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At 06:42 AM 9/1/00 -0400, Steven Furlong wrote:
> > A scientist in California let his son borrow his new mini-van. One
> > of the son's friends left some seeds or butts or something in the
> > van, which led to the van being confiscated. The scientist was
> > pissed at the authorities for this theft, so he spliced THC genes
> > into orange seeds. He sent out packets of seeds to anyone who
> > asked. He didn't keep records, but thinks he sent out fifty or a
> > hundred packets of ten. The new orange trees would be identical to
> > normal orange trees, and in particular indistinguishable from the
> > air, but the oranges contained THC. One orange would be equivalent
> > to one joint.
At 12:48 PM 9/1/2000 -0400, David Honig wrote:
> I think this is a net.legend, the plant's synthesis of that complex
> molecule would require porting a number of enzymes and getting them
> to work together.
The difficulty is similar to that of creating "golden rice" (a rice that
synthesizes the full set of B vitamins) It took a team, and fair bit of
charitable funding, not one guy in his spare time.
"golden rice" is a long way from what one hacker can do in his spare time,
but it did not require a big government project, or even a big corporate
project. The same is true of orange munchies.
We are fast approaching the point where hackers will create new, and
sometimes malicious, life forms in their garages, but we are not quite
there yet. One can do trivila modifications in one's garage, but nothing
like an orange that gets one high.
--digsig
James A. Donald
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4N9F0OZlzBXGkimMCBETEpwoD2cr/l3enah1aVGRz
