[Enter Subtitle Here] to be cool that is like other people


So it's been a long day. Tuesdays are always the worst days, I get into the lab at 8 and catchup on items I need to do for the labs during the week, then teach Aquatic Botany lab for 3 hours, finally sitting through Medicinal Botany for 3 hours. Which ends up me getting back to my apartment around 9.

Long freakin day.

Medicinal Botany is an excellent class but doing a 3 hour lecture is hard. Even with enough breaks it still ends up seeming long. Today we talked about poisons. Useless nugget of information: It is possible to poison someone with enough apple seeds. Apple seeds are a cyanogenic glycoside. Meaning that when bitten into a reaction occurs in which Hydrogen Cynonide, or cynanide gas. To affect a person you need about 4mg/kg. So you would need about 0.4g to kill 100 kg person. Which is about 50 seeds. Unfortunately the seeds need to be broken, or massicated(chewed). So if you take a nail file and scratch the seed coat a little it would work. So it's possible to kill someone with an apple seed. So listen to those old wives tales, they do have some truth in them. Well minus the whole growing in your stomach thing.

Of course the funny thing today was, most of these toxins have to be ingested orally. Now my question is this, are there people stupid enough out to to put everything in their mouth?? I already know the answer to that, but damn, at least it cleans the gene pool.

More tidbits of information, Ricin, extracted from the castor bean seed, which you can also get castor oil which was/is used as a laxative. Ricin is consider the #3 poison by the FBI, behind plutonium and botulism. Ricin is a protein extracted from the castor bean, which is very easy to extract, as apparent by the people who extract. (i.e. a Minnesota Paramilitary group) The interesting thing that is does is bind to ribosomes. Now ribosomes are used in transcription of RNA into proteins for use in the cell. Now why is that important?? Because transcription is basically how a cell lives (there are other functions but no need to explain that right now). So what ricin does is bind to the ribosomes preventing transcription, preventing the cell for continuing it's exsitence. It can be a quick death if given in a high dose, or it can be painful. One example is a the KGB. The KGB used it to assassinate a journalist speaking out against the Kremlin. They took a normal umbrealla, hollowed it out and put 250 ug (that should be a mu, for micrograms) and walked by stabbing that unfortuntate man. It took him 4 days to die for bleeding and hemoragging. Noticed I said micrograms. 250 micrograms eqaute to about 4000 uses in 1 gram of substance. How much is one gram?? Not a hell of alot, it's about the size of a small pinch. Of course ricin maybe injested or it can be absorbed dermally, but it takes a long time and is not as effective. The Minnesota Paramilitary I mentioned earlier had about 250 grams of it, which is a quarter of a kilo, a kilo weighs about 3 pounds.

Just think about that.