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Serious question. I'm no chemist so bear with me.
Why can't we synthesize other things very well? I dunno, lets take something like, penicillin. We must understand the chemical makup of it by now, does it have some genetic coding built in? Why can't we just make it ourselves? How about marijuana, or cotton?
Is that we can but it's too expensive? Is it easy to understand but takes a lot of effort? Do we just not know? What? How about apples?
I'm interested why we don't do this? Do we do this already?
I think penicillin is synthesised. Whatever process works, though, and it's a bit of a sliding scale - is a big tank of bacteria in a lab not synthesis?
quote]Is that we can but it's too expensive? Is it easy to understand but takes a lot of effort? Do we just not know?
combination of all those really.
With "biological" compounds it's usually easier/cheaper to grow the bug/fungus/plant that produces it then extract, purify and if possible modify it to suit.
Well we do don't we? There's silly examples like quorn and faux leather, but also things like the fact we can grow stuff using stem cells etc.
Do you know we can make gold? But you have to start off with platinum, which is even more expensive, so it's not really worth it. Or so I've heard.
It's very hard to manipulate things at such a small level in order to create stuff (and so also very expensive).
Penicillin comes from a fungi, cotton and marijuana from plants, apples from trees - at some point these things were part of a living thing I guess - are those the things you're interested in?
Also really really not a chemist or biologist here too.