
Making Penicillin at Home - gscott
https://www.doomandbloom.net/making-penicillin-at-home/
======
setquk
Not sure I’d risk this myself. However when I did chemistry at A level at
school, with the intention of going into pharma for a bit, I did extract
aspirin from willow bark. This is something you can do relatively easily and
safely yourself. Disclaimer: if you kill yourself it wasn’t my fault.

Thanks to my wonderful chemistry teacher I got a couple of hours at Glaxo and
run NMR on it to validate it. Was an amazing experience even if it was a bit
worrying getting the train there with vials of white crystalline substance on
me.

~~~
entity345
Just to be clear: There is no aspirin in willow bark. Willow bark contains
salicin which metabolizes into salicylic acid (which is still different from
aspirin, ie. acetylsalicylic acid).

~~~
ChristianBundy
> salicylic acid

I could be wrong, but isn't that the main ingredient in Stridex? I used to
have oily skin (before changing my diet) and I could've sworn that I used
salicylic acid as a chemical exfoliant.

~~~
RandomInteger4
Yes. Also the active ingredient in Wart remover, though at higher
concentrations (2% for stridex and 17% for wart remover). Good at melting skin
I guess.

~~~
entity345
Which perhaps illustrates why it's not so good for your stomach and why,
therefore, aspirin (same properties without stomach issues) was a
breakthrough.

~~~
nkozyra
Aspirin isn't especially great on your stomach either.

~~~
entity345
It is much better. That's the point...

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agumonkey
Reminds me that to do just about anything, you need tools, and most
importantly measurement tools. Metrology is subtle. I'd love to know how to
make sub milligram scale.

Something a little more stable than [http://sci-
toys.com/scitoys/scitoys/mathematics/microgram_ba...](http://sci-
toys.com/scitoys/scitoys/mathematics/microgram_balance/balance.html)

ps: More like
[https://erowid.org/psychoactives/hardware/hardware_info1.sht...](https://erowid.org/psychoactives/hardware/hardware_info1.shtml)

~~~
jcims
Saw this DIY one a few years back on youtube, looks like the Erowid one,
thought it was a neat build - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n90whRO-
ypE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n90whRO-ypE)

YouTube just dug up a a real nice breakdown that Ben Krasnow did -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta7nlkI5K5g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta7nlkI5K5g)

~~~
agumonkey
I see Ben Krasnoz I click

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InclinedPlane
The big breakthrough with penicillin wasn't discovery it was mass production.
Many fungal species produce it, but it took an extensive search to find one
that produced a lot of it and then "genetic engineering" (via mutagenesis) to
produce a variant which made enough to make the whole thing feasible.

~~~
tcbawo
Perhaps to combat drug resistance to human-facing bacteria, we should be
promoting resistance in bacteria that infect fungi. Eventually, nature may
lead us to the next step in the arms race.

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FlyMoreRockets
You can also homebrew tetracycline beer like the ancient Nubians.

[http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_REPORT/stories/2010/09/07/beer.ht...](http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_REPORT/stories/2010/09/07/beer.html)

I guess the trick is to obtain and maintain a healthy Streptomyces colony.
Antibiotic laced beer should keep real well without refrigeration, too.

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dawnerd
Actually found it more interesting that you can buy aquarium antibiotics
without a prescription. But doesn’t antibiotics have a fairly short shelf
life? Wouldn’t that be kinda difficult to stockpile?

~~~
sneak
They used to sell them on Amazon until they got wind of it. An old homeless
friend taught me that trick, and as someone who was uninsured in the US for a
long time (my health plan for most of the last decade was “worldwide,
excluding USA”) I used it a number of times when treating minor infections
(versus giving the urgent care $200).

Make sure you take a full course, in any event, and recall that many bacteria
these days are resistant to Penicillin.

These days, I stock my prepper kit of antibiotics from
[https://www.alldaychemist.com](https://www.alldaychemist.com), and they take
bitcoin now too.

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seymour333
This whole article seems like an offhand way to get people to stockpile
aquarium antibiotics. This guy is obviously on Big Aquarium Pharma's payrol.

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entwife
Useful to know if you want to keep your digestion running predictably, without
hidden disruptors: "One thing you might not know is that a lot of bakeries put
a substance called a mold inhibitor on bread. This stuff, which is called
mycoban, is going to suppress the fungus, so you should probably use bread
that you baked yourself."

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JoeAltmaier
...with only 5 or 6 other hard-to-find substances. If you are stockpiling
those items, why not stockpile penicillin itself?

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jk27277
TLDR: if, in a post apocalyptic world, your home laboratory is still running,
you are able to grow penicillium or aspergillus cultures. These may, or likely
may not, produce penicillin..

~~~
msla
I'm curious about what, exactly, the people who take this seriously think
they're preparing _for_.

In a scenario severe enough you're trying to make your own antibiotics, you
can assume hospitals aren't functioning, which means civil society is gone.

You can't assume the government is gone, BTW: Every power vacuum will get
filled, one way or the other, and there are plenty of unrecognized governments
which are as governmental as they need to be to enforce their idea of order in
a defined region.

Therefore... you, the prepper who was responsible enough to squirrel away
tools and knowledge and supplies, are a target. If the government is trying to
rebuild, it's going to be seizing supplies and, possibly, conscripting anyone
capable of using those supplies who didn't have the good sense to _leave_ when
the getting was good. If the government isn't trying to rebuild... well, since
when have gangs _not_ looted anyone with stuff worth having?

It comes down to a survivalist fantasy, which amounts to one person, one
family, one karass, against the world. A small, intimate group, as opposed to
the granfalloon with guns which is called a military. Well... when a small
group goes up against a big group, the small group is almost always fated to
lose.

"Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress
of society." \--Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 1813. ME 13:333

~~~
jcims
What about cases like Katrina and Puerto Rico, where there are no local
services but there are zero threats to the sovereignty of the federal
government?

You don't need to survive Mad Max style for decades, you just need to make it
a month or two until roads are open and power is back on. In this case having
a stash of antibiotics could mean the difference between life and death for
someone that's injured, and as the article points out there's no real good
reason to grow your own when you can buy serviceable alternatives online.

~~~
nuguy
Exactly. Living your life with zero buffer against fluctuations in the
availability of life-critical materials is just as stupid as people who are
prepping for zombie invasions. One guy thinks nothing will ever happen and the
other thinks society is a transient entity. They are both fantasies. If you
aren’t ready for earthquakes, fires, financial disasters and etc then you have
a short attention span or you’re just lazy.

Besides all this, consolidation and integration of life-support is the way of
the future. If you look at society as one big system, it makes a lot of sense
to have lots of redundant units rather than all units depending on one central
resource. Sole and batteries for example harden the whole country against
equipment failure, terror attack, negligence and natural disasters. With a
single power plant any instance of one of those things could bring down huge
numbers of houses. Technology is making it possible to produce some of the
things you need in home, so there is a funny convergence of preppers and
technologists.

~~~
mattmanser
No idea why you've been d/ved, as you say, there's so many potential, but low
risk, scenarios. Even in America and the EU we've all got a 0.5%, maybe 0.1%
every year that something could go very wrong. Most likely is that it doesn't
spiral, like the 2008 financial crisis, but there was a real, but small,
chance that could have gone much worse.

His comment not only is ignoring real-life examples that have happened within
his life time (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Venezula, Katrina, Puerto Rico,
etc.), he's also postulating that these new governmental structures would
magically spring up over night, rather than taking years or even decades to
emerge.

I'm no prepper, but I do feel that I am knowingly taking a risk, albeit a very
small one, by not being one. If I had a family to care for, I would definitely
be more prepared with 3 months food and some emergency medical supplies beyond
a first aid kit. It's a small enough risk that it will probably not happen for
my generation or my country, but it does happen.

I also often don't buy insurance for things I think aren't worth it, but it's
still a deliberate choice rather than sleep walking into it.

It's almost on the same risk percentage as Home Insurance, so if you're
insuring your home, why aren't you 'spending' a little time each year
prepping? Just because it's socially unacceptable, but home insurance is
regarded as socially acceptable?

~~~
barrow-rider
Doesn't even have to be something destructive like Iraq or Puerto Rico,
Argentina comes to mind: serious economic collapse, maybe not Venezula-style,
but enough that it disrupted things heavily.

I agree with the parent -- it's just insurance, and is a cost-benefit trade-
off that needs to be evaluated in a similar fashion as flood insurance or the
like.

There are a lot of what I'd call "psychological" or perception-based factors
for doing things like hoarding guns and food, and it's easy to go overboard,
but they're not fundamentally poor choices.

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amelius
This would be more interesting if they provided methods for
checking/controlling the quality of the result.

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logfromblammo
Huh. This is basically an advertisement for aquarium antibiotics.

Why aren't preppers building phage libraries instead? Isn't that more workable
with limited resources than antibiotics production? You basically just need a
DIY bacterial culture medium (such as soup stock), glassware, and dirt.

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syntaxing
Is there a book that teaches you more about this stuff? I'm getting more and
more interested in this after reading the cancer drugs people in China are
making. This seems like a fun experiment to do at home for a weekend.

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Odenwaelder
*How to kill yourself with fungal toxins because you fail to grow the correct species.

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scythe
Not quite biology, but sulfanilamide is simple enough to synthesize at home,
as is dapsone and maybe isoniazid. Most antibiotics (e.g. cipro) are way out
of reach, though.

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pensketch
So.. who just bought a bunch of Fish-Mox?

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oxide
Site is 503'd, unfortunately.

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kilpikaarna
I thought most of the stuff you'd want antibiotics for is resistant to
penicillin by now.

For the cuts and bruises mentioned, clean and bandage them and make sure your
tetanus vaccination is up to date. Maybe make some calendula and/or yarrow
extract, if you're into making your own remedies.

