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‘Right to Repair for Your Body’: The Rise of DIY, Pirated Medicine

The Microlab is the lab equipment (called a controlled lab reactor or CLR) that you use to actually make medicine, using the suggested reaction pathways given by Chemhacktica. Costs for the materials to build this are between $300 and $500, depending on the features you want. Four Thieves has released detailed instructions about how to build and use the Microlab, as well as software that will make it run.

‘Right to Repair for Your Body’: The Rise of DIY, Pirated Medicine

So Four Thieves Vinegar Collective set out to teach people how to make their own version of Sovaldi. Chemists at the collective thought the DIY version would cost about $300 for the entire course of medication, or about $3.57 per pill. But they were wrong.

The Price of Insulin Has Soared. Biohackers Want to Fix It | Time

Ultimately, it’s not clear that the Open Insulin Project’s real goal is to facilitate insulin minilabs across the U.S. The group intends to put the plan for their designer insulin-­producing yeast online as soon as it’s done, but only for “research purposes,” says Di Franco. And without brewing facilities or the ability to check and purify the hormone, the plans themselves are a long way—scientifically and legally—from the point where anyone will be injecting homegrown insulin. Di Franco has offered up his own body as a proving ground once the lawyers sign off: “I’d be thrilled to be the first person to take the insulin,” he says.

5 Hours of Glenn Gould Outtakes. Why? Listen and Find Out. - The New York Times

In a 1966 article, “The Prospects of Recording,” he fantasized about a future when listeners would be granted tape-edit options and could patch together their preferred versions of, say, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, from recordings by different conductors.

A DIY Pharmaceutical Revolution Is Coming—If It Doesn’t Kill Us First

At Harvard’s Wyss Institute, biochemist Peter Nguyen is developing a system for medical field operatives that he hopes will make preparing life-saving drugs much like making a Cup of Noodles. Last fall, he co-authored a paper in the journal Cell on how to use freeze-dried pellets and water to make drugs on the fly. The pellets contain the necessary chemical building blocks for certain drugs, cells stripped of their inner materials that translate genetic instructions into molecules, then frozen, and dried out. They also freeze-dried the DNA carrying the instructions for how to make specific drug-creating molecules. Add water, and kickstart the chemical reactions that would turn them into therapies.

A DIY Pharmaceutical Revolution Is Coming—If It Doesn’t Kill Us First

If you’ve ever built Ikea furniture though, you might quibble with how easy it really is to put together without error. Instructions for an alpha version of the “Apothecary MicroLab” offered on Four Thieves Vinegar’s website were difficult to understand at best, explaining how to build an automated lab reactor using, among other things, an open-source sous vide controller and a mason jar. Laufer envisions that his army of DIY chemists will build and then program this minilab to manufacture small quantities of their drug of choice. Recently, he uploaded instructions on how to make Daraprin, the medication that Martin Shkreli controversially raised from $13.50 to $750 per tablet.

WaPo to license self-serve CMS for small publishers

WaPo also announced it intends to make Arc available to all publishers through a self-service platform, suitable for smaller publishers, which will help clients tackle video, mobile apps, and social media distribution.
"I'm inviting authors from other regions to the Twin Cities where I will host events for them at some of my home bookstores and they'll do the same for me," explained Webb, who says there is no other program like this in the country. She already has 10 authors signed up to participate and she hopes eventually to have at least one host author in every state.