Tag Archives: addiction

Age of Excessions Interlude: Biology, or the Drugs Win the Drug War.

Understanding what the Venter Institute really did today

The short answer is that they created a wholly synthetic genome and put it in a yeast cell. This goes towards creating a minimal cell; figuring out how little DNA you need to make a barebones organism. This leaves lots of extra possible genetic space to making that minimal cell do stuff we want, whether it be pee out biofuels or Prozac, eat Gulf of Mexico oil, or glow in the presence of melamine, cancer, or anger. With a minimal and reusable platform, doing any of these things just becomes a coding problem. And not even a novel coding problem, because we already have Nature to reverse engineer from. Nature uses the same platform, and at some point or another has already solved all these problems.

It’s techno-exciting, but fundamentally, it’s the next level of fine-grained resolution on the control of our environment, which has been our species’ trick from the beginning. Venter and his cohort are trying to replace petroleum, (and control the replacement, and pretty much rule the world as a result) and others are trying to create complex cancer fighting biologics. Some sweet, wonderful people from the nicer parts of biomed are even trying to figure out how to make a cheap suite of biologic drugs to treat the horrible helminthic NTDs (Neglected Tropical Diseases) that are destroying the lives of about 1.5 billion of the world’s poor. This task will be made vastly simpler with a platform like the minimal cell, at least in theory.

But there’s a paradox built into our tendency to seek more environmental control. The more control we have, the more unpredictable our world becomes. This is because all the other humans with their unpredictable and hidden desires can now also control our environment.

While biopunditry is talking about biofuel, cancer treatment, and growing extinct mammoths, I wanted to bring the implications of this work out of the towers of ivory and industry and down to earth.

Today, we lost the drug war. Oh, it will run around for a while, unaware that it is dead, but we have decisively lost.



What synthbio is inventing right now is the true Bittorrent for things. It’s a platform for generating and sharing materials just this side of geology, since nearly everything but rocks is made by life. Right now you can think of it has having an interface so bad only a few people in the world can actually use it, and our hope for being in control is that the interface stays bad as long as possible. In the history of technology, that has rarely worked in the long term.

Craig Venter is not, despite his press, the smartest guy on the planet. He is not savant like, leaps and bounds in front of everyone and everything else. He isn’t the only one working on this. He’s maybe slightly in front, but probably not. If he is, it’s by inches. This is perhaps his Trinity, or the proof of concept right before it. It’s momentous, but it won’t stay contained.

This is on the scale of nukes, but not for long. Nukes are hard to build, requiring mind-boggling equipment and leave a kind of scent where ever they go. They can only really be used for magawatt power generation, and blowing shit up. Bio can be used for nearly anything you, me, or Charlie Stross can dream up. Imagine trying to stop proliferation if the atomic material centrifuges literally grew on trees and the fissile material floated freely through the air, and tended to show up in great amounts on bread you left out too long.

When you think of this, you can think of seeing a dodo someday, or Jurassic Park, or even taking a drug that a doctor grew just for you. But keep in mind the strangeness of the human imagination and the strength of human desires. A thousand weird Somas are coming, too.

Tab dump


1000 Ledes n + 8: Citizen of Two Countries

In the contest of human despair, 15 year old “Amjad” of Beach Camp in the Gaza strip could certainly hold his own. Most of his family is lost in violent conflict, or ill and barely able to care for themselves. He is scared everyday that he will die. He has little prospects of education, and even if he did, there little chance he could get a job afterwards.

But one thing can make him forget all of it, can give him a purpose and a focus that transcends the world of terror and squalor he have lived all his life in: the need to score his next hit of heroin.



Stealing From Tomorrow


Seems like a convenient mode of ingestion of small quantities.

Keep wanting
to get back
to where things were clear.




This much is well documented.

The first flash is the best. Never
quite that good


So you try to avoid the interactions.


We’re talking poisons here.  But poisons going nowhere.





Small one didn’t do it.

you hide your pain in the blinding whiteness
of your crystals.  You hide the night.
Already I can feel it:  tasks undone,
papers left scattered.  A slow accumulation
of flotsam.  Or a word too sharply spoken.
A craving that calls me, through any job or meeting.
during an evening with friends,
from my bed where I went thinking to sleep.
So quickly she makes her bed in your ear,
but she is not the singer, she
bringeth not the lyre, but the lie.

To keep the vapor
from condensing in the stem
I warm it first,

moving the pipe
back and forth slowly
over the flame

trying to heat
the whole pipe


You can see the spots
that haven’t gotten hot enough
from the crud and stuff
in the pipe.  Stroke
the bowl a few times
and then come back
to the stem, twist
a little left or right
to try to get
the sides.  Wait till
it’s all hot to
put the sustained
heat to the bowl.

I like to see
the crystals melt
before emptying out
my lungs, exhaling, then
three or four
final stem passes,
back to the bowl
and inhale slowly, you want
that vapor to hit
the bottom of your lungs, pal,
then hold it in,
and hold, or even when
you can’t anymore just
breathe shallow.


Like a tongue tip, lightly licking all along it.

You love it.  You want to do it again and
morning come and again and ever
so closer and ever and
I still haven’t slept.

If I could just find some activity that didn’t require concentration.



Buying in small quantities is safest.

No.  There IS no “safest.”




If you get up at all!

After stealing from tomorrow for long enough,

weeks, maybe for months,

you start stealing from today.


Just the worship service.

Weren’t you supposed to get something from all this?

You’re doing your part for her.  That’s for DAMN sure!

But you’re not at the end.

Next is stealing from yesterday.

The third stage of the ally’s conquest.

Your savings, your bank accounts – nothing very esoteric there.

Sometimes your friends.  Sometimes your marriage.

Sometimes your children.

Your reputation.

And your memories.

Nothing very esoteric there.




The hard part.

You do it instead of eating.
You do it instead of sleeping.
You do it instead of doing.

The hard part.
is stopping, sitting down.
The hard part,
the hard part concerns time.
The hard part is just sitting,
without inspiration,
with no ideas and not knowing…

No, that’s not it.  Lots of ideas.
The hard part is doing it.
And there is so much to do:
much more than you have time to do.
It’s easier to keep the accelerator pressed
and to keep rushing, touching this, touching that,
and to keep doing that.

The hard part is quitting.

Clear enough?

Signs of a living religion and an addicted culture












Too beautiful, too stark

Infinite Jest, pg 347
