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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

- 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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-‘.

the more insight into the synthesis of a pro-therapeutic substance, the easier (i guess) is to remove the undesirable effects (what recreational people want)

Combined with intensive integration therapy it has been the only treatment that had any positive effect. A lot of treatments have a risk profile in whether they will confirm my existing beliefs and only aggravate my situation (similar to above, failing to find "go to therapy" useful advice and opening myself to blame/unlovability from givers of the advice), but I hope I can go back sometime for a similar treatment if it's psychoactive.

It was no cure, and today I'm largely the person I was before treatment moodwise, but one thing I learned was for a condition such as mine, there is unlikely to ever be a cure. I had just the right amount of trauma that I can expect to manage my condition for the rest of my life. But what opinion do I choose to attach to this belief? That I'm okay with it. It wasn't my fault so there's not any sense in shaming myself for not finding what I can't have. At least one thing I can say is I found something that had an effect, and no matter how pessimistic I get, not even I can deny that with some depressive retort. This is not a sensation I'm familiar with. Before taking the drug I had lost all hope from believing my incompatibility with doctor-approved methods made me an untouchable, on top of already being depressed. It was clear my path forward would have to be paved away from the one society prescribes for me from then on.

Strangely I have no strong desire to take the drug again yet even though I am still depressed. I accept my life will be one of sometimes violent mood swings and I will have to be more patient with myself than in the past. I have made it my life's goal not to foist my malfunctioning brain's irrationality onto others at all costs. My condition is not my fault, but it is my responsibility to manage it. If I'm depressed now I just try to sit with it instead of fighting for things I know are unrealistic to have. I'm just not like most people, and I'm okay with that now, more or less.

10 years later and this person still isn't right.

The ultimate cure for depression: call this new line of sadness and hopelessness and despair as the baseline for what life is. And any ounce of hope, happiness, bloom is a gift and blessing that you appreciate without taking for granted. And then you structure yourself to live for those fleeting moments. And suicide is a world of persistent misery many times worse than what you are experiencing.

But instead you took LSD, and found yourself hope yet the message can be a complete deception. What will you do when you realize that? All you have done is separated yourself from ever understanding your reality because of that hope.

People who suffer from depression are those who are unable to connect with their world. Either trauma, anger, or confusion will cause them separation and difficulty of integration. There is this book called feeling good I think which goes into CBT. The first few pages repeats one thing relentlessly: you have exaggerated the negatives in your world in order to cope with it.

Some people adopt supremacy complexes to give themselves new meaning and curse out all irritations. This is a temporary solution because it swings them into the other side of disconnect eventually

> I know if I took it again today I would still have a bad time.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe not.

I'm sorry you had a bad experience.

Here is the passage that I think is relevant to whether people should do hallucinogens. (I was mistaken earlier when I claimed the passage was about LSD specifically.)

>substances like psilocybin fracture our sense of self -- and that can be traumatic and dangerous by the way and leave people with PTSD, which is why I don't recommend you do it

It is an aside in the middle of another sentence. Here the same passage with more context (specifically, everything said from 7:10 to the end of the video):

>the focus of your mind is on "I". You are the object of your attention. [Dr K looks at the chat stream] OK? Like anxiety, yes. [Dr K stops looking at the chat stream] Then what happens -- so, when this person says, this person on the reddits says, you know, "I actually think that self-awareness is the problem," they are absolutely right because their self-awareness is their default-mode network being highly active. Then we can look at neuroscience papers, and what we discover is that substances like psilocybin fracture our sense of self -- and that can be traumatic and dangerous by the way and leave people with PTSD, which is why I don't recommend you do it -- fractures the sense of self, but when you stu -- when that sense of self gets fractured, you are no longer stuck thinking about yourself, and when you are no longer stuck thinking about yourself, this problem of over-self-awareness goes away, and people get better in terms of depression. Does that make sense?

He is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist.