New Molecular 3D Printer Can Create Billions of Compounds 132
ErnieKey writes: University of Illinois researchers have created a device, called a Molecular-Machine, which essentially manufactures on the molecular compound level. Martin Burke, the lead researcher on this project says that they are already able to synthesize over a billion different compounds with the machine, compounds which up until now have been very difficult to synthesize. The impact on the pharmaceutical industry could be staggering.
Replicator prototype (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Replicator prototype (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope, it's much close to what Neil Stephenson describes in the 'Diamond Age' although calling it a 'printer' is a bit disingenuous. It looks like a complicated solid phase chemistry setup. And it only 'prints' four classes of simple molecules.
But it is interesting. It's not your father's organic chemistry any more.
Re:Replicator prototype (Score:5, Insightful)
calling it a 'printer' is a bit disingenuous.
To be fair, the scientists did not call it a 'printer'. The journalist made that up in an effort to dumb down the story and wedge it into a column on 3D printing.
Re:Replicator prototype (Score:4, Insightful)
It will happen, and soon. The journalist understands this. So, it is a printer. You are persnickity to the point of blocking the realization - chemical printers will happen, and it is part and parcel of the 3D printing flaming freakout that will shortly commence. They will have to shut this down HARD, to keep us from manufacturing pharmaceuticals and recreational drugs wihout the permission of IP "owners" or our frankly insane drug law enforcers.
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Meanwhile in 2016...
(Pharmaceutical IP "owners") Hello, is this Senators-R-Us? We need Laws to lockout major progress in the Pharmaceutical field to keep drug prices insanely high.
(Senators-R-Us) Bla-bla campaign contribution bla bla Super PAC bla bla
(Pharmaceutical IP "owners") uh huh... And how much will that cost us?
(Senators-R-Us) Bla-bla [$Chump_Change]
(Pharmaceutical IP "owners") Sold! Manila envelop or briefcase?
(Senators-R-Us) Bla-bla Super PAC Lawyers Bla-bla. Not fraud until caught.
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Wow: Big Pharma's *and* Big Moral Cop's worst nightmare. Here's hoping, anyway.
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If it's a copy of an existing drug the trials are much easier. You don't have to demonstrate efficacy, just equivalence.
I think the OP was getting at printing his own pharmaceuticals though. He can have fun with that.
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I can envision a "pharma singularity" occurring when our supercomputing power is able to model human biology well enough to replace the glacial and unethical plod of double-blind testing. Instead of giving half your population of Ebola patients a placebo and having to lie through your teeth to their grieving relatives, we will be able to directly test new compounds against the model to shortcut right to a final "smoke test" with human patients.
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They will have to shut this down HARD, to keep us from manufacturing pharmaceuticals and recreational drugs wihout the permission of IP "owners" or our frankly insane drug law enforcers.
It will take decades before automated chemical synthesis is advanced enough to allow individual manufacture of patented and/or illegal compounds. And for someone sufficiently determined, it's not all that difficult to get these molecules right now. You just need to contract it out to a lab in China, which has plenty of ski
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Wake me up when I can print Leeloo.
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Re:Replicator prototype (Score:5, Interesting)
If I am reading this correctly, no. It does not appear to have significant value at the production level. The cost per quantity is astronomical. But what it can be used for is rapid prototyping. Say you have an idea for a new doping agent for a photovoltaic cell. Previously, you would have to either manually concoct the agent, or you would have to design a production system to make it for you. Both of which are incredibly time and financially intensive, especially for something that is just a theory. This machine would allow you to "print" a small batch of your agent, enough to do a proof of concept so that you can determine if it is worth moving forward with a production system to produce it more efficiently.
-Rick
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Manufacturing equipment that is designed to be as flexible as possible on a smaller scale is probably never going to be as efficient and cost-effective as a setup optimized for mass production. A skilled team of organic chemists should be able to figure out a much better way to synthesize molecules that they need massive quantities of. The reason this tool is potentially a huge breakthrough is that it's prohibitively expensive to do this for every molecule you're potentially interested in, versus those yo
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Drug costs and the potential here (Score:3)
Unfortunately, the cost of the vast majority of pharmaceuticals is hardly related at all to the cost of the ingredients.
It's the R and D, the testing, the approvals, the red tape and paperwork, the patents, the lawyers, the lawsuits, other stuff along those lines, and of course the requirement to make a profit.
What this has the potential to bring in is a time where prototyping a drug from theoretical compound-might-do-this to have-compound-will-test is a practical reality.
Much drug generation is truly blind
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Absolutely. As is any notion of safety. :)
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There is still the notion that: A known compound that other people have already taken...
So, some notion of safety.
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Is this the beginning of what could become Star Trek-like replicators?
I'd say more likely this will usher in the era of Stargate-like replicators.
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Is this the beginning of what could become Star Trek-like replicators?
Yup... With due respect tho the other response below, the op said is this the *beginning* of startrek replicators. And yes. I think so.
Diamond Age (Score:1)
Obligatory Diamond Age reference...
Re:Diamonds? (Score:5, Interesting)
Diamonds are carbon-based, but can they be 3D-Printed ?
With a combination of CVD [wikipedia.org] and deposition masks, it may be possible to someday 'print' diamonds in complex 3D shapes. We can already do this with silicon, which is chemically closest to carbon. Most silicon photolithography is subtractive, but it can also be additive.
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When your wife wants a diamond she also generates a fairly obscene amount of pressure on your budget.
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If only that sort of pressure could be re-purposed to start fusion plants....
Maybe we can get deBeers in the energy business. They're very good at creating high amounts of pressure for selling clear rocks made of carbon already.
Re:Growing Diamonds (Score:5, Informative)
I thought growing diamonds required a fairly obscene amount of pressure?
No. Natural diamonds form that way, and in the past HPHT (high pressure, high temp) methods were used to manufacture low grade diamonds for use as abrasives. But today, most diamonds are manufactured using CVD, with operates in near vacuum. CVD is cheaper, produces better quality diamonds, and can work with odd geometries. It can also be used to put a diamond layer on an existing substrate. But we still don't have diamond coated frying pans.
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I think the lack of diamond coated frying pans is more because diamonds actually aren't forever, and the first time you burned your pan, your expensive nano diamond coating would sublime off into carbon dioxide.
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You have obviously never seen my cooking. Believe me, it can happen. I have been known to burn water. Actually the water evaporated off, leaving whatever minerals were left - it still made a hell of a mess of the pot though.
Never try to code while you are cooking.
Not 3D chemical printing (Score:3)
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But it is going there. Nothing can stop it. Ways will be found. Give it ten years. First industrial scale, then expensive professional machines, then someone cracks the manufacturing code, as it were, and we're off to the make-your-own-cocaine-and-rogaine races.
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Molecular printers, flying cars and fuel-cell smartphones...
Re:Not 3D chemical printing (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, it's a lot like existing solid-state nucleic acid or peptide synthesis setups, but with the major advantage of forming carbon-carbon bonds instead of phosphodiester or amide linkages, making the technique a lot more general. The setup involves a useful reaction called Suzuki coupling. In Suzuki coupling, a metal (usually palladium) catalyzes a reaction between a halide (that is to say, chlorine, bromine, etc.) and an organoboron compound. The mechanism is complex, but the result is a carbon-carbon single bond. This reaction and similar ones are already widely used in the pharmaceutical industry since they can reliably glue together smaller structures together to make a larger molecule. The smaller structures are not individual atoms, though- they tend to have maybe 10-20 atoms or so. Drugs with biaryl structures like the blood pressure drug valsartan are now often made this way.
In previous work, the Burke lab showed that the reaction could be made more convenient by using a specific type of boronate salt which can be easily added and removed from a molecule, and generally produces derivatives that are stable long-term. They then found that these salts can bind to silica and will only be released in the presence of the solvent tetrahydrofuran. So what they did was build a setup that can run this reaction iteratively; at each step, you add another bit of the molecule; each bit has a halide at one end and a boronate salt at the other. This is a lot like an amino acid, which has an amine at one end and a carboxylic acid at the other, which can each react with other amino acids to form chains. Since the molecule bits are shelf-stable, conceivably you could load a machine with a library of commonly used "puzzle pieces" (which you probably bought from a specialty chemicals manufacturer like Sigma-Aldrich or EMD) and assemble them, then wash off the finished product in THF. The yields demonstrated thus far are...not great, but the idea that it can run automated means that it could brute-force some syntheses and allow for the production of complex molecules from more common starting materials. It's a major advance in synthetic organic chemistry, but it's not so much a universal printer as more like an early mechanical printing press, where you still need to provide the type blocks and set the letters yourself.
End of the World as we know it. (Score:1)
Not saying this will be misused,
But, it will be misused.
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Yup. Breaking Bad 2030.
useless plastic junk (Score:1)
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Wrong printer analogy. Thing drugs, not guns.
"Without chemicals, life itself would not be possible"
- Monsanto, 1977
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Think...
Come on Slashdot. Editing posts is so 20th Century.
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Finding comments from even a few years ago is likewise so 20th century.
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"Without chemicals, he points"
Fixed (Score:5, Interesting)
"The impact on the pharmaceutical^Hrecreational drug industry could be staggering."
Yes, I would like to 3d print some lsd, please? :D
(Note to any snoopy snitches who might happen to see that I posted this non-anonymously: I don't mean I *personally* have any intention of wanting to 3d print any currently-illegal recreational compounds... not at all. Nope.)
The impact on the pharmaceutical industry (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's hope it's devastating. Anything that could loosen their stranglehold on medicine can only be seen as a good thing. But like the writers guilds back in the day, they will probably try to have the molecular printing press banned.
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Let's hope it's devastating.
Hmmm. Think that through. Destruction of the pharmaceutical industry......what could possibly be bad about that?
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Destruction of the pharmaceutical industry......what could possibly be bad about that?
I'm sure you can figure it out if you think about it a little longer.
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Oh dear! Somebody might lose their vacation house in the Hamptons! What, do you think nobody will fill in the hole? You don't see opportunity where there was none? What is wrong with prying the market open?
Re:The impact on the pharmaceutical industry (Score:5, Informative)
There ya go. The costs for many drugs could plummet if access to manufacture were made more easy.
Most drugs ARE easy to manufacture. That's what the generic manufacturers do for a living. It's hard to design and test them. It's hard to ensure purity. It's hard to crunch through the legal and bureaucratic wastelands that surround design, testing and manufacturing.
The bulk organic chemistry is actually pretty straightforward.
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There are few industries more corrupt than pharmaceuticals. Most of the money goes to buy offs and other backdoor deals to block out any competition. The legal and bureaucratic wastelands are their creation to serve that purpose. Anything at all that can break their stranglehold can only be seen as good, by anybody outside the industry of course.
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Yes yes yes. But they also invent cures and treatments for diseases which blight or end the lives of billions of people (over time). Put down the Russell Brand dvd and signed t-shirt for a moment, and think about who exactly would produce a cure for HIV, cancer etc if everyone can just make copies of compounds the drugs companies produced (at no small cost). Let me guess - you're going to crowdsource it on kickstarter?
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If they didn't do it somebody else would, that would include using the government itself to produce and compete in the market. We don't need big business to corrupt the government to get the things we need.
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Well, if you can't be bothered to oversee your government, I guess you shouldn't expect much, doesn't sound like it's their fault though. Competency of a government is only a reflection of the competency of the people that vote it into place.
The Masses (Score:2)
Anyone starting a pool on when it'll be used to make designer drugs?
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Probably never, at least on massive scale. The whole point of a designer drug is to dodge classification as illegal, which is pointless if you can simply print the original at home.
However, combined with ever-growing computing power performing molecular simulations this might give rise to a new class of designer drugs that have been actually designed to give desired effects while avoiding unwanted ones. Which is terrible for drug cartels a
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Hopefully, only 40% [xkcd.com] of it.
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grey goo is already here we call it bacteria and guess what it hasn't eaten the planet, why because eating the planet require lots and lots of energy. scifi grey goo won't happen.
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Yeah, it's not like lots and lots of free energy is available (cough solar radiation cough), is it?
Disassembler runaway is entirely possible, energy wise, sad to say.
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yes and solar radiation isn't enough or photosynthesising bacteria would have consumed the earth.
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No, doesn't follow. Bacteria don't exist to consume. They exist to reproduce. And there's no problem doing that, so no pressure to consume anything but the easy stuff. Most of them don't even bother with harvesting radiative energy, preferring to hit sources that have already done some of the work for them.
However, a disassembler has an entirely different imperative, and an entirely different set of capabilities. All it would take for a grey goo scenario is for the one to become uncoupled from the other.
Sorry, it's a drug precursor. Not yours. (Score:2)
We can no longer buy iodine, or red phosphorus, or acetyl chloride, because they can be used to make meth. If someone makes a machine that can "print" arbitrary small molecules, what makes you think that The Authorities will view these machines any more tolerantly?
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Which is actually a nice simple molecule, and not too difficult to synthesize.
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Tricky, but no more so than the other steps of meth-making.
Chemistry supplies can be hard these days. I've just delivered some 4-nitroaniline to a friend, but I had to order it from some dodgy ebay seller in Ukraine - next we order the sulfuric acid. High-speed camera is ready to film. I think you can guess what we're planning to put on youtube.
Yes, we have a place out of doors and gloves to handle it - I know that stuff is really toxic.
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Before you start trying to warn us:
- The outside area has very little in the way of animal life, and almost all the 4-nitroaniline should be used up. The very small quantity released will break down safely.
- We're ordering filter mask too. Probably overkill considering how small a quantity we are using, but better safe than sorry.
- I've read the MSDS.
I know this stuff is toxic, precautions are being taken. There's no real purpose to this: It's just for fun and youtube hits.
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Probably because they are only capable of synthesizing nanogram quantities of stuff.
It's gonna take a while to make enough to get a buzz. Better pop another beer.
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Or tetrahydrofuran. I had a very hard time getting hold of that stuff for an experiment.
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We can no longer buy iodine, or red phosphorus, or acetyl chloride, because they can be used to make meth. If someone makes a machine that can "print" arbitrary small molecules, what makes you think that The Authorities will view these machines any more tolerantly?
you can also processe those out of other things phospher for example can be processed out of urine (that was how it was discovered in the first place) iodine can be bought at in water purification kits for backpacking. where theres a will theres a way.
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Sure, but not at all easily. (Okay, iodine's easy if you can get hold of an iodide.) I've seen documentation of a homebrew project that successfully produced a small amount of phosphorus. It's definitely not a process I'd be willing to try, at least not in any building where I'm responsible for paying insurance.
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Someone needs to start a campaign against the war on chemistry while we can still buy glassware.
Know how I can tell you don't live in Texas? [state.tx.us]
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Solid Phase Synthesis/Combinatorial Chemistry (Score:1)
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A coming nightmare for our owners (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the beginning, of course.
Imagine the fainting freakout when they realize that we (if we were allowed to have a printer) make any drug we like. Or explosive. Or ammunition. Or laser components.
Don't bother imagining what the world's imaginary property "owners" will immediately demand - and receive - in the way of DRM and strict drone-and-goon raids on anyone who dares make an object they "own".
And further imagine the flaming worldwide war against printers when they realize we will be able to make electronic and photonic computers and comm systems that don't have their cute back doors built in from the factory or installed at the intercept point they use to infiltrate routers and other computing devices.
Phones: tracked. Computers: pwned. Unauthorized software and video/audio recordings will shortly become drone-and-goon felonies on every corner of the planet, as soon as Obama fast tracks the treaty. How about a raise of hands for those of you who understand that owning a chemical printer, much less an product printer, without real-time monitoring by entities outside our control will be likewise a drone-and-goon felony.
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Funniest Sentence in Months (Score:2)
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Yeah, I had to chuckle at that one too. I mean, it looked to me like Dalton [wikipedia.org] was a pretty beefy guy; something that weighed less than 900 times as much as him could still be huge...
more drugs (Score:1)
When these get more advanced.... (Score:2)
1) Buy raw materials.
2) Download molecular template for popular entertainment drugs.
3) Profit!
Seriously, when complex chemical printing becomes cheap and ubiquitous (and it will), the war on drugs will get even *more* ridiculous than it is now.
On the hilariously amusing side, pharmaceutical company profits go into the toilet.
Most posts here are completely besides the point (Score:2)
Yes, it is mildly interesting. But professionals do not even agree whether it is a significant new tech at all. And if is is, it is most certainly not for production of compounds in measurable quantity (e.g. more than a few mg at most). The only agreement is that the researcher is known for good marketing and a big ego.
Here are links to interesting discussions by people who actually know what they are posting about:
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2015/03/12/the_end_of_synthesis.php
http://pipeline.coran
I have four words for you: (Score:2)
Synthesis of many different types of organic small molecules using one automated process Junqi Li, Steven G. Ballmer, Eric P. Gillis, Seiko Fujii, Michael J. Schmidt, Andrea M. E. Palazzolo, Jonathan W. Lehmann, Greg F. Morehouse, and Martin D. Burke
Moleculers! Moleculers! Moleculers! Moleculers!
Oh Boy (Score:2)
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The impact on the pharmaceutical industry (Score:1)
I'm not looking forward to.... (Score:1)
....changing the cartridge in an HP molecular printer, just because the zinc ran out.
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I would like to filter the following ever-expanding list of terms:
3d print, make community, maker, hackerspace, ruby, ruby on rails, disrupt, women in tech, code.org, zuckerberg
I need push updates on: /. beta news.
Bennett Haselton, hugh pickens, and
Thanks a million.
What you really need a greasemonkey userscript to change all Zuckerburg to Zoidberg [wikipedia.org].