My cat Luna died five years ago next week. She was the best cat that ever existed and there’s still a hole in my heart.

:(

The Nobel committees frequently give prizes in an area that really have more to do with other areas. Six of the last ten Nobels in Chemistry have been explicitly biology focused. Two more were materials science stuff, so maybe half chemistry. Only two were what I’d consider actual chemistry.

But this one is pretty rough. The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to setting the world’s energy reserves on fire so coked-up executives’ lines can go up and basement-dwellers can generate waifus with big tiddies. UGH

make the best decisions they can

I would recommend an HPLC and a competent analytical chemist to gather data and decide whether or not a batch is safe to consume.

This has been posted to a bunch of different communities, and I’m gonna be a stick in the mud each time.

I’m a process chemist. I do this for a living. I’ve made kilo-scale batches of pharmaceuticals at work that have gone through the regulatory process and made it into people. I went to school for ten years to do this.

This is a colossally dangerous thing.

Every time you run a chemical synthesis, you generate impurities. Slightly different temperatures, concentrations, reagent quality, and a million other things will vary the identities and concentrations of those impurities in your product.

The nature of biochemistry is that most compounds, even at very small concentrations, can have effects. Usually bad ones. So drugs have tight specs on how much of each potential impurity can be present. Usually it’s in the 0.1% range, but sometimes a lot lower.

Detection of impurities at that level cannot be done with ‘hacker’ gear in your garage. So if you do this, you’re going to be taking unknown quantities of unknown impurities.

There are trade-offs. If you’re definitely gonna die without the medicine, then the worst that can happen is you die faster, or more painfully. If it’s medicine to maintain quality of life, then you might die fast and painfully.

I’m not saying the current system is good at all. Medicine is too expensive. It shouldn’t be limited by right wing nutjobs. Those things are true. Those things require a solution.

This is not a good solution.

got lucky

That is not how I’d characterize 2016 at all. Also, I would like to refer you to argument number two.

1. 2016
2. He currently works for a crypto betting market
3. 2016

Why on earth are we still listening to Nate Silver?