Empowering people to do the impossible

"synthesize medicines" makes it sound like a device that can make multiple medicines, but although various medicines will use some of the same steps, they may not be the same order, and there is a lot of monitoring between steps to verify quality. For example, if you grow a GM bacterium to make medicine A - the drug itself may only be a small fraction less than 1% of the total suspension where the bacteria are growing (if you were perfectly successful with the culture). You might have to filter, freeze, or do some solvent extraction as a first step. Several steps later, you might have to add a chemical to react with the drug or with a byproduct to make it possible to separate. Later there might be another reaction to remove the chemical component you added (or some other piece of the drug molecule). I'm not saying every drug goes through 20 process steps, but some do.

Willow bark will give you salicylic acid in just a few steps - similar to aspirin, dry the bark, extract in alcohol for a week or more. This "tincture" could be evaporated to produce a more concentrated product. It is far from pure, however.