Humans have strange rituals of celebration. They consume vast quantities of substances that can kill them or can cause them to do stupid things that will make them wish they were dead. One of those often fatal celebratory substances is ethanol, C2H5OH. One of the most common drinking games humans play is to see which drinker can drink the most alcohol the fastest.
But now there is a trick that the clever drinker can use to win this drinking game, without the risk of dying or being fatally stupid. It involves ingesting a special alcohol-converting gel before drinking. The gel sits in the upper GI tract, converting ethanol into acetic acid (vinegar), which is safely absorbed in the gut without inebriation occurring.
Researchers at ETH Zurich have now developed a protein gel that breaks down alcohol in the gastrointestinal tract. In a study recently published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, they show that in mice, the gel converts alcohol quickly, efficiently and directly into harmless acetic acid before it enters the bloodstream, where it would normally develop its intoxicating and harmful effects.
“The gel shifts the breakdown of alcohol from the liver to the digestive tract. In contrast to when alcohol is metabolized in the liver, no harmful acetaldehyde is produced as an intermediate product,” explains Professor Raffaele Mezzenga from the Laboratory of Food & Soft Materials at ETH Zurich. Acetaldehyde is toxic and is responsible for many health problems caused by excessive alcohol consumption.
In the future, the gel could be taken orally before or during alcohol consumption to prevent blood alcohol levels from rising and acetaldehyde from damaging the body. In contrast to many products available on the market, the gel combats not only the symptoms of harmful alcohol consumption but also its causes. __ It Just Doesn’t Affect Me the Same Way
The gel described above may be an early step toward making our gastrointestinal tracts perform more tricks for us than they normally do. It is an interesting idea, but I am thinking more along the line of a family of genetically engineered tapeworms.
Historically, tapeworms have been considered a sneaky way to eat a lot, but to still lose weight so that one’s clothes would fit.
There is evidence of advertising, from the late 19th and early 20th century, hawking “sanitized tapeworms” to help women maintain a slim figure. Whether the pills sold actually contained tapeworms or whether women actually ingested them hoping to acquire a tapeworm is difficult to verify. Such a pill would likely contain the cyst part of the tapeworm’s life cycle, but one would imagine that cultivating a large supply of these would make for a rather unpleasant day’s work. It seems unlikely, but there’s also a good chance that somewhere in the long, strange history of humanity, someone somewhere did try using a tapeworm to lose weight. So, the answer to the question, “Did it happen?” is most likely yes, but it was probably never widespread [source: Mikkelson]. __ The Tapeworm Weight Loss Method
Tapeworms could be modified genetically to metabolize a wide range of substrates into harmless products. One idea is to encase the engineered tapeworm inside a substrate-permeable contact casing (think velcro) which allows the worm to ingest large amounts of substrate from the host, without risking a dangerous cysticercosis. The encased worm could be ejected using a suitably powerful emetic or a laxative which would cause the worm’s casing to de-adhere from the GI mucosa.
The chronic ingestion of large amounts of alcohol can lead to liver damage, brain damage, pancreatic damage, and toxicity to other body organs. Liver and pancreatic transplantation using the decellularized scaffolding technique is being increasingly considered in cases of chronic severe organ toxicity caused by alcohol, where such therapies might be life saving.
Improvements in probiotic engineering offers some of the more exciting prospects for the creative use of the GI tract. Properly engineered microbes could metabolize just about anything into just about anything else. Such microbes might be designed to float freely in the GI tract — like normal GI flora — or could be encased in a permeable casing or capsule of some type.
There are many other concepts for blending natural and artificial biochemical systems in the service of life enhancement, of some sort or another. It is best to go slowly with such things, in general.
Unfortunately, many humans in affluent societies indulge in celebratory practices which can do great harm to their body systems. And such persons tend to expect that the biomedical infrastructure which has always lurked in the background, will step forward and continue to rescue them from their own misadventures. And perhaps it will. Until such cost benefit analyses are turned over to the machines. Perhaps even then. We shall see. Until then, there is a great deal of fun to be had dreaming up new alternatives and workarounds to our systems, as currently evolved.
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