“I'm not great at the advice. Can I interest you in a sarcastic comment?”

This is what ‘Friends’ actor Matthew Perry’s character Chandler Bing was known for. He was known for being funny. However, he had his own struggles in his personal life and those struggles were acute depression. He was treating it with ketamine infusion therapy which is legal in the US and the UK.

What is Ketamine infusion therapy?

Ketamine is an anaesthetic used to treat depression, anxiety and pain under supervised and controlled medical settings. However, it does have its side effects, which can lead to distortion of sight, sound and time. It can also produce calming and relaxing effects.

Ketamine increases a person’s heart rate and blood pressure. If overdosed, it can leave users confused and agitated and can cause them to hurt themselves without even realising it. It can also lead to liver damage and bladder problems.

However, when used in moderation and under the supervision of medical doctors, it can treat depression where traditional antidepressants have failed.

Prof Rupert McShane, a University of Oxford psychiatrist who runs an NHS ketamine treatment clinic told BBC that ketamine “probably turns off the area of the brain that is involved in disappointment.”

Can Ketamine Infusion Therapy Kill Someone?

In simple terms, it cannot, be if the dosage is given in a controlled setting and as prescribed. Ketamine infusion therapy uses drugs in small doses than those used for anaesthesia. It acts faster than traditional anti-depressants, but the effects also wear off way quickly. Which is why it is important to monitor patients’ mental state for relapsing back into depression and discouraging them from overdosing on it.

There are ways of giving people ketamine. One of the ways is through “infusing”, which means to use an IV drip. However, injections, nasal sprays and capsules are also methods used to give people ketamine.

Since the dosage of ketamine used in the infusion treatment is small, it being the reason of actor Perry’s death was ruled out. The medical examiner also noted that Perry’s last ketamine infusion therapy session happened more than a week before his death, which means by the time he had died, it must have worn off.

So, What Happened To Perry?

Though Perry’s last session was more than a week before, his post-mortem showed that his blood contained a high concentration of ketamine. He had died of the “acute effects” of ketamine.

If it was not his session, then how did he get ketamine?

Prosecutors alleged that his assistant gave him at least 27 shots of ketamine in four days before his death, reported BBC.

Perry has been open about his personal struggles and this is what the doctors and dealers used against him. Martin Estrada, the US attorney for California’s Central District told the BBC that people took advantage of his condition. They charged him 165 times more than what vials of ketamine cost.

Names that have come up include Dr Salvador Plasencia, drug dealers “Ketamine Queen” aka Jasveen Sangha and Eric Fleming, and Perry’s live-in assistant Kenneth Iwamasa.

Who Are These Names And What Did They Do?

Ketamine Queen or Sangha supplied drugs that led to Perry’s death. Her home was a “drug-selling emporium,” said Estrada. More than 80 vials of ketamine, and thousands of pills including methamphetamine, cocaine and Xanax were allegedly found in her house known as the “Sangha Stash House.”

Sangha is known to deal with high-end celebs and was a “major source of supply for ketamine to others as well as Perry,” said Estrada.

Dr Plasencia called Perry a “moron” while charging him $2,000 for vials that cost only $12. He sold Perry 20 vials of ketamine between September and October 2023, costing $55,000.

He was the one who taught Iwamasa, who had no medical knowledge to inject the drug. This is after he knew that “Perry’s ketamine addiction was spiralling out of control,” as per what the investigators told the BBC.

Another dealer Fleming was told by Sangha to “delete all our messages.” While Fleming pleaded guilty to conspiring to distribute drugs unlawfully, he also allegedly messaged Sangha: “Please call...Got more info and want to bounce ideas off you. I’m 90% sure everyone is protected. I never dealt with [Perry] only his assistant. So the assistant was the enabler.”

The court documents also revealed that he asked Sangha on whether the ketamine stays in your system or “is it immediately flushed out.”

Dr Pepper, Bots, Cans

The people who allegedly exploited Perry used coded language for ketamine and called it “Dr Pepper”, “bots”, or “cans.”

Selling overpriced drugs, taking advantage of Perry’s mental condition and falsifying medical records to make the drugs given to him look legitimate by Dr Plasencia is what took Perry’s life.

Iwamasa is said to have administered more than 20 shots of ketamine and three on the day Perry died. Whereas ketamine is only administered by a physician. Authorities also found that weeks before Perry’s death, Dr Plasencia allegedly bought 10 vials of ketamine and intended to sell to Perry.

He also injected Perry with a large dose, two days later. This caused him to “freeze up” and spiked his blood pressure.

When I Die, I Want Helping Others To Be The First Thing That’s Mentioned

Perry had always been open about his drug addictions, struggles with alcohol and his depression. He said that his openness would help others who are also struggling and wanted to be remembered by his quote which also is on the homepage of the Mattew Perry Foundation that helps others struggling with the disease of addiction: “When I die, I want helping others to be the first thing that’s mentioned.”

Five arrests have been made in the case so far.

The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has proposed restricting the manufacture and sale of analogue dairy products as “paneer.”

The draft Food Safety and Standards (Prohibition and Restrictions on Sales) Amendment Regulations, 2026, seeks to amend the 2011 regulations to specifically include “paneer made of constituents not derived from milk” among products whose sale would be restricted.

The move aims to prevent consumers from being misled about the nature and composition of such products and comes amid concerns over spurious dairy products.

What Does The Proposed Rule Say?

The proposed amendment seeks to insert a new clause under Regulation 2.1.1 of the existing regulations covering “paneer made of constituents not derived from milk.”

Products made using paneer or cheese analogues would therefore have to be clearly identified to consumers.

“Products already licensed or registered under the ‘Analogue in Dairy Context’ category would be required to discontinue the use of the term ‘Paneer’ in their nomenclature, labelling or marketing,” FSSAI said.

“The proposed amendment is aimed at ensuring that the nomenclature and presentation of food products accurately reflect their nature and composition, thereby enabling consumers to make informed choices,” the food regulator added.

Since this is a draft regulation, FSSAI has invited objections and suggestions from stakeholders and members of the public.

The draft will be considered after 60 days, and the submissions received during this period will be considered before the proposed amendment is finalised.

Who Will Be Affected?

The proposed amendment would affect food business operators, including hotels, restaurants and catering services, that use substitutes for traditional dairy-based paneer or cheese products.

FSSAI said businesses using such products would need to prominently disclose this information at consumer touchpoints, including menu cards and packaging labels, in accordance with the Food Safety and Standards (Labelling and Display) Regulations.

In August, Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh banned the manufacture and sale of non-dairy paneer, commonly referred to as analogue paneer or analogue cottage cheese.

Dairy Paneer Vs Analogue Paneer

Traditional paneer is a fresh, soft, non-melting cheese commonly used in Indian cuisine. It is made by curdling milk with acidic ingredients such as lemon juice, vinegar or citric acid, followed by separation of the curds from the whey. The curds are then drained and pressed to remove excess water.

Analogue paneer, on the other hand, is made using non-dairy ingredients such as vegetable fats or oils and starches instead of milk fat.

Under FSSAI regulations:

• Paneer must be made from milk.
• Products containing non-dairy ingredients cannot be presented as conventional paneer.
• Analogue products must be appropriately identified so consumers are aware of their nature and composition.

How Can Consumers Check The Product?

Consumers can start by checking the product label and menu description.

• Read the label: Look for terms such as “analogue” or “imitation” where applicable.
• Check the ingredients: Look for non-dairy fats, vegetable oils, starches or other substitutes.
• Check the product description: At restaurants and other food-service establishments, consumers can ask whether the paneer being served is dairy-based or an analogue product.

Home tests sometimes promoted online, including iodine or toor dal tests, should not be treated as definitive methods for identifying adulterated paneer. Laboratory testing is required to establish the composition of a food product reliably.

AI company Anthropic’s chatbot Claude has discovered a novel enzyme system with properties resembling CRISPR, a gene-editing technology.

The finding comes from Anthropic’s new life sciences research group and laboratory, established earlier this year to use Claude to explore DNA datasets, identify uncharacterized protein families and generate hypotheses for laboratory testing.

Anthropic said Claude autonomously identified an enzyme system associated with an array of DNA repeats, a pattern similar to CRISPR.

“Although we don’t yet know its function, the system that Claude discovered has a set of characteristics that have only ever been found together in a handful of other systems, all of which are programmable and perform operations like cutting, copying, and pasting DNA,” the company said in a blog post.

What Is The Enzyme System?

The system is based on reverse transcriptase (RT), an enzyme that copies RNA into DNA. Anthropic said Claude was the first to identify the combination of features defining the system, which researchers named array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART).

ART was identified in bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, according to a preprint.

“These findings indicate that LLMs can autonomously detect anomalies and drive analyses to initiate biological discoveries,” the researchers said.

“This is an exciting example of how AI agents can contribute to biological discovery. The identification of RNA-repeat arrays associated with reverse transcriptases is genuinely intriguing and merits further investigation. I hope this work encourages more scientists to explore how AI can support their research,” said Feng Zhang, a CRISPR pioneer and professor at MIT and the Broad Institute, after reviewing the preprint.

How Claude Found ART

Anthropic researchers prompted Claude to search a massive DNA database for unusual reverse transcriptases.

After 21 hours of searching by roughly 950 agents using 210 million tokens, one agent identified a repeating DNA sequence next to the gene for an unusual RT.

Further analysis and laboratory testing showed that the pattern marked a previously uncharacterized enzyme system in bacteriophages. Anthropic said research into ART’s function is ongoing.

What Are The Implications For Gene Editing?

It is too early to know whether ART can become a gene-editing tool, and researchers have not yet established what ART does or whether it can be programmed to make precise changes to DNA.

If future research shows that ART can recognize or manipulate specific genetic sequences, it could potentially offer another system for studying gene editing.

Its properties could also reveal new ways biological systems recognize, copy or modify genetic material, potentially leading to tools with capabilities different from existing CRISPR technologies.

For now, the key finding is that AI helped identify a previously uncharacterized biological system that can now be studied experimentally.

How AI Is Changing Gene-Editing Research

AI is increasingly being used in gene-editing research. In 2025, Stanford Medicine researchers reported CRISPR-GPT, an AI system designed to assist with gene-editing workflows, including generating designs, analyzing data and troubleshooting problems.

While CRISPR-GPT helps researchers use existing gene-editing tools, Claude’s latest discovery involves identifying a previously uncharacterized biological system.

The findings highlight a potential new role for AI in biology: helping researchers discover biological systems that could eventually become new research tools.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could soon implement measures to speed up processes that help companies obtain approvals for new vaping products and nicotine pouches, according to a Reuters report that cited in a Wall Street Journal report.

The agency is expected to revisit rules introduced in 2021 to simplify some scientific requirements and shorten timelines of review of these products, allowing them to move through the approval process swiftly and smoothly.

It is important to note that Reuters could not verify the report independently. The FDA, too, had not responded to a request for a comment.

The development is slightly alarming as even though these products are often positioned as alternatives to traditional cigarettes, they are not essentially safer.

Are Vapes Safer Than Conventional Cigarettes?

Most e-cigarettes contain nicotine, which is a highly addictive substance. The aerosol produced by a vape can also contain harmful substances, including cancer-causing chemicals, heavy metals like nickel, tin and lead, and other tiny particles that can travel into the lungs, leaving lasting damage.

It is also important to understand that the long-term effects of vaping are still being studied.

For adults who already smoke cigarettes, the FDA says switching completely to e-cigarettes may reduce damage that stem from harmful chemicals found in cigarette smoke.

But continuing to smoke while vaping, known as dual use, does not provide any benefit. Hence, FDA authorisation is not a declaration or proof that a product is risk-free.

Also read: Never Smoked, Still Got Lung Cancer? Rare Gene Mutation Linked To Over 60x Risk

Nicotine Pouches

Nicotine pouches do not produce smoke or an inhaled aerosol. Instead, the pouch is placed in the mouth, where nicotine is absorbed through the gums and lining of the mouth. Again, nicotine pouches may pose lesser risk than tobacco cigarettes, but it still contains nicotine.

The FDA says nicotine pouches can generally be a lower-risk alternative for adults who smoke cigarettes if they switch completely, because they can reduce exposure to many harmful chemicals found in cigarettes. But they are not risk-free, and the FDA has not approved nicotine pouches as medicines to help quit smoking.

The agency has already authorised some nicotine pouch products after reviewing their risks and benefits. In August 2026, it authorised four additional products through its nicotine pouch pilot programme.

Nicotine is highly addictive and can affect the brain, especially in the younger population. Nicotine pouches can also contain relatively high levels of nicotine, and scientists are still studying their short as well as long-term health effects.

Also read: It’s Not Just Tobacco: The Hidden Oral Cancer Risks We Rarely Talk About

Why FDA Is Pushing For Does Faster Approval For These Products?

The FDA's move is essentially about how quickly products can be reviewed and approved, not about removing the requirement that products meet a specific public-health standard.

The FDA says authorised products must prove that their benefits for the public as a whole is greater than the risks they pose.

At the same time, it continues to state that there are no safe tobacco products, and people who do not use tobacco should not start using vapes or nicotine pouches.