Uh oh. It looks like NGF is thermally unstable. The Isreali company says here that it can only survive 1 week at 4C (whereas most fridges are around 8C) after reconstituting it with water. Freezing is only certified to work for a few weeks, and only at -70C! I looked at some other vendors and found similar specifications.
So this means that we need to keep it in powder form until use.
I thought there was a nasal spray version of NGF.
how are those people keeping NGF stable ?
Presumably it's a liquid in the container used to spray it up your nose.
(perhaps this is a clue that the nasal applicator has a very short 'use-by-date')
Or ... have they solved the problem of the fragility of NGF ?
How much are microgram (not milligram) scales ?
I did a quick search online and the numbers i saw were all in the thousands of dollars.
Surely there are cheaper ones out there.
Obviously, i'm thinking that if we had scales capable of dividing up crystals into
N microgram quantities, then each N microgram quantity could be very carefully
placed in (dozens of) tiny ampules. This would solve the problem of the heat
sensitivity of NGF.
Maybe we need someone to act as a broker that has access to analytical lab scales.
errrmmm..... But it's delicate work... and there might be an awful lot of tiny ampules.
Playground.
I don't think we're helping ourselves if invent a protocol which is applicable only to billionaires. And moreover, this has to be practical for everyone, aside from the economic issues. We have to accept that most researchers in NGF are backed by massive institutional funding. So they probably have individually wrapped 5 ug units or whatever. Most of us can't afford that. So the cheap way to do this is to buy perhaps twice as much as we think we need, in order to account for degradation. Then drop the powder into a bottle of saline nasal spray, and start shooting it every day, and just hope that it doesn't degrade too fast. (I suspect that the specifications are vastly overconservative, because they're guaranteeing 98% purity after accounting for decay.) This is what I mean by "spray and pray".