How to Brew a Better Painkiller

摘要

This past August, Stanford bioengi-neer Christina Smolke announced a first: Her team used brewer's yeast-the stuff in beer-to produce a precursor to oxycodone and the active ingredient in Vicodin, two of the world's most popular painkillers. By splicing 23 genes from plants, animals, and microbes into yeast DNA, she says, "We created a chemical assembly line." Predictably, the achievement caused a stir. On the one hand, it was a significant breakthrough. Opiates are useful and highly sought-after painkillers. Yet their manufacture still begins with physically scraping sap from the seedpods of opium poppies. That makes them expensive and limited. Smolke's method breaks that process open in a big way.