Drugs is a Human Construct
The human body is an assembly of chemicals, as is all food & all medicine. So what we label as a drug is a social construct.
Lifting weights changes your bio-physiology in a way that creates performance-enhancing effects on your body.
Drinking coffee changes your metabolism in a way that creates performance-enhancing effects on your body.
Eating breakfast changes your biochemstry in a way that creates performance-enhancing effects on your body.
Practicing in your sport of choice creat...
notesEveryone and every substance is chemicals and molecules. How we classify them is purely a social construct.
Deducing the Original Arrangement of Chemicals
The chemists who uphold dualism are far from being agreed among themselves; nevertheless, all of them in maintaining their opinion, rely upon the phenomena of chemical reactions. For a long time the uncertainty of this method has been pointed out: it has been shown repeatedly, that the atoms put into movement during a reaction take at that time a new arrangement, and that it is impossible to deduce the old arrangement from the new one. It is as if, in the middle of a game of chess, after the ... notesFrom a compound is like trying to figure out the history of a chess game from the positions of the pieces on the board at present.
Chemicals "Copulate"
From this time everything was copulated. Acetic, formic, butyric, margaric, &c., acids, alkaloids, ethers, amides, anilides, all became copulated bodies. So that to make acetanilide, for example, they no longer employed acetic acid and aniline, but they re-copulated a copulated oxalic acid with a copulated ammonia. I am inventing nothing—altering nothing. Is it my fault if, when writing history, I appear to be composing a romance? notesMaking it sound natural, so the chemist describes his work as composing a romance for the elements' natural affinity for one another.
Humans share 98.5% of our genes with chimpanzees
The genome is not a blueprint for constructing a body; it is a recipe for baking a body.
As the hox story illustrates, DNA promoters express themselves in the fourth dimension; their timing is all. A chimp has a different head from a human being not because it has a different blueprint for the head, but because it grows the jaws for longer and the cranium for less long than a human being. The difference is all timing.
The startling new truth that has emerged from the human genome - that... notesEven the difference between human and mouse blueprints are minor. Our variation comes from the schedules that manage the expression of genes, and these are controlled by the chemicals and enzymes in our environments.
Bumbling Humans Made It to the Moon
So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and, vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky. notesWritten after the success of the Apollo mission, Baker points out how bumbling people are in everyday life, but with technology we can go to the Moon.
The Placenta and Toxicity
“During most of pregnancy, the placenta separating mother and fetus is only one cell thick,” Koren tells me. “But it has an array of mechanisms to help it do its job of protecting the fetus.” These subcellular tools, he explains, include tiny pumps that expel toxins before they can do any damage, immune agents that guard the placenta’s perimeter, and placental enzymes that chemically break down intruding molecules.
This armamentarium does an impressive job of blocking bacteria from... notesThe placenta uses chemical and electrical criteria for filtering out molecules, meaning small fat-soluble molecules, even harmful ones, will pass through.
