Grad and wedding seasons, you have met your match.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
~Cheesy~ in a good way.
"Don't blow it all in one place!"
Most party stores will fill them up for you. Get all the info here.
In the opening moments of Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Love & Basketball, three little boys are jaw-jacking about the skills of an NBA star. The good-natured trash-talking soundtracks their own missed shots as they ball on a half-court on the grounds of a pristine upper-class estate.
“I thought you said only girls moved in?” one of the kids asks of the new next-door neighbor who emerges from up the hill, wearing grubby jeans, a T-shirt, and a fitted cap, asking for a chance to join in the game.
The kids agree, and as that hat is removed, and the pressed, un-ponytailed hair of a young tomboy is revealed, they collectively groan in disapproval.
“Girls can’t play no ball!” one little boy gripes.
Then, young Monica Wright (Kyla Pratt) — who dreams of being the first woman to play in the NBA — says words that hit as hard as that first layup she throws on a guy nearly twice her size: “Ball better than you.”
At its core, Prince-Bythewood’s directorial debut has almost nothing to do with race, yet this film is undeniably black, delivering a subtle and significant message. But in many ways, that important narrative — dropping black folks in a tony, all-black area without explaining how they got there — was almost a sideshow to the message of girl power, told with brown faces.
Gina Prince-Bythewood and Sanaa Lathan
New Line Cinema/ Everett Collection
Love & Basketball was Prince-Bythewood’s story. She’d been an athlete for as long as she could remember — she ran track for UCLA and played basketball all her life — and had yet to see a film that reflected her experience. Her movie was a romantic coming-of-age story divided up into four quarters (like a pro basketball game), and it introduced us to two things we’d never seen on the big screen before: unpretentious black wealth set in a predominantly black neighborhood and a female athlete who was no less of a woman because of her strength.
This was a film written and directed by a black woman — a novelty then, and still unique enough now that when it happens, it grabs a headline. (Last year, only three of 275 of the top-grossing films were directed by black women; Prince-Bythewood was one of them.)
“Honestly, I never set out to write a feminist mantra,” Prince-Bythewood said in an interview with BuzzFeed News. “I wanted to put out in the world that we could have it all. I wanted to destroy the negative perception of a female athlete. I wanted to counter the stereotype of a female athlete. And I knew who I was, and who these women around me were, and it wasn’t what I was seeing in the media and television and film. I want and deserve the career and love, and you can have both. It doesn’t need to be a choice.”
Love & Basketball was released 15 years ago and debuted in the thick of a renaissance of movies that chronicled black coming-of-age stories — Juice, The Wood, and Crooklyn all came along before the 1990s closed out — but missing from Prince-Bythewood's plot was the downtrodden experience audiences had grown accustomed to. Instead, this sophisticated coming-of-age story was unmistakably about love. Finding it. Keeping it. And mastering your dreams in spite of it.
New Line Cinema / Everett Collection
Love & Basketball covers a roughly 13-year friendship, from 1981 through the mid-'90s, of two well-to-do next-door neighbors, Monica and Quincy, bonded by their shared love of basketball. By the time they enter their senior year of high school, the two best friends realize they’re in love with each other, which is almost perfect considering they’re both heading to play hoops for USC.
The film uses gender equality issues in sports as a source of tension for their romance — the girls’ games in high school are sparsely attended in comparison to the boys’ games; and in college, the women adhere to a stricter curfew, while the men’s team has a much longer leash — and the adoration of their entire campus. Quincy doesn’t quite understand the of-the-moment struggles that his girlfriend faces, much less the idea that after college, her options to have a career playing ball professionally means she’ll have to live outside of the country. The WNBA is not yet an option for her, not to mention, taking that route would be far less lucrative than that of her boyfriend, who has tunnel vision while trying to chase his dad’s successful and celebrated NBA career. That divide is what ultimately ruins them by the time we hit the middle of the film: Quincy doesn’t understand the trials she faces as a female athlete, and he doesn’t seem keen on ever getting the point.
The only thing Monica loves more than Quincy is basketball — it’s what she’s good at and it’s the thing that keeps her focused. She’s unlike her ultrafeminine sister, who takes after their stay-at-home mother, both preferring lipstick, foundation, and sticking to the traditional lines of who a woman should be. The be-who-you-were-meant-to-be catalyst for Monica is her father, portrayed by actor Harry Lennix, who encourages his younger daughter to embrace her skill and passion as a ball player.
In Love & Basketball, the actual love story between
the two leads comes in second to the love a female athlete has with
fulfilling what seems to be an impossible dream — thriving in a field dominated by men.
“I wanted to put out this message in the world to be authentic to who you are,” says Prince-Bythewood. “That’s been a theme in all of my work. Just tapping into your authenticity and being brave enough to live in that.”
Love & Basketball's gender equality message plays as powerfully as the one of race — though the racial and economical messages are extremely subtle by comparison. And it hit just the right note, considering that by the time the film was released, the WNBA was in its third season and enthusiasm for a professional women’s basketball league was growing.
But it took a lot of convincing to even get Prince-Bythewood's story to the screen.
New Line Cinema / Everett Collection
Like John Singleton with Boyz in the Hood and the Hughes brothers with Menace II Society, Prince-Bythewood was writing what she knew. She wasn’t trying to throw a ticker-tape parade, pointing to the idea that her characters could have grown up in the same types of neighborhoods that say, any of John Hughes characters did in his classic 1980s films, chief difference being that they were black. She wanted that very visual statement to be quiet, but recognized and normalized.
"I wanted to put it out in the world that these two characters travel the same way that anybody else travels both in career and in love," Prince-Bythewood said.
That was part of the problem with getting a round of yeses for Love & Basketball. Her subtle storytelling was, perhaps, too loud. There was no real reference point for a movie that focused on upper middle class people who happened to be black, and that proved to be a problem for Hollywood.
“When I went out with this film, this got turned down by everybody,” Prince-Bythewood said. “I kept getting a repetitive refrain that it was soft. That was the note and why people didn’t want to do it. I didn’t understand. How is it soft? Because no one’s getting chased by a knife or no one’s been shot? How do you address that?”
Lennix said that it took him years to fully understand the importance of the film’s representation of blackness — which directly feeds into Hollywood's hesitation to make it. Love & Basketball was a film that embraced dynamics we weren't accustomed to seeing: a black nuclear family who uplifted academic importance (college wasn't a dream here, it was a given).
New Line Cinema
“I think frequently, rather than dealing with black victimology that the people want to see something that's good tasting and good for them and reminds them that they have ... the human experience that anybody else has,” Lennix said. “I think that that was about a current time. It was about people who were recognizable, and unfortunately, I guess, there aren't more of those.”
Once Prince-Bythewood got turned down by nearly every studio in town, she went through a Sundance Institute program to workshop her screenplay. Organizers heard of her script and invited Prince-Bythewood to be a part of the program where she made minor adjustments and staged a reading. One key listener at that Sundance reading was Sam Kitt, an executive from Lee’s production company, 40 Acres and a Mule. He loved it, attached 40 Acres to it, and took it to New Line Cinema, which had released a string of successful House Party movies in the '90s.
She got the greenlight, but then Prince-Bythewood needed a star, and she was particularly sensitive to which actress could carry the lead role. Her mentor, longtime TV producer Stan Lathan, suggested his daughter Sanaa, who wasn’t a very recognizable face before 2000 rolled around. But he was confident his daughter could pull off the complexity Prince-Bythewood was looking for.
Sanaa Lathan
New Line Cinema / Everett Collection
Lathan earned degrees at the University of California, Berkeley (English), and Yale (drama), and her body of work largely came from New York and Los Angeles stages. Her first film role was two years prior, in 1998, playing Wesley Snipes' mother in Blade, and she chased the next year with smaller roles in The Wood and The Best Man. Performing was in her blood, given that her father had worked on shows including Sanford and Son and Def Comedy Jam and her mother worked as a Broadway actress and dancer. Stan swore he wasn’t being biased by suggesting his daughter to Prince-Bythewood, who, before writing and directing this debut film, had cut her teeth working in television, namely on the long-running Cosby Show spinoff A Different World, where she worked as a writer.
Prince-Bythewood held an audition for Sanaa at the home of actor Hill Harper — who read the role of male lead Quincy — but it didn’t get off to the best start. “I walked in the door and she shows me this Vibe magazine spread that she just did which was like a bikini spread,” Prince-Bythewood said. “I was like, This is so not the character at all! I didn’t know how she was going to get the part, but she read and she was pretty good. I told her I would think about it. I left, and it’s funny because when she and I talk about it later, she was pissed off that I didn’t offer it to her there.”
New Line quickly agreed to Prince-Bythewood's first choice for the role of Quincy: Omar Epps, who, the writer-director noted, "was the man back then." Epps was a well-established actor, starring in films like 1993’s The Program, 1994’s Major League II, and 1995’s Higher Learning — all movies in which he portrayed athletes.
Omar Epps
New Line Cinema/ Everett Collection
The studio informed the writer-director that if she went with a well-known actor for his part, she could choose whomever for Monica. After going through more than 700 actors and athletes, Prince-Bythewood said she realized that she didn’t have anybody else in mind other than Sanaa Lathan.
“I called her back and said, ‘You have the part for the reading.’ And I knew she would only be doing the reading because she had never touched a basketball in her life, and I would never hire a woman who couldn’t play ball for the film,” Prince-Bythewood said. “We did the rehearsal for the reading, and she was awful. Awful. And I was so freaked out that I went to my husband, and I said, 'I’ve got to fire her. Who can we get to do this in like an hour?' Racking our brains, we could not find anybody and finally we just have to go with her. I called her up and I was like, You have to bring it. And then she came to the reading and was amazing.”
Lathan hired a trainer and worked for three months so that she could deliver a true female basketball star. She filmed those scenes alongside actual athletes and said they often would look at her quizzically, trying to figure out how she landed a role playing a basketball player, but yet couldn’t hoop.
“I practiced for hours on my form,” Lathan said. "I practiced for hours on my layups. Dribbling. All of that. My form was really good. But if you actually put me in a real game? Forget about it.”
In the movie, Lathan’s now good friend Gabrielle Union played Shawnee, the sexy, feminine high school student who wanted to hook up with Quincy, while Monica was much more comfortable in sneakers than heels. “Normally we think of people losing themselves in roles, and we think of Charlize [Theron] in Monster or Halle [Berry] in Monster's Ball," Union said. "But what Sanaa had to do to become Monica ... Sanaa Lathan is a hippie. The fact that we all bought her, lock, stock, and barrel, as this gifted athlete says a lot about her level of preparation and her commitment to the role. 'Cause that ain't her. At all.”
Prince-Bythewood was blown away by Lathan’s work ethic and was floored by the chemistry she and Epps had on set. But what the director wasn’t immediately aware of: Lathan and Epps were secretly dating at the time.
“I think if I had known, I don't know if I would have taken that risk,” Prince-Bythewood said, laughing. “When people are dating or married, a lot of times they don't have chemistry on screen. What if they break up midway through shooting? But they were hot. There was this sweetness between them. And I just wanted to watch them.”
New Line Cinema / Everett Colleciton
Seeing the burgeoning brown-skin love affair come to life on screen was restorative. It signaled change, especially considering that it came shortly after 1997’s Love Jones and 1999’s The Best Man, which both had audiences piercing their hands in the sky, celebrating the fact that contemporary black love was finally getting highlighted on screen.
“If you never see yourself, it’s going to affect your self-esteem and self-worth on a deep, unconscious level. I believe that,” Lathan said.
But there was a yielding of sorts for other black romance films. Two years later, Brown Sugar — which was directed by The Wood’s Rick Famuyiwa and also starred Lathan, pairing her with Taye Diggs — gave a similar amorous moment. (There have been several romantic comedies with largely black casts — most successfully 2012's Think Like a Man — but not simply a romance film.)
There wasn't a movie truly like Love & Basketball, arguably, until Prince-Bythewood's 2014 movie Beyond the Lights, which took five years to get to theaters. She still had to fight to get a comparable love story — featuring two young, black characters who were not set against a backdrop of environmental strife — on the big screen.
“I think it's the design of people who are comfortable seeing black people as desperate and despicable people — making victims of them, making pariahs of them,” Lennix said. “Why is there this fascination with black victimhood in slave movies and so forth? There's no reason for them, really, to empower black people with nutritious content when you can get them junk and have them buy it in even greater fervor.”
Love & Basketball's characters just happened to be black, yet it was placed into the distinct “urban” film genre. Besides a particularly saucy conversation between Monica and another basketball player while overseas — “Shit. Them Italian boys? They love them some black women,” the character cooed — race is never mentioned.
“It was an organic time to have that conversation because that was the only time the characters had that experience,” Epps said of the scene. “Black people, we’re not sitting around talking race in that regard. For Love & Basketball, that conversation didn’t need to happen because it was a bunch of brown people talking to brown people.”
New Line Cinema/Everett Collection
Love & Basketball is now reaching a new generation of fans — at an event with high school students earlier this year to promote Beyond the Lights’ DVD release, Prince-Bythewood collected the loudest cheers when her young audience learned she wrote and directed the 2000 film.
The fact that Love & Basketball still resonates is telling. Filmmakers — Prince-Bythewood included — still struggle to get the greenlight for daring to make movies about black people that go against the grain. All these years later, news of a black female protagonist in a film is still a moment worth heralding.
“It is a feminist movie,” Lathan said. “It’s a new classic now. When I say classic, I mean something that stands the test of time and also crosses cultural lines. I’ve had old Asian men come up to me and be like, 'I love Love & Basketball.' It stands.”
Even though there was a campaign among fans to get a sequel going (a mockup of a poster announcing a new film that would hit theaters this Valentine’s Day circulated online), it’s never happening. Prince-Bythewood said the story ended how it was supposed to in its flash-forward epilogue: After years of being apart, Monica and Quincy eventually acknowledge they’re still in love with each other, marry, she goes on to star in WNBA (which now exists!), he’s the ex-athlete husband who is supportive of her career, and they have a daughter, who has a role model right at home — the kind her own mother couldn’t dream of having while growing up.
“I put out characters that I knew. I knew people that lived in Ladera Heights and View Park, where we shot. The houses that we used, black folks lived in them,” Prince-Bythewood said. "I consciously wanted to show a side of black life that hadn’t been shown.”
In June, the entire cast will reunite for the first time since its release, and present the film as part of the L.A. Film Festival to commemorate its 15th anniversary.
“One of the things that I care about so much is the fact that we can all be able to be reflected,” Lathan says. "Obviously, because I’m a black woman, I want to see myself up on that screen. And I’m so happy that this movie is that for young, black girls.”
Bless their hearts.
—Alex Rende, Facebook
YouTube / ItsKingsleyBitch / Via s30.photobucket.com
"We're just giving you time to catch up!" ?
—Tonya Hicks, Facebook
ABC
—Janine Estrella, Facebook
Nickelodeon
Can’t touch this.
A decade after my second son was born I found myself unexpectedly pregnant again.
Will Varner / BuzzFeed
An unsettling thing about e-readers is that you can't easily sense how far along you are in a book — the feel of the object in your hands never changes; there's no tactile shift to signal that one is at the beginning, or midway, or approaching the end. And sometimes life feels like that, too.
We already did everything. That's how it seemed. I'd already grown up, gone to grad school, married, landed a job, had two kids, written some books, and now what? Do the same things again and again until I got too sick or old to do them, and then die? Nothing is new anymore, my grandmother complained at 90. I felt that way at 40.
Still, there's a luxuriousness to being at the midpoint. There's enough experience behind you so that you know who you are — you've made a life — yet there's a sense of plenty still ahead. I'm not in physical pain, I'd tell myself, rushing to the subway. I'm not hooked up to an oxygen tank. I get to do my work and raise my kids and run around this city with my friends. This is the good part.
But this sense of being in the middle, it's tentative, provisional. If I'm my grandmother, who died in her nineties, I'm in the middle of my life; if I'm my mother, who died at 54, I'm closer to the end.
How did we get here so fast, my mother asked, just before she died.
Will Varner / BuzzFeed
We like to think we know where we are along the road, and it's radically disorienting to find oneself at an unanticipated and completely different place on the map. Any disruption in life chronology causes vertigo. For me, instead of the dreaded lurch forward, life looped back. A decade after my second son was born I found myself unexpectedly pregnant again.
It was summertime. I'd returned from a month working in Paris; my husband was happy to see me. Our boys were away at camp and we were alone in the lazy late July light of our blessedly empty apartment. When I think back on it now, that place in time has a kind of mystical, luminous charge; we had no idea we were summoning a new person into our lives.
I'm pregnant. The thought shook me awake in the middle of the night a few weeks later. When an EPT stick confirmed this, my husband and I laughed, shocked and weirdly happy. I began to wait for the miscarriage, which I was sure was coming.
I think you're going to carry this baby to term, the attending said, when anxiety landed me in the ER. We have a heartbeat, I told my husband on the phone from the hospital parking lot.
Should I have this baby? I should at least consider my options. But I couldn't get past the question to imagine what an answer of no would mean. With a new heartbeat inside me I was euphoric, still a part of the pulsing living world.
Get your sweatpants on. Things are about to get cheesy.
Sweet cheesus. Recipe here.
Behold: a spinach and artichoke masterpiece for the ages. Recipe here.
The creamy factor is tempting enough on its own. Recipe here.
Via giverecipe.com
The Russian president scored eight goals at an exhibition game this weekend.
Dmitry Astakhov / AP
AP Photo/RIA-Novosti, Alexei Druzhinin, Pool
AP Photo/RIA Novosti, Alexei Nikolsky, Poo
We feel your pain, Wendy from Sussex.
THEY MADE ME SO MAD, I TIPPED MY TROLLEY OVER
At my local Asda, with a weekly shop in my trolley, I got to the checkouts to find none was manned, and the supervisor directed me to the ugly self-service machines.
I don't like using them at all. That day, I had a lot of shopping and it was going to take ages to scan it all myself. Had I known that there were no cashiers available, I wouldn't have entered the store in the first place.
So instead I told the supervisor, very politely but through gritted teeth, that I was going to abandon my trolley there in the middle of Asda and go to another supermarket where I could be served by a human being.
I was going to abandon my trolley there in the middle of Asda and go to another supermarket where I could be served by a human being
'Could I please have my £1 coin back from the trolley?' I asked, since I could hardly shove the thing back into its stack when it was full of food.
But no. He wouldn't give me the £1 from a till and he wouldn't get the tool they use to retrieve coins stuck in trolleys.
So I saw red and did a very petty thing. I took the trolley with both hands and tipped it over so all the food tumbled out on to the floor.
Of course, the eggs broke all over the place. In fact, I did my best to break them on purpose, which, yes, I admit is also very childish and silly. But it did feel good.
The supervisor shrugged and turned away — as though he saw irate customers making a mess of his supermarket every day. Most of the other customers laughed, and it's possible a few clapped.
Then I took the empty trolley to the stack and got my pound back. And I still refuse to use those wretched self-service machines.
WENDY TAYLOR, 62, Lancing, Sussex
The photography project aims to show the diversity of people involved in Greek life.
Kayleigh Dumas / Via Facebook: kayleigh.dumas
Kayleigh Dumas / Via Facebook: kayleigh.dumas
Does shaking it off actually work? Academics and other experts weigh in.
Luckily, David McDonagh from the University of Leicester has done the math.
"Based on a simple pendulum model, even the lightest wrecking balls would require
a human to be traveling around 316 mph," he says. "Attempting to break someone's walls at this speed ... would almost certainly result in a deceleration well beyond human limits."
In other words: becoming a human wrecking ball would definitely wreck Miley.
Via youtube.com
Nope, according to neuroscientist and hearing expert Dr Seth Horowitz, who has studied sonic weapons.
"No soft song will have a lethal effect, unless it is one that someone particularly hates and makes them go out and do something unpleasant," he says.
"Even at the maximum loudness from sitting too close to a bunch of Marshall stacks at a metal concert, the most you could get would be temporary threshold shifts in hearing (although with long term exposure, that becomes permanent along with fun stuff like tinnitus)."
Via youtube.com
Not necessarily, according to royal watcher Jerramy Fine, author of Someday My Prince Will Come.
She says there are plenty of examples of ordinary folk marrying royals.
"Crown Prince Haakon of Norway met his princess at a rock concert and Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden married her personal trainer," she explains.
But are there any royals who are currently on the market? "As far as I'm concerned, until Prince Harry is engaged, he is eligible," she says. "Prince Philippos of Greece and Prince Nicholas of Romania are also highly eligible. And cute."
Via let-the-games-commence.tumblr.com
There's solid evidence for the existence of "gay genes" in men, says Professor Jenny Graves from La Trobe University – though none so far regarding women. There's also solid evidence that environmental factors are important.
Instead of thinking of genes as gay or straight, Professor Graves believes everyone has a mixture of "male-loving" and "female-loving" genes. Both men and women "can be somewhere between very male-loving and very female-loving," she says.
Via youtube.com
They’re just like us!
Bryan Steffy / iStock / Via Getty / Thinkstock
Christopher Polk / iStock / Via Getty / Thinkstock
A personal trainer in your pocket.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
What's amazing about this timer is that you can customize the exercises in your circuit, and the app will speak the interval names aloud. Don't worry: you can still listen to your own music and hear the alerts on top of it!
The countdown is giant. It's visible in both landscape and portrait mode, so you'll never lose track of the time. Upgrade to pro ($5) to save timers for different types of workouts (7 minute, Tabata, HIIT, etc.).
Only the pro version of this app ($5) is available for Android.
A new study shows how to turn ordinary brewers yeast into a biological factory for producing opiates. Some scientists want to use this technology to make better painkillers. But other researchers — and the FBI — warn that this could lead to people brewing heroin at home.
Jenny Chang for BuzzFeed News
Making opiates is a long and laborious process that starts in the arid poppy fields of the Middle East. But a new method could one day allow "home brewers" to make the drugs just about anywhere, with not much more than a jar of specialized yeast.
With the tricks of genetic engineering, scientists have figured out how to turn ordinary brewers yeast into a fermentation machine that could transform sugar into our most widely prescribed painkillers, not to mention heroin. Scientists have long been working on this complex chemical process, and a crucial missing piece was published Monday in Nature Chemical Biology.
It's the first example of a genetically engineered organism producing a narcotic, and the scientific community is split over what to think about the technology's implications. The current method would make opiates in tiny quantities, too small to be useful for any purpose. But in two or three years, some scientists warn, this research could allow anyone with access to the special yeast strain — or the genetic know-how to make it — to cook up opiates from home.
"Things are moving really fast right now," Kenneth Oye, a professor of political science and engineering systems at MIT, told BuzzFeed News. "It's not like tomorrow someone's going to have a fully integrated, one-pot pathway to go from sugar to morphine," Oye said. "But it's coming."
In a commentary in Nature also published Monday, Oye argues that scientists and law enforcement need to band together to keep the new capability in the lab and out of the garage. Oye even suggests that the U.S. Controlled Substances Act be extended to cover possession of the genetically revamped yeast.
But others say that these dire warnings are overblown. They point out that a lot of good could come from this research — namely, it could lead to cheaper, more powerful, and less addictive painkillers. It would also be extremely difficult for amateur scientists to do this kind of opiate alchemy.
"At the end of this you're left with the impression that if anyone builds this yeast, and it gets out, then anyone else can make stuff with the ease of brewing beer," Rob Carlson, managing director of Bioeconomy Capital, a biotech investment firm, and a staunch proponent of the "DIY bio" movement, told BuzzFeed News. "But at the moment the only thing we can brew that way is beer."
What's more, Carlson argues, pushing for strong regulation at this early stage would only lead to the eventual creation of "bigger, blacker markets" down the line.
Farmers harvest raw opium at a poppy field in Afghanistan.
Allauddin Khan / Associated Press / Via apimages.com
Take insulin, for example. The widely used diabetes medication used to be laboriously extracted from pig and cow pancreases — it took more than two tons of pork to make just eight ounces of insulin. But now it's made by genetically modified E. coli bacteria that churn out the proteins in 50,000-liter fermentor tanks.
By 2012, the market for drugs made by biological organisms hovered at an impressive $100 billion, according to a forthcoming research paper by Carlson.
The new study added to more than a decade of previous work using yeast to make opiate painkillers. The standard way of making these drugs, which relies on poppy plants from the Middle East and South Asia, is fraught with problems.
"There is supply instability that we face from changing environmental factors, and from geopolitical instability in the area," Christina Smolke, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford who has worked on opiate-producing yeast since 2004, told BuzzFeed News. Moving the process into the lab would be safer and cheaper, she said.
Previous work by Smolke had pinpointed several key ingredients — genes from the poppy plant and certain soil bacteria — that need to be added to yeast before it can turn sugar into opiates. In March, a lab at the University of Calgary contributed another piece to the chemical puzzle.
In the new study, John Dueber of the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues figured out the last necessary ingredient: a gene found in beets.
When fed sugar, the new yeast strain makes (S)-reticuline, a molecule that can be converted into more than 2,500 compounds that are heavily used in making all kinds of medically useful products, including cancer drugs, antibiotics, and opiates. With the new method, scientists can turn sugar into codeine, oxycodone, and morphine.
"Now we can use the power of synthetic biology to build all those molecules pretty quickly," Dueber told BuzzFeed News.
But Dueber was also concerned about the potential for misuse, particularly for making controlled or illegal opiates such as oxycodone and heroin.
"If the field continues at the pace that it's going, it could be done in the two-year time frame," Dueber said.
Tea time = sacred time.
No better place to do this than on national television.
It’s your one true love.
The event last week took place amongst the ruins of last summer’s 50-day conflict with Israel.
Gaza's last cinema was shuttered over two decades ago during the first intifada, an uprising against Israel's occupation of the territory, Al Jazeera reported in December.
