Scientists Create Plant That Produces Ayahuasca, Shrooms, and Toad Psychedelics All At Once
Some people spend their careers curing cancer or figuring out why bridges fall down, and then there are the researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science who looked at a tobacco plant and said, you know what this thing is missing, and the answer was apparently psilocybin, DMT, and whatever it is that comes out of a Sonoran Desert toad. The whole operation produces five psychedelic compounds at once in a single leaf, which is either the greatest scientific achievement of the decade or the origin story of a very bad Tuesday. The stated reason is actually legitimate — wild populations of the source animals and plants are getting poached into the ground by demand, and the synthetic production methods are apparently a chemical nightmare — so somebody had to do something. They were also careful to make the plants sterile so the genes don’t pass to the next generation, which is the kind of sentence that suggests they have already thought about what happens if they don’t. Clinical use only, they said, with the kind of emphasis that tells you exactly what the next question was going to be.
Some people spend their careers curing cancer or figuring out why bridges fall down, and then there are the researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science who looked at a tobacco plant and said, you know what this thing is missing, and the answer was apparently psilocybin, DMT, and whatever it is that comes out of a Sonoran Desert toad. The whole operation produces five psychedelic compounds at once in a single leaf, which is either the greatest scientific achievement of the decade or the origin story of a very bad Tuesday. The stated reason is actually legitimate — wild populations of the source animals and plants are getting poached into the ground by demand, and the synthetic production methods are apparently a chemical nightmare — so somebody had to do something. They were also careful to make the plants sterile so the genes don’t pass to the next generation, which is the kind of sentence that suggests they have already thought about what happens if they don’t. Clinical use only, they said, with the kind of emphasis that tells you exactly what the next question was going to be.