In this episode of the Brainforest Café, Dennis McKenna sits down with medicinal chemist Matt Metcalf to explore a genuinely strange frontier: testing drugs in pea seedlings and the touch-sensitive Mimosa pudica instead of in mice. Along the way they circle the question that started it all, why the opium poppy spends so much energy making opioids at all, and what those molecules might be doing inside a plant that has no nerves.

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Matthew Metcalf is a neuroscientist with a background in the medicinal chemistry and pharmacology of opioids and cannabinoids as analgesic drugs. He is an assistant professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences University (MCPHS) School of Pharmacy - Worcester.

His current research focuses on the development of New Approach Methodologies (NAMs, sometimes called Non-Animal Models) drug tests to limit the use of animals used in drug testing.

His current work focuses on the use of living plants as the biological organisms to replace animal models used as drug tests.

Outside of his research he is passionate about auroras and timelapse photography.

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