AR15's, a water reclamation system and 7 years of macaroni in his basement but is so out of shape he can't run up a flight of stairs. Want to really prepare for TEOTWAWKI? Try jogging.
  - mac01021 8y ago
    One of the two AR15s is for propulsion.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - ataturk 8y ago
    Only two? Most of the people you are describing have >100 guns and more ammunition than they could use in two lifetimes. And yes, they're disgustingly obese.
  - FlyMoreRockets 8y ago
    Even better, try gardening. Food and exercise at the same time!
- jcims 8y ago
  What about cases like Katrina and Puerto Rico, where there are no local services but there are zero threats to the sovereignty of the federal government? You don't need to survive Mad Max style for decades, you just need to make it a month or two until roads are open and power is back on. In this case having a stash of antibiotics could mean the difference between life and death for someone that's injured, and as the article points out there's no real good reason to grow your own when you can buy serviceable alternatives online.
  - nuguy 8y ago
    Exactly. Living your life with zero buffer against fluctuations in the availability of life-critical materials is just as stupid as people who are prepping for zombie invasions. One guy thinks nothing will ever happen and the other thinks society is a transient entity. They are both fantasies. If you aren’t ready for earthquakes, fires, financial disasters and etc then you have a short attention span or you’re just lazy. Besides all this, consolidation and integration of life-support is the way of the future. If you look at society as one big system, it makes a lot of sense to have lots of redundant units rather than all units depending on one central resource. Sole and batteries for example harden the whole country against equipment failure, terror attack, negligence and natural disasters. With a single power plant any instance of one of those things could bring down huge numbers of houses. Technology is making it possible to produce some of the things you need in home, so there is a funny convergence of preppers and technologists.
    - mattmanser 8y ago
      No idea why you've been d/ved, as you say, there's so many potential, but low risk, scenarios. Even in America and the EU we've all got a 0.5%, maybe 0.1% every year that something could go very wrong. Most likely is that it doesn't spiral, like the 2008 financial crisis, but there was a real, but small, chance that could have gone much worse. His comment not only is ignoring real-life examples that have happened within his life time (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Venezula, Katrina, Puerto Rico, etc.), he's also postulating that these new governmental structures would magically spring up over night, rather than taking years or even decades to emerge. I'm no prepper, but I do feel that I am knowingly taking a risk, albeit a very small one, by not being one. If I had a family to care for, I would definitely be more prepared with 3 months food and some emergency medical supplies beyond a first aid kit. It's a small enough risk that it will probably not happen for my generation or my country, but it does happen. I also often don't buy insurance for things I think aren't worth it, but it's still a deliberate choice rather than sleep walking into it. It's almost on the same risk percentage as Home Insurance, so if you're insuring your home, why aren't you 'spending' a little time each year prepping? Just because it's socially unacceptable, but home insurance is regarded as socially acceptable?
- arkh 8y ago
  http://www.shtfplan.com/emergency-preparedness/a-survival-q-a-living-through-shtf-in-the-middle-of-a-war-zone_10252011 http://www.shtfplan.com/emergency-preparedness/a-survival-q-... Conclusion: trust only your family.
- ahje 8y ago
  I live in the countryside. During winters (starting about this time of the year), the roads here are barely usable under normal conditions. We occasionally end up not being able to get to the store for two or three days due to heavy snowfall. We also have occasional power outages caused by heavy snowfall. I'd say it's only a matter of time before we're hit by a severe blizzard and we need to manage on our own for a week or two. We do have antibiotics and other basic medical supplies at home, for such occasions. We also keep enough food and firewood for at least two weeks, sometimes more. As for making one's own antibiotics, one of the most commonly repeated survivalist mantras is that one should always have and maintain a skill that will be useful in order to rebuild, in case society collapses. That way, if we do end up with zombies roaming the streets, Illuminati death squads chasing survivors, and a runaway AI trying to exterminate humanity, you will have something to offer the groups trying to rebuild. Personally, I know how to make booze. My neighbors do, indeed, seem to appreciate that skill. :D
- imhoguy 8y ago
  > In a scenario severe enough you're trying to make your own antibiotics, you can assume hospitals aren't functioning, which means civil society is gone. The problem of the society is that more and more people count on "How to..." lookup on the Internet and can hardly imagine empty pharmacy or shop shelves. I worry that the civil society is too much dependent on centralized services prone to interruption: specialized knowledge, production lines, banks, methods of payment, medical drugs, mobile networks, electricity, drinking water and petrol supply, government, ISPs, online services. > It comes down to a survivalist fantasy, which amounts to one person, one family, one karass, against the world. No, it is to help a community around you to survive a crisis. Local or global - that doesn't matter. I think the take away from all prep efforts is preserving basic tools, knowledge and skills in the society. In case of crisis, the prepared community can quickly rebuild basic services and sustain itself before a help arrives. Also it can share or barter with other communities.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    I wonder if these should be diffused in secondary education.
- mirimir 8y ago
  > You can't assume the government is gone, BTW ... Right. It'll be some mix of police, ex-military and professional criminals. Edit: Reminds me of Harlan Ellison's A Boy and His Dog. The film adaptation was OK too.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Sadly it's easily possible to get into situations where the hospitals and society are "functioning", but civil society has decided not to give you any medicine. It seems to be an occasional problem in the US, but also happened during e.g. the Greek financial crisis. Antibiotics are one thing, but I know several people who are dependent on insulin, and more who are dependent on more complex cutting-edge medication. This is why we need to keep the supply lines open, civil society civil, and international trade operating. The fact that the UK is now seemingly going into "state prepper" mode for an avoidable self-inflicted disaster is starting to frighten me. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/brexit-no-deal-insulin-diabetes-stockpile-medication-novo-nordisk-eu-ema-sanofi-a8522276.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/brexit-no-deal-ins...
  - ada1981 8y ago
    “it's easily possible to get into situations where the hospitals and society are "functioning", but civil society has decided not to give you any medicine.” We are currently in such a situation in the United States.
- ataturk 8y ago
  You're just trying to make yourself feel better or superior and you don't much like it when other people are better prepared, capable of looking after themselves, and otherwise self-sufficient, do you? It upsets you, doesn't it? It's okay, you're not alone. There are armies of government workers who behave like you. They want all of us to live on their plantations. Whether or not "prepping" is a useful activity, e.g. the stockpiling of goods, the MENTALITY of it is highly useful--that people can come around to the idea that there isn't secret knowledge that only a few can have, is what is most important. Democratized knowledge and being able to "make do" used to be a time-honored tradition in the US. It's only in recent memory that people have gotten too comfortable with just in time supply lines which, as we see all too often, can be gone in an instant. And then there's the cashless crowd, constantly pushing us away from being able to trade between each other without a third party involved. We never needed these assholes before and we don't need them now, either.
ginko 8y ago
Might not work so well if the apocalypse was caused by an antibiotic-resistant plague outbreak.
arnsholt 8y ago
Also, I think this most likely produces Penicillin G, which has to be given intravenously because it's broken down by stomach acid...
- Angostura 8y ago
  Or could useful be spread on open infected wounds.
AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
Only if the post-apocalyptic world still has sliced bread.

oxide 8y ago

Site is 503'd, unfortunately.

Odenwaelder 8y ago

*How to kill yourself with fungal toxins because you fail to grow the correct species.

setquk 8y ago

Not sure I’d risk this myself. However when I did chemistry at A level at school, with the intention of going into pharma for a bit, I did extract aspirin from willow bark. This is something you can do relatively easily and safely yourself. Disclaimer: if you kill yourself it wasn’t my fault. Thanks to my wonderful chemistry teacher I got a couple of hours at Glaxo and run NMR on it to validate it. Was an amazing experience even if it was a bit worrying getting the train there with vials of white crystalline substance on me.

ian0 8y ago
Quick-link for those wondering how to do this (as I was): https://home-remedies.wonderhowto.com/how-to/make-aspirin-from-willow-tree-0142525/ https://home-remedies.wonderhowto.com/how-to/make-aspirin-fr...
- setquk 8y ago
  To add, this wasn't the method I used. It was more "industrial". I don't want to describe it here as there are a number of problems with it. Firstly, the output is near pure which brings dosage problems. Secondly, the output isn't 100% pure and brings storage problems. Thirdly, you don't have an NMR spec handy. If you do I am impressed :)
jk27277 8y ago
No, you didnt. You extracted salicylic acid, a precursor of aspirin.
- setquk 8y ago
  No I had some acetic anhydride available to me as well (back before it was scheduled). It was the whole job.
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    And did your professor tell you a story about pipetting glacial acetic acid by mouth? I'm beginning to suspect that maybe it actually happened to someone else. Or maybe it never happened, and got invented from whole cloth to justify the purchase of thumbwheel pipette controllers.

dawnerd 8y ago

Actually found it more interesting that you can buy aquarium antibiotics without a prescription. But doesn’t antibiotics have a fairly short shelf life? Wouldn’t that be kinda difficult to stockpile?

jjeaff 8y ago
Dry pill form antibiotics will easily last 10 years without losing too much potency.
sneak 8y ago
They used to sell them on Amazon until they got wind of it. An old homeless friend taught me that trick, and as someone who was uninsured in the US for a long time (my health plan for most of the last decade was “worldwide, excluding USA”) I used it a number of times when treating minor infections (versus giving the urgent care $200). Make sure you take a full course, in any event, and recall that many bacteria these days are resistant to Penicillin. These days, I stock my prepper kit of antibiotics from https://www.alldaychemist.com https://www.alldaychemist.com, and they take bitcoin now too.

InclinedPlane 8y ago

The big breakthrough with penicillin wasn't discovery it was mass production. Many fungal species produce it, but it took an extensive search to find one that produced a lot of it and then "genetic engineering" (via mutagenesis) to produce a variant which made enough to make the whole thing feasible.

tcbawo 8y ago
Perhaps to combat drug resistance to human-facing bacteria, we should be promoting resistance in bacteria that infect fungi. Eventually, nature may lead us to the next step in the arms race.

kilpikaarna 8y ago

I thought most of the stuff you'd want antibiotics for is resistant to penicillin by now. For the cuts and bruises mentioned, clean and bandage them and make sure your tetanus vaccination is up to date. Maybe make some calendula and/or yarrow extract, if you're into making your own remedies.

agumonkey 8y ago

Reminds me that to do just about anything, you need tools, and most importantly measurement tools. Metrology is subtle. I'd love to know how to make sub milligram scale. Something a little more stable than http://sci-toys.com/scitoys/scitoys/mathematics/microgram_balance/balance.html http://sci-toys.com/scitoys/scitoys/mathematics/microgram_ba... ps: More like https://erowid.org/psychoactives/hardware/hardware_info1.shtml https://erowid.org/psychoactives/hardware/hardware_info1.sht...

JulianMorrison 8y ago
You could cheat, and make the stuff in bulk, then just use a little of it.
jcims 8y ago
Saw this DIY one a few years back on youtube, looks like the Erowid one, thought it was a neat build - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n90whRO-ypE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n90whRO-ypE YouTube just dug up a a real nice breakdown that Ben Krasnow did - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta7nlkI5K5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta7nlkI5K5g
- agumonkey 8y ago
  I see Ben Krasnoz I click
jsjohnst 8y ago
I agree, it annoys me that good quality 1mg scales can be readily acquired for around $30, but dropping down one order of magnitude further to 0.1mg costs at least 15-25x more. As sibling commented, the easiest solution is to just multiply the recipe by 10x. Doesn’t work for everything, but it’s generally worth it unless you are doing a lot of chemistry work.
- 75dvtwin 8y ago
  closest price for high precision scale 310 $USD https://scaleman.com/sartorius-ay123-milligram-digital-scale.html https://scaleman.com/sartorius-ay123-milligram-digital-scale... 10x more than, then the base of $30

amelius 8y ago

This would be more interesting if they provided methods for checking/controlling the quality of the result.

entwife 8y ago

Useful to know if you want to keep your digestion running predictably, without hidden disruptors: "One thing you might not know is that a lot of bakeries put a substance called a mold inhibitor on bread. This stuff, which is called mycoban, is going to suppress the fungus, so you should probably use bread that you baked yourself."

JoeAltmaier 8y ago

...with only 5 or 6 other hard-to-find substances. If you are stockpiling those items, why not stockpile penicillin itself?

logfromblammo 8y ago

Huh. This is basically an advertisement for aquarium antibiotics. Why aren't preppers building phage libraries instead? Isn't that more workable with limited resources than antibiotics production? You basically just need a DIY bacterial culture medium (such as soup stock), glassware, and dirt.

seymour333 8y ago

This whole article seems like an offhand way to get people to stockpile aquarium antibiotics. This guy is obviously on Big Aquarium Pharma's payrol.

syntaxing 8y ago

Is there a book that teaches you more about this stuff? I'm getting more and more interested in this after reading the cancer drugs people in China are making. This seems like a fun experiment to do at home for a weekend.

FlyMoreRockets 8y ago

You can also homebrew tetracycline beer like the ancient Nubians. http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_REPORT/stories/2010/09/07/beer.html http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_REPORT/stories/2010/09/07/beer.ht... I guess the trick is to obtain and maintain a healthy Streptomyces colony. Antibiotic laced beer should keep real well without refrigeration, too.

scythe 8y ago

Not quite biology, but sulfanilamide is simple enough to synthesize at home, as is dapsone and maybe isoniazid. Most antibiotics (e.g. cipro) are way out of reach, though.

pensketch 8y ago

So.. who just bought a bunch of Fish-Mox?

johnmathew7679 8y ago

We are offering cenforce 150mg. these medicines are mainly used to cure erectile dysfunction. Buy cenforce 150mg pills are used to treat erectile dysfunction (impotence) in men. If you have lost the capacity to have an entire sexual life, at that point you should take these pills for better physical connection. https://illnesssolutionpharma.wordpress.com/2018/12/11/it-is-possible-to-remove-erectile-dysfunction-use-cenforce/ https://illnesssolutionpharma.wordpress.com/2018/12/11/it-is... https://www.illnesssolution.com/product/cenforce-150mg/ https://www.illnesssolution.com/product/cenforce-150mg/

johnmathew7679 8y ago

Purchase cenforce 150mg | Make payment through PayPal & Credit card. Cenforce 150mg pills are used to treat male impotency life (Erectile Dysfunction). It is not recommended to take the drug on an empty stomach, or with abundant, fatty meals. You should take these pills for better physical connection, it available in our Unitedmen shop store. https://unitedmenshoppharma.wordpress.com/2018/12/11/remove-erection-issue-capably-and-essentially-with-cenforce-medicine/ https://unitedmenshoppharma.wordpress.com/2018/12/11/remove-... https://www.unitedmenshop.com/product/buy-cenforce-150mg-sildenafil/ https://www.unitedmenshop.com/product/buy-cenforce-150mg-sil...