Dr Lee Cronin and his team have been working on a number of interesting and unique projects - one is highly theoretical - an attempt to evolve life using non carbon based chemistry - and the other has more immediate implications for policy and everyday life - the development of a molecular printer.
Assuming such a printer becomes cost effective for the average consumer (the feedstock is cheap enough to make the end products competitive with the market, and output is in large enough amounts per unit time etc), it will immediately be used for production of illicit drugs.
This will have several positive knock on effects, and other negative ones:
I assume the technology will first be adopted by drug pushers - but in the end, the technology will also be their undoing, and will destroy their livelihood, such as it is.
The cycle of criminality that surrounds the illegal narcotics market will collapse: and drug use will probably drop, as there will be no drug pushers out there trying to sell drugs to buy their own drugs - the bottom will fall out of the market,and prices will collapse. The purity of the drugs available will also increase, and so drug deaths due to contaminated product will also decrease. Third world countries with large narcotics industries will find that these collapse.
Other forms of drugs will also be more readily available - for example, performance enhancing drugs for body-builders and athletes will be easy to obtain. Designer narcotics will blossom, as users will experiment with novel molecules, and share the print files for them freely on-line.
Pharmaceutical companies will also take a major hit - they will rapidly lose control of their intellectual property, as drugs and molecule will be reduced to shareable software instructions. It will be impossible to regulate table top printing of expensive drugs. The technology will be rapidly adopted in developing nations where modern western pharmaceuticals are too expensive.
The pharmaceutical industry will go the way of EMI and HMV, unless they start to plan ahead of the curve, because this technology will arrive, it is only a question of when, not if. Once drugs become data, then the product becomes information. The Bayer/ ICI iTunes pharmacy? Or just straightforward bankruptcy?
The tax take that derives from this economic area will also plummet, as will employment in all areas of drug production, apart from basic research carried out by universities.
It will be almost impossible to regulate the use of experimental drugs by patients with terminal diseases - with nothing to lose, they will simply print out the experimental medication, and take their chances.
Will government regulation of such a printer be possible? It may not be, if a molecular printer could be constructed ( or even most of the parts for it constructed) with a standard 3-d printer. One would simply download the construction file to your own desktop 3d printer, and print yourself a new molecular printer, or table-top micro-chemistry set, or whatever it ends up being called. Preventing distribution of the construction files will be impossible, likewise distribution of the software files for the individual molecules.
Once cocaine/ heroin/ecstasy becomes a data file, will possession of the data file for printing be illegal? How could that be policed?
Assuming such a printer becomes cost effective for the average consumer (the feedstock is cheap enough to make the end products competitive with the market, and output is in large enough amounts per unit time etc), it will immediately be used for production of illicit drugs.
This will have several positive knock on effects, and other negative ones:
I assume the technology will first be adopted by drug pushers - but in the end, the technology will also be their undoing, and will destroy their livelihood, such as it is.
The cycle of criminality that surrounds the illegal narcotics market will collapse: and drug use will probably drop, as there will be no drug pushers out there trying to sell drugs to buy their own drugs - the bottom will fall out of the market,and prices will collapse. The purity of the drugs available will also increase, and so drug deaths due to contaminated product will also decrease. Third world countries with large narcotics industries will find that these collapse.
Other forms of drugs will also be more readily available - for example, performance enhancing drugs for body-builders and athletes will be easy to obtain. Designer narcotics will blossom, as users will experiment with novel molecules, and share the print files for them freely on-line.
Pharmaceutical companies will also take a major hit - they will rapidly lose control of their intellectual property, as drugs and molecule will be reduced to shareable software instructions. It will be impossible to regulate table top printing of expensive drugs. The technology will be rapidly adopted in developing nations where modern western pharmaceuticals are too expensive.
The pharmaceutical industry will go the way of EMI and HMV, unless they start to plan ahead of the curve, because this technology will arrive, it is only a question of when, not if. Once drugs become data, then the product becomes information. The Bayer/ ICI iTunes pharmacy? Or just straightforward bankruptcy?
The tax take that derives from this economic area will also plummet, as will employment in all areas of drug production, apart from basic research carried out by universities.
It will be almost impossible to regulate the use of experimental drugs by patients with terminal diseases - with nothing to lose, they will simply print out the experimental medication, and take their chances.
Will government regulation of such a printer be possible? It may not be, if a molecular printer could be constructed ( or even most of the parts for it constructed) with a standard 3-d printer. One would simply download the construction file to your own desktop 3d printer, and print yourself a new molecular printer, or table-top micro-chemistry set, or whatever it ends up being called. Preventing distribution of the construction files will be impossible, likewise distribution of the software files for the individual molecules.
Once cocaine/ heroin/ecstasy becomes a data file, will possession of the data file for printing be illegal? How could that be policed?
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