Old plastic bottles turned into medical gold in astonishing act of scientific alchemy
Will future generations thank us for carefully storing our waste for their use? Only time will tell
The collapse of the Scottish Government’s deposit-return recycling scheme was seen as a terrible thing, and rightly so given the hideous cost to the taxpayer and companies which put their faith in ministers and spent large sums of money preparing for something that never happened.
However, it might just be that the Fates intervened on our behalf to save us from a terrible mistake. For, instead of being turned into fleecy jumpers, old plastic bottles can apparently be used to make a drug for Parkinson’s disease, according to scientists at Edinburgh University. What alchemy is this?
And there’s more, with Professor Stephen Wallace saying: “This feels like just the beginning. If we can create medicines for neurological disease from a waste plastic bottle, it's exciting to imagine what else this technology could achieve... By engineering biology to transform plastic into an essential medicine, we show how waste materials can be reimagined as valuable resources that support human health.”
Perhaps future generations will end up mining Scotland’s landfill sites for their ‘medical gold’ in plastic form, thankful that we had the, er, ‘foresight’ to, um, just throw our ‘rubbish’ away.
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