[perl4ever]

>Insulin while being the first human protein to be synthesized today is still created using biotechnology by using bacteria to manufacture it

An interesting factoid I ran across is where citric acid comes from. I had noticed inexpensive "lemon iced tea" had citric acid listed as an ingredient, and vaguely thought perhaps it's called that just because the citrus source is heavily processed.

Turns out, while citric acid was originally produced on an industrial scale from fruit, circa WWI, due to shortages, Pfizer started making it using microbes, specifically black mold.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid

[dogma1138]

Citric acid is used as a preservative and regulator in food so it will be added even if the ingredients contain it naturally simply for consistency with flavored drinks it’s even more common to basically break everything down to their base chemical ingredients and then add them back in at the exact amounts.

Overall pretty much anything that is naturally produced in plants and animals will already be the most “efficient” way of doing that both due to natural selection and both due to the fact that the process is easily scalable, heck we still make rubber from the rubber tree because nothing else comes close to that.

Chemistry is fucking hard and we don’t have anything close to the molecular machinery that living organisms have to assemble complex molecules.

Chemistry in living things is like a robotic assembly line in a factory, chemistry in manufacturing is throw stuff into a reaction chamber and stir it until something happens.