I'll catch up later today.

In answer to Suro's question regarding drug production "after the fall", specifically epinepherine.

Yes and no. 

Yes, in that epinephrine could be made in that situation - though an "epi-pen" would probably be out of the question.  Theoretically, anything done by chemists and pharmacists up to the 1930's can be done in a survival situation, and epinephrine was first synthetically produced in 1901. 

No, in that you would need a fully-equipped laboratory and the knowledge of how to do it.  This is a two-fold problem, the first issue being that to make a wide enough assortment of medications to be able to at least substitute for a modern pharmacy requires a broad base of chemistry knowledge that normally isn't found in one person nowadays.  Put simply, the knowledge of how to actually make a wide variety of modern medicines it is not something you'll find in one single person nowadays, because as with most scientists today, chemists today are specialists. This is because there's simply too much information for one man (or woman) to learn it all over the course of a single four-year degree.  The second problem is that doing it requires a lot of equipment that is highly fragile (and some of it with limited shelf-lives), and that isn't going to survive any kind of end-of-the-world scenario that involves violence and social upheaval.  This is particularly true for pharmaceuticals, which are always among the first items to be looted from every available source - hospitals, pharmacies, everywhere drugs and chemicals are stored are prime targets once social order breaks down.

In short, when you start looking up what the US government thinks would happen after a major disaster (example:  nuclear war), you have three definable waves of death.  The first wave is from the disaster itself - people who are killed outright when it hits, and people who die later because of it's effects (radiation, for nuclear war, or just lack of clean drinking water causing epidemics of typhoid).  The second wave is people who require medicines to survive - including allergy patients who need epinepherine.  They die over the course of the next year or two as their supplies run out.  The third wave is people who die from the violence that follows a disaster of that magnitude, which can continue for years after a major disaster, depending on what kind of organizations spring up to try to fill in the power vaccuum.  Our experience with major disasters here in the US hasn't shaken this belief (particularly the New Orleans Floods).  The government's efforts in a disaster are focused on addressing these problems in reverse order - send in troops to restore order, quell violence and establish the government as being in charge, then start trying to address people who are ill or require medications, then start burying the dead.

Bear in mind, also, that this presumes the government itself doesn't become a problem.  After the New Orleans Floods, for example, the police went door-to-door, confiscating firearms.  The ostensible goal was to prevent violence.  However, the result was to increase it, because the gangs just followed where the cops had been, looting from and frequently raping and murdering those who had been disarmed.  Medical supplies that could have been used to save people were grabbed both by wild-eyed looters and by well-intentioned cops acting under orders, and because of the scope of the disaster, most never saw use on the people who actually needed it.  Food that could have been sorted and distributed was also grabbed by hungry looters and well-intentioned cops acting under orders, while thousands starved.  People trying to flee the disaster and the roving gangs of violent looters shooting anyone they saw often ended up being gunned down by police, mistaking them for more looters.  The police, despite their best intentions at trying to help, effectively became just another violent gang.  The scope of the disaster was beyond their ability to effectively do anything about, and the city government decided that the moment the disaster struck, the constitution was nothing more than a meaningless document in a vault in Washington.  The disaster and every aspect of it's aftermath had been predicted in disaster scenarios for over forty years, both by the government and by private individuals analyzing the available data.  But that wasn't what anyone wanted to hear, so it was ignored until it actually happened, and people died.

So, the short of it is:  Yes, it can theoretically be done.  Practically, however, everyone who requires any kind of medication or special diet to live is going to be dead a year after the balloon goes up.

surochek said:

Yep, that's pretty much what I figured. And my scenario isn't invasion or nuclear war, but a breakdown of world communication and therefore exchange systems.

But how about twenty years later, with a much-diminished population and still existing knowledge and random stockpiles of supplies? Or people capable of pooling and passing on specialized knowledge and using it as a bartering value?

So if epinephrine was produced in 1901, then a primitive lab can produce it again in a less-than-ideal environment with salvaged tools and a cobbled generator?

(all that theoretical wondering, and I'm not even planning on using epinephrine in my current stories -- but it's the submerged bottom of the iceberg I'm exploring)

Remember that Epinepherine was produced in 1901 using the infrastructure that was in place at that time - that of a fully developed late industrial-age society. There are a lot of components that are not going to be available in a survival situation, simply because the infrastructure required will not exist.

The modern method starts with the reaction of catechol with chloroacetyl chloride, followed by the reaction with methylamine to give the ketone, which is reduced to the desired hydroxy compound. The racemic mixture is then separated using tartaric acid. None of that is going to be available without a large infrastructure of a fully-developed society behind it to crank it out. Tartaric acid, for example, requires a fully-developed wine-making industry to produce enough of it to be useful. The wine-making industry itself requires a fully-developed barrel-making industry to make the barrels you ferment the wine in. The barrel-making industry requires fully-developed logging and wood-cutting industry to produce the wood staves, and a fully-developed cooper's shop to hammer the iron into barrel-bands. The iron the cooper needs requires a fully-developed mining industry, and all the above requires a fully-developed agricultural base to feed everyone. And that's just one component.

The 1901 method was technologically simpler - they started with the adrenal glands of cows, pigs and other domestic animals.  However, the laboratory necessary to process it is going to require quite a bit of glassware, which requires glassblowers who actually know how to make laboratory glass, and requires a source of fuel large enough and steady enough to melt glass, and so on.  Connecting all that glassware together requires various tubing, which back then was made of rubber, which requires a rubber processing industry, which requires an oil refining industry, which requires an oil drilling industry.  Earlier tubing was made of natural rubber (which degrades and has other problems, but we'll skip that for now).  This requires a rubber processing industry, which requires a rubber harvesting industry, which requires rubber tree plantations, and so on.  Though there was less infrastructure required, even the 1901 method still required an infrastructure that is not going to exist in the scenario you propose. 

Still, someone might have managed to collect enough gear to make a decent lab, and with a few expendable animals around, they might produce enough epinepherine to be useful.  Then what?  The epinepherine they produce can't be stored indefinitely - it's a bio-product, and it breaks down over time.  Epi-pens are usually stored in a cool location at the pharmacist (like a refrigerator) to try to keep them fresh, and a modern epi-pen stored properly can still be effective up to ninety months (seven and a half years) after they were made.  Just tossed in a drawer or otherwise stored haphazardly in a post-ruin environment, they're not likely to last more than a year simply due to warmth accellerating the breakdown of the chemical. 

The breakdown of epinepherine and the difficulty in working with animal parts in trying to get a consistent output was the reasons pushing chemists to come up with a synthetic method of producing it.  But even if we say "okay, they have the technology, the equipment and the necessary supplies to crank it out", we then have to ask "how do you administer it?"  People who actually require an epi-pen need an injection immediately.  Even a few minutes' wait can spell death.  Realistically, it would take hours before they can finally be dragged to the local science lab along with a stray pig or dog to sacrifice to make a dose for them, and by that time, they're long dead from anaphylactic shock.

In short, if you have a character who requires an epi-pen to survive, as soon as the drugs in that epi-pen go out of date and/or they just run out completely...  Well, they're going to die.  Sooner or later, something they're allergic to is going to get them. 

Raetjor said:

Xaa, I agree in general, and certainly don't have the knowledge to question your chemistry there.

How sure are you about the information you provided regarding the need for "fully developed" feeder industries?

Very sure.  One of the problems they have working with villages in Africa is that there is little or no local infrastructure locally, and building it up takes ages for most industries.  So, you can go visit a village in Kenya and talk to the local blacksmith - he's taking recycled metals that have been in the village literally decades, sometimes centuries, and hammering them into new tools and weapons for the villagers.  Meanwhile, he's using a cellular phone to talk to his son in the "Big City" going to school, because the cellular system is a lot easier to set up, as it's infrastructure requires very little from the local environment.  Automobile batteries are used to recharge the phone (not that anyone has a car - just batteries), and they're charged from solar cells donated from various overseas charities - but if even a single solder joint comes loose on the solar charger, there's no way to repair it locally because nobody has the tools or the knowledge.

Infrastructure is tremendously critical to doing anything more advanced than what our medieval ancestors did, and it's more than just having a set of tools.  It's also having the skills, knowledge, and some way of transporting raw materials and products around.  And, infrastructure is difficult to build up quickly, it takes decades even for advanced civilizations to "uplift" small villages in the third world, simply because they lack so much knowledge, skills, and the physical connections necessary to transport raw materials and goods.  Lastly, modern infrastructure is astonishingly delicate - and just one thunderstorm in the right location can put thousands or millions in the dark for days.  We had one power generating plant go out in this area a few years ago due to a mechanical failure, and literally millions of people were without power for over a week.  Of course, this is the Eastern New Mexico/West Texas area, it didn't get much attention in the national news, but yes, a few people who needed electricity to survive did die from that.

The closest we have come to a general collapse here in the US was the Great Depression.  While those in the industrialized areas of the country still had the amenities of day-to-day life (though perhaps not the jobs to afford them), those out in the country were totally screwed.  Many starved - this was the "Dust Bowl" era, and thousands would die of starvation and disease, only to be forgotten today simply because we can't imagine things ever getting that bad.

The bottom line is that the scenario she's described is one she's talked about with us for a couple years, now, and it's very similar to Gordon R. Dickenson's "Wolf And Iron." (<---click for Amazon link) In that story, there isn't a war, just a more generalized collapse caused by unrelenting social distress and economic factors.  And in that situation, well...  Very quickly, we're reduced to "frontier" living.  If the central government falls, then you're down to the only law being that which issues from the barrel of a gun, and the only infrastructure being what you can salvage out of the ruins and hoard.

Raetjor said:

Many of the industries you listed (mining, smithing, coopers and wine making) are ancient and have not changed as significantly as one might think by the early twentieth century as to be impossible to be working in the scenario Suro has outlined.

Taking each in turn:
- Mining: There are no modern mines in the world which can be operated without electricity, and all the workers need to be fed, and what they manage to get out of the mine still needs to be distributed. Without electricity, working transportation infrastructure and solid food supplies, all mining shuts down.
- Smithing: Think of the number of people you know or have met who actually know how to do blacksmithing at all, much less build and operate a smithy. The number of actual blacksmiths here in the US is very small - just a few thousand - and they are very widely scattered. If you exclude those who use modern tools and only include those who use pre-modern technology, the number drops to a few hundred. More, their work still relies on supplies and raw materials brought in via a functioning transportation network, which requires petroleum products (diesel for trains and trucks), which requires a working petroleum production and refining industry, which requires electricity, and so on. Though it is quite possible for someone who does medieval-style blacksmithing to simply produce his own coal from lumber people bring him and use scavenged metal to make stuff, the number of people in this country who have the tools and the shop setup to do it is going to be very, very small, and they will be very widely spread apart.
- Coopers: Already discussed, above. More, most cooperages in this country are actually part of the whiskey-making business. Take electricity away from them along with the transportation and infrastructure networks that bring them their supplies, and they stop working.
- Wine-making: Most vineyards here in the US are in California, and require large amounts of manual labor to collect the grapes. This work force would disappear once the vineyard owners say "umm... We don't have any money to pay you with and even if we did there's no place to spend it." Even assuming they get around that problem, there's still the question of how they are going to process the grapes without electricity. Though the French still have vineyards and production facilities that run entirely on muscle-power, here in the US, it all requires electricity, and once that stops, they can't just turn the machines with their fingers.

In short, the kind of disaster Suro describes is not one that would allow anything better than late 19th and early 20th century technology - and that's after they take a few decades to build UP to that, recycling and re-purposing tools, vehicles, supplies and materials scavenged from ruined cities and scrapyards.  Once the electricity goes, everything stops.

No, really.

Consider:  Once the electrical system goes down, all civilian communication pretty much stops.  No phones, no radio, nada.  No way to organize a response among the civilians except using the military - but all their supplies have a limited use.  Sure, they've got battery powered stuff and generators, but no way to get more fuel, so that eventually runs out.  With the electricity off, there's no way to even pump gas out of underground tanks and into your vehicles, so pretty soon, all transportation (military and civilian) grinds to a halt.  There's also no water - all modern water systems require electricity to function.  Within the first few days, we're out of water and people are gettin' damned desperate.  Since horses in this country are pretty rare, we're down to walking.  I live in Portales - the nearest town is Clovis, it's got a military base, and that's likely where they would organize some kind of disaster relief.  But, it's thirty miles away.  Walk thirty miles there to get food and water, then walk thirty miles back, and hope I don't get shot and robbed of the supplies along the way?  That won't work - I'd pick up my rifle and try heading out into the country side with my woman and just hope I made it. 

The bottom line is once the electicity goes, we lose everything that relies on it - communication, transportation, water, food, and health systems all rely on electricity nowadays.  Staying in the cities doesn't work, they become death-traps.  Your only hope is out in the countryside - and there'd be three hundred million people who all have the same thought I just did, and we'd all be fighting.  By the time that settled down, you'd have nothing but burned out ruins of cities and small bands of scruffy-lookin' survivialists in the hills yelling "WE TOLD YOU SO!"

So something like epinephrine is out. And is epinephrine the only way to treat a life-threatening allergic reaction?

Now assuming that medieval-level craftsmanship is available (or higher, randomly, depending on what was salvaged -- tools, supplies, AND knowledge and skills), some other medicines can be produced. I'm already counting on herbal remedies. How about penicillin?

Note to the above:  The most important chemical that can be developed in a survival situation is whiskey and/or corn liquor.  Seriously.  It would be the first line of defense against infection from many different sources, particularly from wounds.  Making whiskey is actually ridiculously simple, particularly if you have access to corn or other decent grains.   Building a still is child's play if you have even the most basic gear, and alcohol can be further refined in the winter using freeze-distilling.

Here's one recipe for home-made penicillin.  Haven't tried it (for obvious reasons), but hell, you're writing fiction, you don't have to be perfect.

Equipment:



Viable spores or a live culture of a strain of Penicillium chrysogenum suitable for submerged (vat) culture of penicillin

Tanks for holding the culture broth that are capable of being sterilized

A means for aerating the broth in vats with sterile air

Purified water

Lactose (20 parts per 1000) and corn steep solids (20 parts per 1000)
(or corn steep liquor) for the fermentation tank, along with trace
amounts of substances such as sodium nitrate (3 parts), dipotassium
phosphate (0.05 parts), magnesium phosphate (0.125 parts), calcium
carbonate (1.8 parts), and phenyl acetic acid (0.5 parts). All these
items must be completely sterile.

Filtering material, such as parachute silk

A weak acid and a weak base

Amyl acetate or ether (for removing the penicillin from the broth)

Aluminum oxide powder or asbestos (to filter microorganisms and "pyrogens" - fever-causing impurities - from the penicillin)

Freeze drying equipment such as a rotary freeze dryer (for removing the
water from the penicillin to make a storable crystalline compound)

Microscopes and slides (for testing the activity of the penicillin)

Thoughtful people might add other items likely to be necessary to this
list, such as electricity, laboratory glassware, and agar agar. For
simplicity, I am leaving such background items of indirect necessity off
the list - for now.



Procedure:

Sterilize the tanks and aeration equipment.

Dissolve the sugar, corn steep liquor, and other substances in the water in the tanks.

Introduce the mold to the culture medium.

When the mold is reproducing, begin aeration with sterile air. Ideally,
maintain the temperature at approximately 24 degrees Celsius. Using
aseptic methods, test the broth regularly for penicillin concentration
and antibacterial activity. (See note.)

When the broth has reached a high level of penicillin concentration,
filter the mold juice through a physical filter, such as parachute silk.

Acidify the mold juice to a pH of 2-3 using the weak acid (such as citric acid).

Thoroughly shake the mold juice with the solvent by hand or using an apparatus.

Allow the mold juice and penicillin-containing solvent to sit until they reseparate.

Drain off the dirty water.

Filter the penicillin-containing solvent through the aluminum oxide
powder (alumina salts). The top brownish-orange band contains little
penicillin; the pale yellow band contains the majority of the penicillin
and no pyrogens; the bottom brownish or reddish-violet purple band is
full of impurities. (The solvent may be re-used.)

Carefully separate only the yellow band in the aluminum oxide powder;
wash it in a buffer to clear off the alumina. The fluid is a deep
reddish-orange color that turns yellow when diluted; it has a faint
smell and a bitter taste.

Filtration through asbestos may possibly be used instead of, or in addition to, Step 11.

Freeze dry the solution to obtain crystalline penicillin.

Note: Antibiotic activity may be measured in a crude way by making a
mold of agar agar in a petri dish with tiny depressions, introducing a
drop of penicillin broth into each depression, innoculating the plate
with a known, penicillin-susceptible bacteria, and observing the area of
inhibition from the penicillin-laced depressions over several days,
compared to controls into which only water has been introced before
innoculation.

And then, there's sedatives, which you will need for surgery.  Chloral Hydrate is probably going to be the easiest for your aspiring survivalist chemist to produce, once you have a steady supply of 180-proof booze lying around and a decent supply of salt.  Ether is also pretty easy to produce, you just need the above booze supply and some sulphuric acid.  Both, however, require a trained anesthesiologist to use else you'll kill the patient, and ether is ridiculously flammable.

Xaa said:

Note:  All of the above isn't something that one guy could do just trotting off into the wilderness with whatever will fit into the back of his pickup.  All of the above requires a lot of gear, a lot of training, a lot of skill, a bit of luck, and lots of help.  Basically, if you're looking at a group of survivalists who are cranking out their own antibiotics and anasthetics, you're also looking at a small community, likely of several hundred individuals, who have built up a pretty decent little infrastructure in their community and are going to defend what they have with lethal force if anyone even blinks at them wrong.

That's exactly the idea.

Oh - one thing I forgot to add to the above:

There's an old Polish treatement for injuries, dates from the 1600's.  You basically take wet bread and spiderwebs and put it as a poltice over the wound to prevent infection.  Probably wouldn't work today (modern bugs are a lot more resistant than they were back then), but worth remembering if you have to answer the question "where did they get the spores?"

Speaking of electricity...a thunderstorm has just come up! I love thunderstorms.

Elynda said:

I love thunderstorms too.  Live on a mountainside and love to watch the storms rolling down the river valley.  Unfortunately one of my dogs is terrified of thunder.

Better not let her watch the storm, then. :P

Elynda said:

I love thunderstorms too.  Live on a mountainside and love to watch the storms rolling down the river valley.  Unfortunately one of my dogs is terrified of thunder.

http://www.thundershirt.com/HowItWorks/Videos.aspx

Seriously.  They really work.

Interesting discussion. I'm wondering where Transition Towns, renewable energy sources and holistic and herbal medicines fit into your disaster scenario. People were around before industrialisation and the rise of the petrochemical industry after all.

Great video Surochek!

Thing is, I live in a big city (even though it's not a big city compare to Paris where I grew up), and it's quite obvious that if one essential element of the infrastructure were to collapse, then there would be a cascade effect on the whole city. It's a feeling of immediacy. No one I know around me would be able to react to a sudden change of status, except maybe the few military and former military neighbors. But why would anyone on our block stockpile food, fuel, or water? And where, when the homeowners' association doesn't like ugly buildings randomly built on our lots, and the houses are not that big?

So I looked around and thought, we're so dependent on a whole network of distribution, which is turn is increasingly dependent on fragile systems and equipment, and global exchanges. And I skipped (except for the Prologue) over the whole Cataclysm and chaos and death and destruction and into the rebuilding part.

So now we have armed groups, some settled, some not, surviving on a local economy of barter and small industry. Fuel? Mostly bio-fuel, but occasionally you can find a tank of actual gas. Vehicles? Cobbled and recycled, and much repaired, but also back to horses. And the same with everything. Cities were abandoned -- there's still things to be found. But you have to be able to keep them.

Because there's the bands of bad guys whose fun is to take and destroy and dominate. Others work, they use. Because there's no organization to curb them, no society to censor them, they are a culture of violence in and of themselves.

Now on the practical side, I started this whole project a couple of years ago because I didn't have the mental energy to sustain the kind of concentration required (for me) to write text stories, but I still had characters and stories pushing to come out. Life kept happening and even this project took a lot more energy than I had to spare. Now I'm back, and it turns out that this world has spread into my text stories as well. Works for me.

AngelusPrime said:

Welp, guess all questions were answered better than I ever could have, no need for me to answer anything, :) Glad you got your info, suro, ^_^

How's everyone?

After reading all that? My stomach hurts and I'm going to have nightmares for weeks. Other than that, just fine. You?

surochek said:

Nanobot said:

After reading all that? My stomach hurts and I'm going to have nightmares for weeks. Other than that, just fine. You?

Seriously? Are your filters properly set to "speculative" and "fiction"?

If I took myself too seriously, I'd have those nightmares, too.

Your fiction may be speculative, but I didn't take Xaa's discourse as fantasy. Uh-uh. Nope. We're all screwed!!!111!!!

*runs off shrieking*

AngelusPrime said:

Welp, guess all questions were answered better than I ever could have, no need for me to answer anything, :) Glad you got your info, suro, ^_^

How's everyone?

Doing fine here, and you?

;-)

I *was* being a touch dramatic, I confess--but the what-ifs are scary. Hey, the story would have no impact if it weren't close enough to reality to seem ominous, would it?

If people didn't care about a civilization collapsing, would we have all sorts of folks trying very very hard to keep us all from tumbling into a Dark Ages? Economically and otherwise.

Jim, I love the history. Keep it coming!

Also, at least in my local experience, my neighbors will *not* start looting and pillaging at the first crack-up of trouble. I mean, we had massive power outages with Hurricane Isabel a few years back, and things remained cordial. People helped each other, mostly. When the hurricanes hit Texas a few years back and people migrated from the Corpus area north and west? Communities took care of them. I think Katrina was a hell of an object lesson--and that's good, that other locales could learn from this.

And during the 911 emergency, did Americans fall apart into savagery at the first attack? NO. Like a large family, the internal squabbles silenced and we pulled together.  When things get quiet, Americans quibble with each other ceaselessly, and I suspect this fools the rest of the world. I strongly recall my very European in-laws (back in the previous marriage) not expecting that community would suddenly really matter when in the breach. They thought that Americans would just fall apart. We did not and will not.

So, things would get really rough after a bit, yes, but communities would not WANT to fragment into helpless enclaves.  I do believe the coming-back would be much sought after in this part of the world.

Sadly, there are parts of the world where things do seem to fall apart if breathed on wrong.

Nanobot said:

Jim, I love the history. Keep it coming!

Oh, goodness, I could ramble on for days when it's that open-ended. I do better when you throw a specific question at me. ;-)

Off topic...since it's a weekday lunchtime and time for non-sequiturs...

Color matching game! Very interesting. http://color.method.ac/

Designboom comes through again! This would be a wacky pier indeed. Needs a giant skater.

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/9/view/17934/big-architects-st-petersburg-pier-competition-shortlist.html

Another topic zig-zag. Just found--where the hell have I been??--the Rob Dougan album, Furious Angels. Everybody's heard "Clubbed to Death." But the rest of the album is wildly Noir! And his voice, which is rough and gritty and Tom-Wait-ish but not that rough--is about what I imagine my figment Ian's voice would be like, if he sang. Whew. Perfect. Dar/Grim will know what I mean, and so will LT.

Nanobot said:

Another topic zig-zag. Just found--where the hell have I been??--the Rob Dougan album, Furious Angels. Everybody's heard "Clubbed to Death." But the rest of the album is wildly Noir! And his voice, which is rough and gritty and Tom-Wait-ish but not that rough--is about what I imagine my figment Ian's voice would be like, if he sang. Whew. Perfect. Dar/Grim will know what I mean, and so will LT.

....I will look for this when I get time later tonight- I remember Dougan's voice, it's one of those to me that causes a shoulder to lift.  In the BEST of ways.  Sometimes a voice grabs you and won't let go- his does that to me.  *Grin*  I know know what ya mean, Nan-  Talk about butter melting.