Student discovers fungus predicted by Albert Hoffman

> Really impressive that a student managed to find something Hofmann suspected nearly a century ago.

Why is that impressive? I’m genuinely asking, I do not understand the obsessive fascination with “student discovered”. It’s like everyone expects “student” to mean “mentally incapacitated” and anything beyond tying their own shoes is impressive. Or is everyone so disillusioned with the educational system they are caught off guard when students apply what they’ve learned? If this same student had graduated two months before making the discovery, would it have made it less impressive or significant?

> It also makes me think about how much untapped potential might be hiding in the ordinary plants we pass by every day.

A ton, which is one selfish reason the genetic diversity collapse is such a negative. In this particular discovery, we already knew there was something interesting about the morning glory plant and it took us decades and decades to find it. To give you an idea how little plant life has been studied, we have sequenced the gnome of less than one thousand species.

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LSD saved my life. I suffered chronic depression and anxiety with suicidal ideation, had tried multiple psychiatric drugs and forms of therapy, and nothing had improved (the failure of these officially-approved modes of treatment actually left me feeling much more hopeless). Taking LSD gave me the insight that this wasn't fundamental the the nature of being me, that there was hope that one day I could love my life. The road to get there has been difficult, and has involved intense (non-LSD) psychedelic-assisted therapy to deal with very deep childhood trauma, but that first fundamental glimmer that there's a reason to have hope came from an experience with LSD.

If I had listened to stern authority figures telling me that there's never a good reason to try it and it could only do me harm, I would in all likelihood be dead today.

It's not at all unusual for drugs to have effects similar to the thing they're used to treat.

The anti-emetic I needed to take for chemo (chemotherapy is literally poison, your body will quickly figure out that you're being poisoned and, despite the fact that the poison was injected into your veins, throw up to try to remove it, so, you need an anti-emetic or you'll have a bad time each session) has "Nausea, vomiting" on its list of possible side effects. It also has a long list of really nasty psyc effects, so since taking it after chemo isn't mandatory I just didn't, most people take it for a few hours or a day, I just didn't, which was not fun but to my mind the risk wasn't worth it. [Yes I'm fine now, chemotherapy works]

Even more hilariously I read a friend's Morning After pill patient info while she was busy taking it, and almost every symptoms of early pregnancy is on the side effects list - basically the only thing they're not saying you might have despite this pill is a baby. Vomiting, cramps, dizziness and headaches, bleeding, sore nipples - pretty much everything except the newborn human in nine months was on the list.

It is at about 7:50 in a short aside. Notice that he only says psychedelics can be dangerous if you already have PTSD and he does not recommend it.

The video seems not to say that nobody should take LSD. In fact it explains how psychedelics can help with depression if I am not totally mistaken.

(LSD is also never actually mentioned in the video. It talks more generally about psychedelics and hallucinogens.)

Yes, it is a major risk. I’m unsure why people want to pretend that it isn’t. Everyone knows someone who unexpectedly changed forever for the worse bc of these drugs. It also happened to me even though I had perfect set and setting, I was traumatised by it for years, and I know if I took it again today I would still have a bad time. And yet I’ve met multiple people who have told me that the issue is that I just didn’t take enough, some even going as far as saying that I’m stuck in some kind of purgatory unless I take a heroic dose

Wildly irresponsible, many of the fans of these drugs, who seem to talk as if things like risk and responsibility are just constructs from the man trying to keep you down

I think people should be properly informed about the risks of LSD and should try a small dose before trying anything larger, and should have the maturity to understand what a complex or difficult trip could mean.

After the discovery of a psychedelic compound, there are two pipelines for release:

- the academic way, where it's studied in labs by "serious people", and after FDA approval a big pharma with worldwide licence sells it for one million $ per kg.

- the black market way, where it's manufactured in quantity by shady RC companies and sold on the internet, until someone tries too large a dose, gets it put in Schedule I and banned.

I guess this one went the first route, unlike LSD.

I feel like it overhyped it for being a treatment when that hasn't been validated yet

>produces effects similar to the semisynthetic drug LSD, which is used to treat conditions like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction

yes, such incredible maturity, didn't even mention that these are not the reasons that most LSD is sold, bought, and consumed... although, "self-medication" probably does adhere pretty well.

As I understand it, sequencing is the step that confirms the discovery, so it represents the culmination of the effort.

Biology is one of those fields where accidental discoveries still have value. Whether they earn the same recognition as some long grinding effort is up in the air, but it's a nice feather in the cap for a student.

There's the old saying: "Chance favors the prepared mind." The student must have had an insight that caused them to investigate something that many other people had probably overlooked or dismissed as unimportant.

I'm expecting the significant thing is knowing which DNA to sequence. Also, if I'm reading the article correctly she isolated the DNA being sequenced first, so it's not like she just sent in the fungus and offloaded all of the work.

>Question - how is it significant, considering they sent it off to another company to do the sequencing?

It's actually a little more complicated than they made it sound. What the student likely did was assemble the genome.

When you send DNA out for sequencing, you get back files of 100-300 basepairs. You then need to do assemble them into a genome by figuring out where all the pieces overlap.

Obviously there are tools that help with this, but there are lots of fiddly bits and settings that you need to play around with to get it right.

The whole article feels a bit confusing, and I’m not really sure what they’re talking about. Are they saying the mushroom produces ergot alkaloids—the precursors to LSD? That would be interesting but not groundbreaking. Or are they claiming it actually produces LSD itself?

Fun fact: I once knew someone whose master’s thesis involved a solid-gas fluidized bed reactor—basically wheat kernels suspended in humid air, with ergot fungus growing on them. Ergotamine was then extracted from the air. The reactor was quite complex, spanning several floors, and was a gift from a now-defunct chemical giant.

I think what they mean is:

sequencing a genome [of a new species] is a significant thing

She did want to say: "It is amazing for a student to get this much success by a half accidental discovery"

Then she thought about things incomprehensible for programmers and said the other sentence.

It's great for the student. And it shows that the lab she worked in and the university are able to do this type of science.

Sequencing a new fungus is not that rare. It's done all the time these past years. People discover new species all the time.

What is cool is that they already know a bit about where this fungus lives and what it might do.

The hard biology will be go actually culture it, test it's abilities and see what else it can do.

I mean the article is very short so this is me speculating, but if it is of interest they might figure out what the symbiosis really means to the plant and the fungus.

Also discovering the gene clusters that produce the active compounds will be cool and interesting.

Edit: just so it's clear, its amazing that the student was involved and had the trive to do this. It's easy to not be curious but she was and also she was in an environment where her curiosity was taken serious. That's a great feat of the superiviser or whoever else was involved

A full human sequence is only 2-5k USD so it's about money.

I doubt she wrote the grant, professor looks like he would give certain students undue credit.

> it is (from my experience) way more dangerous than LSD.

That is not necessarily related to the compound but the method of consumption. Natural sources of psychedelic compounds have, naturally, variances in potency. With Morning Glory seeds you also ingest some other probably pharmacologically active compounds, again in amounts that vary from seed to seed.

>It is know since a long time that morning glory seeds contain LSA

This is one of the givens they were working off of. The finding of the research is the fungus that produces the LSA in the seeds.

What happened ? I took LSA (both top-choice morning glories and HBWRs) about 20~40 times. About half to 1/3rd were "blank shots" (when you feel almost no effects). I even re-peaked once.

Very unpredictable, but it was always less, never more intense trips. The fact I took top-of-the-shelf seeds might have to do with that. It's better to take 10 HWBR from Ghana than 50 from Hawaii (may have god mercy upon your soul if this is the case).

Also ipomea vs HBWR is as different as sativa vs indica.

LSA distorted my perception of object sizes and made me very nauseous.

I took it once in high school. HBWR seeds. Scraped the nasty stuff off the outside. Fell asleep while waiting for it to kick in. Woke up intoxicated. Puked. Went back to sleep

MDMA, magic mushrooms, and cannabis are all also Schedule 1 by US federal law too. All it really takes though to get around it is for a state law to allow it and the state to tell the feds to go fuck themselves and close the door to them and make them challenge it in court if they want to do anything about it, which the feds don't want to do because it would cost ass tons of money to fight in court and would only further prove that drug scheduling is mostly just bullshit and lies.

Here's one, I'm sure there are others:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38042914/

Drug scheduling is complete bullshit and is backed by politics and bronze age protestant beliefs, not science.

I believe there are religious exceptions allowed. See Michael Pollan’s “How to change your mind.”

Book: https://michaelpollan.com/books/how-to-change-your-mind/

Documentary based on book: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt21062540/

Please be serious: alcohol is a real problem child but it’s widely used and legal.

Cannabis and LSD have their issues, sure; but, so do so many other drugs that aren’t schedule I.

Scheduled drugs are simply politicized to separate the ‘desirables’ from the ‘un-‘.

"problem child" is an allusion to Hoffman's own characterization.

How is it a problem child? The only problem is the fed's blanket ban of it like many other drugs that do have known medical uses. Feds still classify marijuana as schedule 1 with no medical uses, and yet multiple states allow you to buy it freely. Just don't invite the feds to your house.

You should read / watch Michael Pollan’s “How to change your mind” https://m.imdb.com/title/tt21062540/