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They aren't planning on growing anything ... they have to synthesize the compound as the 'grown' versions are not pure enough for the FDA.
by abrookewood 8y ago
They aren't planning on growing anything ... they have to synthesize the compound as the 'grown' versions are not pure enough for the FDA.
- skilled 8y agoThat sounds dumb. Any citation on why it's so?
- eindiran 8y agoI don't have a citation for you, but the mechanism here is that it's difficult to extract just the alkaloid you want when a plant has a number of chemically similar alkaloids. So when you do an extraction, you get a number of different compounds, often mixed in slightly different proportions.
- eindiran 8y agoEven though that's the case, what they're doing isn't novel. There are a number of syntheses for psilocybin that are well known in the literature that are potentially suitable for industrial production. In fact, there are a few available in Shulgin's famous TiHKAL. It seems quite unlikely to me that the synthesis they will be doing is novel or "disruptive" in any way.