Bioengineering Enlightenment explores how, in our pursuit to expand awareness and heal personal trauma, we can unknowingly have a negative impact on our environment and indigenous communities – offering an innovative solution through bioengineering.
Gerst’s lab focuses on RNA, studying how RNAs move within cells, why they go to certain places, and what happens when they do not. One of the lab’s key projects is exploring how cells naturally exchange RNAs with one another.
Drawing on this knowledge, the book explores how genetic engineering can be used to identify the genes involved in producing psychedelics and place them into other organisms, like yeast or even plants such as tobacco.
“This approach could create psychedelics in a more sustainable, scalable way than harvesting slow-growing or endangered species such as peyote or iboga, which are currently being over-harvested,” says Gerst.
Psilocybin has already been engineered into yeast with great success; however, it cannot be commercialised due to legal restrictions.
“Genetic engineering allows us to create psychedelics in an eco-friendly, sustainable and low-cost way, which could make them accessible worldwide rather than only to wealthy people in rich countries,” says Gerst.
Harvesting has a huge environmental impact, and chemical synthesis is also problematic, since it produces pollutants and carcinogens, and most of it is done in underground labs.
Gerst explains that with bioengineering, we can avoid deforestation, species extinction and pollution.
“We already ask these ethical questions of our food – how it was produced, who benefited and what the environmental cost was – we should be asking the same questions of psychedelics,” says Gerst.
Bioengineering provides a path towards sustainable, transparent and scalable production.
The book emphasises that bioengineering these compounds would reduce pressure on wild species, limit pollution, and allow local, legal production that benefits communities rather than illegal suppliers.
“If regulation and legal frameworks evolve, we can scale production responsibly,” says Gerst.
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