No. of Recommendations: 3
Uh, huh. Tell me. If the Feds bust someone for illegally importing Propionyl Chloride (a fentanyl precursor that has legit uses in chemical processing) is it more likely or less likely that the suspect is:
A) Making dye coloring, or
B) Cooking up a bunch of fentanyl
Which do you think?It depends - is the suspect someone who is working in a chemical processing plant working on dye coloring? Or a researcher who is
studying propionyl chloride? And is propionyl chloride a very typical chemical for making dye coloring - or one that has emerged as an important substance in a wide variety of research:
The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has emerged as an important animal model in various fields including neurobiology, developmental biology, and genetics. Characteristics of this animal model that have contributed to its success include its genetic manipulability, invariant and fully described developmental program, well-characterized genome, ease of maintenance, short and prolific life cycle, and small body size. These same features have led to an increasing use of C. elegans in toxicology, both for mechanistic studies and high-throughput screening approaches.https://academic.oup.com/toxsci/article/106/1/5/17...These guys are a bunch of biologists working in a biology program at a major research institution, and they were importing animals that are frequently used for biological research.
...and in this hypothetical, this particular type of propionyl chloride is
not capable of being used to make fentanyl? The more I research it, this specific species of roundworm -
C. Elegans - doesn't seem to be an agricultural pest. It's apparently already fairly well-established in the wild in the United States, with no ill effects. There would be absolutely no strategic consequence to taking a bunch of them and releasing them into the wild, any more than if you took ordinary fruit flies (also often used for scientific research) and let them out.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5419493/
