The words “entire athmosphere” and the “plants” might be an exaggregation, but

1) I can readily imagine the _labs_ being contaminated by the reference samples.

2) If the compound is stable, not clumping and not hygroscopic - yes, certainly. “Microscopic” doesn’t do it justice, as there doesn’t seem to be any limit to how small the seed crystals can get.

Since we’re manufacturing literally tons of pharmaceuticals, and carefully manually spreading them over the Earth surface to the pharmacies, so for stable substances it doesn’t seem such an exaggregation to me.

Quite a bit, but Wikipedia provides sources! So I checked [0].

In section 3.3 it says that GSK argued their patent on the new form was being infringed because "there were batches of anhydrate that converted almost entirely into hemihydrate when stored at 40 °C and 75 % humidity within one month."

So "if you keep it wet and warm it will partially convert over the course of a month", and as far as I can tell the "seeding" aspect was not clarified, at least not in the article.

Also it bugs me that the Wikipedia author decided to call the loss for GSK a "technicality". It was decided that it was not relevant that microscopic quantities of the new form were created by accident, I think that is the correct decision and not a technicality.

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4479028/

Sounded totally credible. For me it evoked the situation of GM plants that show up on plots of land of anti-GM farmers, rendering their crops commercially void (and theoretically infringing on the GM licence).

My thought was more: would it not be possible to counter-sue and get damages from them in court. For after all, they "polluted" your lab / plot with something that you never asked for, and that is now causing damages / lost earnings.

> Sounded totally credible. For me it evoked the situation of GM plants that show up on plots of land of anti-GM farmers, rendering their crops commercially void (and theoretically infringing on the GM licence).

Except this almost never happens. But if it does, Monsanto (now Bayer) will reimburse you the cost of contaminated crops.

I was wondering about this too. I get that it's a commonly used drug, but the entire earth's atmosphere? How many molecules per cubic meter of air is that plant letting out? How are the particles travelling around the world exactly?

I don’t think it’s the plants, the fine dust of the pills being _consumed_ all over the world should be enougg

Sounds like science-fiction or some conspiracy theories indeed... but the phenomenon seems to be scientifically well-described. I'm just wondering, wouldn't a clean room be able to keep out those micro-seeds?

Not if they're sufficiently small. Completely excluding nanometer-scale particulates is effectively impossible.

How is this different than low-background steel? The 20th century left a mark.

I can accept the need for low-background steel without believing in homeopathy.

So steel in every smelter on earth can become so contaminated solely via the atmosphere from explosions decades ago it is measurably radioactive, but labs can't be contaminated via the atmosphere with tiny crystals that change nucleation? Walk me through your thought process here.

The crystals (a) weren't deliberately dispersed into the jetstream with hundreds of multi-megaton explosions, and (b) are not radioactive or otherwise capable of affecting unrelated substances from a distance.

Other than that, yeah, I guess it's exactly the same.

Isn't crystal nucleation exactly the kind of process that _is_ affected by impossibly small impurities? One good conference could spread crystal residue over a whole industry.

If that was the case, it would feel reasonable to countersue for sabotage.