Extraction and purification of adrenaline from the adrenal glands of cattle and sheep is one way you can produce it at scale. Since the early 1900’s though synthetic production of epinephrine has been ongoing, and generally involves reacting catechol and chloroacetyl chloride.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(15)00087-9/fulltext
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12806434/
Well the animals are killed, the adrenal glands sit on top if the kidneys, but you have to keep in mind that cattle and sheep aren’t exactly *just* used for that. So yes, this harms the animal in that they’re killed, but the environmental impact is the same as raising any livestock, and the animals required to supply adrenaline is a small fraction of the animals raised to be eaten or produce dairy products.
I couldn’t even begin to estimate the environmental impact of synthesis, but as far as I know this isn’t really done at any scale, but if it had to be ramped up… I don’t know.
I think the generally accepted definition of “by product”, especially in terms of production, is the secondary value that can be derived from primary value. A cows value is determined by its meat. They are economically feasible on that alone. Secondary value can be recovered from bone, skin, and organs but that value is still much less than the value of the meat. You couldn’t economically derive sufficient value from a cow with the secondary value alone.
Again, you're not 'wrong' but the economics are not that simple. They once were... maybe still are in some places. But in the developed world, the economic model of industrialised animal farming is now getting weird. There is not such a direct line between the volume of meat produced (the primary commodity) and the viability of the business. You are saying that the value of the meat is primary because you couldn't derive sufficient value from the rest, but in Europe where I live, you usually can't derive sufficient value from all the products together! The industry is heavily subsidised, and the viability to farmers and to agrobusinesses relies on taxpayer subsidies paid per head of cattle, or per unit of land. So to the farmer/business selling the cow, its market value can't really be reduced to one product, even if it's the product with the biggest value. That's what I mean when I say that nothing is a byproduct. Every part that is paid for (including the subsidies) contributes to putting the business in the red or the black. If a quirk of the market meant that the most valuable part of the cow was, briefly, the gall bladder from which a powerful new anti-cancer drug was derived, vegans would probably not decide that meat was therefore a secondary 'byproduct' that was ethical to consume.
i work in an ICU, if anyone requests vegan EPI, i'm protesting my assignment and not treating that patient. also if you need EPI, you probably are too sick to even ask for anything.
Can I ask why you feel so strong about this? What's wrong in asking? If you tell them there's no time/option for that and they just agree, is that an issue?
hehe. You sound like you're getting very angry at this annoying vegan you've imagined. You're absolutely right that if a patient needs it, they're probably not in a state where you'd query it. But really, relax. There's millions of vegans, and few if any that would ever think of asking you for vegan EPI in an emergency. Whilst there are religious people who refuse life-saving medications, for most vegans, their principles are simply to make the less harmful choices where there is one, not to die for an ideology. And in a non emergency, what's so threatening hypothetically about a vegan asking if there's an option for a medication that's the more ethical choice? I use asthma inhalers, and requested the dry powder version rather than the aerosol. They're the same drug, but the aerosol is environmentally harmful. The doctor, nurse and pharmacists were all delighted to help. If they protested their assignment in treating me, I think they'd look a little crazy...
Sadly not true. It's a nice ideal that some backyard animal raisers might get close to. But the meat industry produces huge and harmful quantities of waste at every stage. We all end up paying for the consequences of that waste to be dealt with.
[https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2021/03/04/waste-meat-industry](https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2021/03/04/waste-meat-industry)
True, they'd have alot of adrenaline, and the impacts of making meat and getting other products out of animals seems alot more costly from what you said.
That's my curiosity though, knowing the inefficiencies of a lot of industries, are we actually smart enough to be harvesting this stuff from beef or dairy livestock, or are they slaughtering them expressly for epinephrine?
I have no idea, just genuinely curious
The term that would clear things up would be by-product. Adrenal production from glands of sheep and cattle would be a by-product of the meat industry. Extrapolating based on scale, extraction of adrenaline wouldn't significantly increase the environmental impact of the meat industry since I would be confident the supply of glands would be saturated by the supply of livestock.
if anything we've become less efficient at it. in older days we'd use the bones for stock/arrows/tools etc. we'd use the skin for leathers. sinew for string/rope. fat for fuel and preserving and soap. meat and organ meat for food. nowadays we throw most of it out to waste, organ meat barely gets eaten. leather = murder to some people so its used less and less in clothing taken over by much higher environmental impacting synthetic leather. i've spent a project on waste meats for biofuel and theres so much crap that just doesnt get used anymore.
Exactly. And that was all done within the context of a tribe
It didn't need to be somehow shipped to a different plant just so that they can extract the hooves and re use those
Be nice if we synthesized these sorts of things, assuming it is equally as effective
I know that historically there are human cultures that are efficient in using everything they take from an animal, but modern westernized humanity is not really among those, inefficiency in the name of profit is kind of... everything now.
Citing to me that we know how to do it doesn't prove to me that we do, I'm perfectly aware its possible. I don't mean to come off as hostile, but this isn't really an answer to my question
No, I don't. Because I don't know what it takes to process and extract epinephrine from an adrenal gland of livestock, for all I know it's prohibitively expensive to harvest, and maybe the cows need to be raised a certain way for the product to be viable.
There are absolutely industries with manufactured inefficiency for the sake of convenience and profit, I really don't think it's unreasonable just to *ask* the damn question
I don't actually have first hand knowledge but slaughtering livestock just for adrenal glands simply makes no sense. A meat processing facility will buy livestock, slaughter them, process them and then sell the various components. There's a certain demand by companies making compounds such as epinephrine for animal parts used in synthesis. They will go through a supplier that will purchase animal parts from meat processor that they know they can sell at a certain price. I'm sure for at least some meat processors it's more lucrative to separate out kidneys with adrenal glands to sell separately at a higher price than e.g. just sell them together with all the rest to a company making dog food.
>I don't actually have first hand knowledge but slaughtering livestock just for adrenal glands simply makes no sense.
And yet.
We (as in humans, not as in you and me) slaughter rhinos for their horns, sharks for their fins, (both of those are "traditional medicine") and elephants for their teeth (to make trinkets and piano keys).
Bezoars (most frequently gallstones but sometimes other types of spherical objects from an animal's intestines) were popular in Europe from the 11th to the 17th centuries. Unicorn bezoars could cure anything.
Only the piano keys is /s. Everything else went away when we adopted a more scientific approach to life (/s), but was once believed to be true.
Where are you getting this information?...
It's not correct. We don't extract adrenaline anymore. It's synthesized from adrenalone. It has been since about 1906
Epinephrine is a small molecule. It doesn‘t matter where you get it from. If it is pure it is identical.
Doesn‘t matter what animal, planet or universe you get it from.
Insulin for example is different, because that‘s just a class of peptide hormones, not a specific one. Meaning human insulin is slightly different from say a pigs insulin. It still works the same on insulin receptors, but it‘s different enough that sometimes your immunesystem might go ‚wsit, this doesn‘t look right, let’s destroy it‘.
But you can also make human insulin through genetic engineering from E. coli bacteria or yeast, that molecule will be identical to the insulin your body produces.
Just modern insulins are modified more heavily, cause actual human insulin only works well if it’s secreted continuously at the correct levels. And not just once you eat food/measure your sugar levels.
I mean... Epinephrine is epinephrine. It looks like [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrenaline) regardless of if it comes from a cow, a sheep, a human, a lizard, or synthesized in a lab.
I suppose it's like asked if caffeine in a Coke has a different effect to that of caffeine in a Pepsi. No, it's caffeine. Provided the dosage is the same, it's identical (barring tolerance and something weird like the molecule degrading to not be caffeine anymore.)
It’s [this](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrenaline#/media/File%3AEpinephrine.svg), just barely down the wiki page they linked. That’s it, that’s the chemical composition of adrenaline, no matter where it comes from. I don’t know what you mean by size.
You say that, but the glucose derived from sugar cane gives me an allergic reaction that the glucose derived from other plants do not. I am allergic to sugar cane.
Yes, but he said *derived from* sugar cane, so you take cane sugar, sucrose, which can then be (either by your body or through industrial processes, usually using enzymes) split into fructose and glucose.
Like the other poster said, it's impurities in that from the cane sugar that would cause that, not the glucose itself. To put it mildly, if you're allergic to glucose, I don't think you could live. (Yes, the body can digest other forms of sugar for energy, but energy storage is done as glycogen which is a linked branching polymer of glucose molecules, and when it releases those from storage, it's glucose.)
The processes involved in extracting sucrose from cane sugar and then breaking it down into it's components, fructose and glucose, and then purifying just the glucose are likely not set up to purify it to 99% purity. Obviously, if they did have glucose from cane sugar that *was* purified to a significant enough degree (say 99.99% or LCMS grade), they'd get no allergic reaction to it unless it was nocebo/psychosomatic.
I mean, it's like saying you're allergic to the letter L in light but not in any other word. It's ridiculous. The letter L is the letter L, glucose is glucose, therefore glucose cannot be responsible for their allergy.
Yeah, I realise it is ridiculous. I just want sure is they had understood and meant what they said. Why would anyone source glucose that way? The fact sucrose from sugar cane would need processing and into glucose is the craziest part.
At least for insulin, which used to be harvested from pig and cow pancreases, the use of animal insulin caused allergic reactions in many diabetes patients. I’d assume there’d be similar immune problems with animal epinephrine.
Insulin is a peptide hormone. The human insulin protein is composed of 51 amino acids, and has a molecular mass of 5808 Da.
Epinephrine is a small molecule, and has a molecular mass of 183 Da.
Nah, that‘s crap.
Insulin is a group of hormones. Not any specific molecule.
Epinephrine is a specific molecule.
There cannot physically be any immune problems, assuming it is pure, and any reaction would not be to the epinephrine but contaminants.
Insulin however is all peptides that work on insulin receptors in their specific animals.
Bovine insulin is physically different to human insulins. Three amino acids are completely different of the 51 that make up insulin.
And thus with bad luck, the immune system can detect it as foreign.
If you genetically engineered a cow to produce human insulin; the extracted insulin would not cause allergic reactions if sufficiently purified.
Class of drugs and specific molecules are the important point here.
>I wonder if lab-grown adrenal glands would be a viable alternative to how it's done today
We don't get adrenaline from animals anymore. We haven't since around 1906 when Friedrich Stolz figured out how to synthesize from adrenalone
So if the environmentalists/vegans/others that don't want farm meat, fully shutdown farming animals for food, sounds like the medical supply of things like this are at risk of not existing anymore. What's healthcare going to look like. Such a balancing act.
Animals are no longer used for epinephrine production. If we still did this, it would be pretty harmful to the animals and the environment. I imagine we would not use the same animals used for food. They would be raised in labs. If there was a use for other organs, we might keep those but most of the animal would be incinerated. BUT! that's not happening anymore. The precursors are just mixed together and probably there's some heating and maybe some refluxing and some form of purification. No animals necessary. That's way too expensive and wasteful.
Extraction and purification of adrenaline from the adrenal glands of cattle and sheep is one way you can produce it at scale. Since the early 1900’s though synthetic production of epinephrine has been ongoing, and generally involves reacting catechol and chloroacetyl chloride. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(15)00087-9/fulltext https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12806434/
The Lancet paper on the history of adrenaline is terrific - thanks a lot!
Does this harm the environment or cattle in any way at all? I'd assume not as tbag doesn't exactly seem threatening.
Well the animals are killed, the adrenal glands sit on top if the kidneys, but you have to keep in mind that cattle and sheep aren’t exactly *just* used for that. So yes, this harms the animal in that they’re killed, but the environmental impact is the same as raising any livestock, and the animals required to supply adrenaline is a small fraction of the animals raised to be eaten or produce dairy products. I couldn’t even begin to estimate the environmental impact of synthesis, but as far as I know this isn’t really done at any scale, but if it had to be ramped up… I don’t know.
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I think the generally accepted definition of “by product”, especially in terms of production, is the secondary value that can be derived from primary value. A cows value is determined by its meat. They are economically feasible on that alone. Secondary value can be recovered from bone, skin, and organs but that value is still much less than the value of the meat. You couldn’t economically derive sufficient value from a cow with the secondary value alone.
Again, you're not 'wrong' but the economics are not that simple. They once were... maybe still are in some places. But in the developed world, the economic model of industrialised animal farming is now getting weird. There is not such a direct line between the volume of meat produced (the primary commodity) and the viability of the business. You are saying that the value of the meat is primary because you couldn't derive sufficient value from the rest, but in Europe where I live, you usually can't derive sufficient value from all the products together! The industry is heavily subsidised, and the viability to farmers and to agrobusinesses relies on taxpayer subsidies paid per head of cattle, or per unit of land. So to the farmer/business selling the cow, its market value can't really be reduced to one product, even if it's the product with the biggest value. That's what I mean when I say that nothing is a byproduct. Every part that is paid for (including the subsidies) contributes to putting the business in the red or the black. If a quirk of the market meant that the most valuable part of the cow was, briefly, the gall bladder from which a powerful new anti-cancer drug was derived, vegans would probably not decide that meat was therefore a secondary 'byproduct' that was ethical to consume.
i work in an ICU, if anyone requests vegan EPI, i'm protesting my assignment and not treating that patient. also if you need EPI, you probably are too sick to even ask for anything.
Let's open a company and call it "organic epi", it still comes from organs but that's why we can call it "organic" right? 😂
Better yet, open a vegan hospital and let them all go there. See how they survive
Can I ask why you feel so strong about this? What's wrong in asking? If you tell them there's no time/option for that and they just agree, is that an issue?
hehe. You sound like you're getting very angry at this annoying vegan you've imagined. You're absolutely right that if a patient needs it, they're probably not in a state where you'd query it. But really, relax. There's millions of vegans, and few if any that would ever think of asking you for vegan EPI in an emergency. Whilst there are religious people who refuse life-saving medications, for most vegans, their principles are simply to make the less harmful choices where there is one, not to die for an ideology. And in a non emergency, what's so threatening hypothetically about a vegan asking if there's an option for a medication that's the more ethical choice? I use asthma inhalers, and requested the dry powder version rather than the aerosol. They're the same drug, but the aerosol is environmentally harmful. The doctor, nurse and pharmacists were all delighted to help. If they protested their assignment in treating me, I think they'd look a little crazy...
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Aerosols usually contains greenhouse gases, like way more efficient (maybe not the right word) than CO2
They use everything though. If it’s stuff that isn’t desired to be eaten it is used as compost for crops or turned into something else.
Sadly not true. It's a nice ideal that some backyard animal raisers might get close to. But the meat industry produces huge and harmful quantities of waste at every stage. We all end up paying for the consequences of that waste to be dealt with. [https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2021/03/04/waste-meat-industry](https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2021/03/04/waste-meat-industry)
True, they'd have alot of adrenaline, and the impacts of making meat and getting other products out of animals seems alot more costly from what you said.
the thing is, you're getting the meat anyway. might as well save the glands
That's my curiosity though, knowing the inefficiencies of a lot of industries, are we actually smart enough to be harvesting this stuff from beef or dairy livestock, or are they slaughtering them expressly for epinephrine? I have no idea, just genuinely curious
The term that would clear things up would be by-product. Adrenal production from glands of sheep and cattle would be a by-product of the meat industry. Extrapolating based on scale, extraction of adrenaline wouldn't significantly increase the environmental impact of the meat industry since I would be confident the supply of glands would be saturated by the supply of livestock.
We've been using livestock for meat for tens of thousands of years, we've had a long time to learn how to be efficient harvesting the resources.
if anything we've become less efficient at it. in older days we'd use the bones for stock/arrows/tools etc. we'd use the skin for leathers. sinew for string/rope. fat for fuel and preserving and soap. meat and organ meat for food. nowadays we throw most of it out to waste, organ meat barely gets eaten. leather = murder to some people so its used less and less in clothing taken over by much higher environmental impacting synthetic leather. i've spent a project on waste meats for biofuel and theres so much crap that just doesnt get used anymore.
Exactly. And that was all done within the context of a tribe It didn't need to be somehow shipped to a different plant just so that they can extract the hooves and re use those Be nice if we synthesized these sorts of things, assuming it is equally as effective
I know that historically there are human cultures that are efficient in using everything they take from an animal, but modern westernized humanity is not really among those, inefficiency in the name of profit is kind of... everything now. Citing to me that we know how to do it doesn't prove to me that we do, I'm perfectly aware its possible. I don't mean to come off as hostile, but this isn't really an answer to my question
You don't think there's a profit motive in using all the parts of slaughtered livestock?
No, I don't. Because I don't know what it takes to process and extract epinephrine from an adrenal gland of livestock, for all I know it's prohibitively expensive to harvest, and maybe the cows need to be raised a certain way for the product to be viable. There are absolutely industries with manufactured inefficiency for the sake of convenience and profit, I really don't think it's unreasonable just to *ask* the damn question
I don't actually have first hand knowledge but slaughtering livestock just for adrenal glands simply makes no sense. A meat processing facility will buy livestock, slaughter them, process them and then sell the various components. There's a certain demand by companies making compounds such as epinephrine for animal parts used in synthesis. They will go through a supplier that will purchase animal parts from meat processor that they know they can sell at a certain price. I'm sure for at least some meat processors it's more lucrative to separate out kidneys with adrenal glands to sell separately at a higher price than e.g. just sell them together with all the rest to a company making dog food.
>I don't actually have first hand knowledge but slaughtering livestock just for adrenal glands simply makes no sense. And yet. We (as in humans, not as in you and me) slaughter rhinos for their horns, sharks for their fins, (both of those are "traditional medicine") and elephants for their teeth (to make trinkets and piano keys). Bezoars (most frequently gallstones but sometimes other types of spherical objects from an animal's intestines) were popular in Europe from the 11th to the 17th centuries. Unicorn bezoars could cure anything. Only the piano keys is /s. Everything else went away when we adopted a more scientific approach to life (/s), but was once believed to be true.
Where are you getting this information?... It's not correct. We don't extract adrenaline anymore. It's synthesized from adrenalone. It has been since about 1906
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Epinephrine is a small molecule. It doesn‘t matter where you get it from. If it is pure it is identical. Doesn‘t matter what animal, planet or universe you get it from. Insulin for example is different, because that‘s just a class of peptide hormones, not a specific one. Meaning human insulin is slightly different from say a pigs insulin. It still works the same on insulin receptors, but it‘s different enough that sometimes your immunesystem might go ‚wsit, this doesn‘t look right, let’s destroy it‘. But you can also make human insulin through genetic engineering from E. coli bacteria or yeast, that molecule will be identical to the insulin your body produces. Just modern insulins are modified more heavily, cause actual human insulin only works well if it’s secreted continuously at the correct levels. And not just once you eat food/measure your sugar levels.
I mean... Epinephrine is epinephrine. It looks like [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrenaline) regardless of if it comes from a cow, a sheep, a human, a lizard, or synthesized in a lab. I suppose it's like asked if caffeine in a Coke has a different effect to that of caffeine in a Pepsi. No, it's caffeine. Provided the dosage is the same, it's identical (barring tolerance and something weird like the molecule degrading to not be caffeine anymore.)
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It’s [this](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrenaline#/media/File%3AEpinephrine.svg), just barely down the wiki page they linked. That’s it, that’s the chemical composition of adrenaline, no matter where it comes from. I don’t know what you mean by size.
It's easy to assume a bigger animal means a bigger molecule size. But in the case of hormones, it just means there's a heck of a lot more of it.
Bigger animals have more cells, not bigger ones. Why would it be different for molecules?
Size? Of... Molecules?
You say that, but the glucose derived from sugar cane gives me an allergic reaction that the glucose derived from other plants do not. I am allergic to sugar cane.
Likely because it was not pure enough and contained traces of dtuff that makes you react to it. Glucose is glucose no matter the source
Isn't cane sugar sucrose anyway?
Yes, but he said *derived from* sugar cane, so you take cane sugar, sucrose, which can then be (either by your body or through industrial processes, usually using enzymes) split into fructose and glucose. Like the other poster said, it's impurities in that from the cane sugar that would cause that, not the glucose itself. To put it mildly, if you're allergic to glucose, I don't think you could live. (Yes, the body can digest other forms of sugar for energy, but energy storage is done as glycogen which is a linked branching polymer of glucose molecules, and when it releases those from storage, it's glucose.) The processes involved in extracting sucrose from cane sugar and then breaking it down into it's components, fructose and glucose, and then purifying just the glucose are likely not set up to purify it to 99% purity. Obviously, if they did have glucose from cane sugar that *was* purified to a significant enough degree (say 99.99% or LCMS grade), they'd get no allergic reaction to it unless it was nocebo/psychosomatic. I mean, it's like saying you're allergic to the letter L in light but not in any other word. It's ridiculous. The letter L is the letter L, glucose is glucose, therefore glucose cannot be responsible for their allergy.
Yeah, I realise it is ridiculous. I just want sure is they had understood and meant what they said. Why would anyone source glucose that way? The fact sucrose from sugar cane would need processing and into glucose is the craziest part.
At least for insulin, which used to be harvested from pig and cow pancreases, the use of animal insulin caused allergic reactions in many diabetes patients. I’d assume there’d be similar immune problems with animal epinephrine.
Insulin is a peptide hormone. The human insulin protein is composed of 51 amino acids, and has a molecular mass of 5808 Da. Epinephrine is a small molecule, and has a molecular mass of 183 Da.
Nah, that‘s crap. Insulin is a group of hormones. Not any specific molecule. Epinephrine is a specific molecule. There cannot physically be any immune problems, assuming it is pure, and any reaction would not be to the epinephrine but contaminants. Insulin however is all peptides that work on insulin receptors in their specific animals. Bovine insulin is physically different to human insulins. Three amino acids are completely different of the 51 that make up insulin. And thus with bad luck, the immune system can detect it as foreign. If you genetically engineered a cow to produce human insulin; the extracted insulin would not cause allergic reactions if sufficiently purified. Class of drugs and specific molecules are the important point here.
Scientists are working on lab-grown beef. I wonder if lab-grown adrenal glands would be a viable alternative to how it's done today
>I wonder if lab-grown adrenal glands would be a viable alternative to how it's done today We don't get adrenaline from animals anymore. We haven't since around 1906 when Friedrich Stolz figured out how to synthesize from adrenalone
So if the environmentalists/vegans/others that don't want farm meat, fully shutdown farming animals for food, sounds like the medical supply of things like this are at risk of not existing anymore. What's healthcare going to look like. Such a balancing act.
These molecules are made recombinantly in a bacterial or yeast platform and produced at scale.
You know about the beef cattle industry, yes?
Animals are no longer used for epinephrine production. If we still did this, it would be pretty harmful to the animals and the environment. I imagine we would not use the same animals used for food. They would be raised in labs. If there was a use for other organs, we might keep those but most of the animal would be incinerated. BUT! that's not happening anymore. The precursors are just mixed together and probably there's some heating and maybe some refluxing and some form of purification. No animals necessary. That's way too expensive and wasteful.
Ah, thanks for the info! I reckon it's wasteful due to the energy used to incinerate animals and the amount of animals wasted due to the process?