Regulate 'home-brew' opiates

May 18, 2015

Kenneth A. Oye, J. Chappell H. Lawson, & Tania Bubela
Nature, 18 May 2015

Writing in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have announced a new method that could make it easier to produce drugs such as morphine. The publication has focused attention on the eventual possibility that such substances could be manufactured illicitly in small-scale labs. Political scientists Kenneth Oye and Chappell Lawson of MIT, along with Tania Bubela of Concordia University in Montreal, authored an accompanying commentary indicating the research community and the public require a fast, flexible response to the synthesis of morphine by engineered yeasts.

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