Open Source Hormone Production

This page has the purpose of collecting several approaches to create the hormones necessary, as well as provide information about art projects that try to do so.

Synthesis and extraction approaches for different Estrogens

Ways to synthesize or extract estrogen:

Synthesis from Novel Reagents

There is an environmentally friendly and cost-effective way of synthesizing of estradiol featuring two novel reagents Si(0)/KF and PMHS/hexamethyldisiloxane/pTSA:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040403906013177

Synthesis from Cholesterol

Estradiol can be Synthesized from cholesterol:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja01215a001

Extraction from Horse Urine

Historically the first approach to extract estrogens in this case, conjugated estrogens, was the extraction of estrogen from pregnant horse urine. The process is straightforward and is well described in literature:

http://www.jbc.org/content/126/2/663.full.pdf

Conjugated estrogen is also sold under the brand name Premarin (a contraction of "pregnant mares' urine"). Premarin has more side effects compared with other forms of estrogen.

Biotechnological production

Another way to produce estrogen is using tissue cultures:

https://www.jove.com/video/58208/a-tissue-culture-model-estrogen-producing-primary-bovine-granulosa

Current Art Projects concerning Open Source Hormone production

This is a collection of art projects regarding Open Source estrogen.

Mary Maggic

Mary Maggic wrote her master thesis about an open source estrogen art project and produced videos on the topic Her website: [1]

Her master thesis:

https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/open-source-estrogen/

Videos:

https://vimeo.com/143059738 https://vimeo.com/211018036

Rian Hammond

Rian Hammond is working on Estrogen producing fungi.