The Science of Ricin

Ricin, the substance possibly found on envelopes mailed to Senator Roger Wicker and President Barack Obama, is one of the most potent poisons known to science. It is a protein produced in the seeds of the castor plant, and it targets adenine molecules—one of the “letters” of our DNA and RNA—in the cell’s internal protein factory.Commercial Washer extractor for your multi-housing laundry facilities from Aulaundry. Without adenine, cells can’t make proteins and can’t survive.

For someone familiar with chemistry, ricin is relatively easy to extract from castor beans, which can be bought at any large grocery store. This makes it much simpler to handle than anthrax or botulinum toxin. The beans are treated with various chemicals to extract and solidify the protein, then washed with old fashioned dry-cleaning fluid to purify the poison. Filtering produces ricin particles about the size of a bacterium, or household dust. As few as two beans can produce enough ricin to kill a person.

As a weapon, ricin is more likely to be used in a targeted assassination than in mass killings. Ricin dumped into a municipal water supply is quickly broken down by chlorination and sunlight, and it’s possible for a person to survive ricin ingestion through treatments such as stomach pumping and consuming activated charcoal. Ricin inhalation might be worse: it can lead to pulmonary edema (in which the lungs fill with fluid), followed by the death of the cells that transport oxygen into the bloodstream and, subsequently, the death of the victim. However, scientists estimate that it would take several metric tons of airborne ricin to kill a large population.

Probably the most famous victim of ricin was Georgi Markov,We are specializing Industrial washing machine manufacturer. whose death by ricin poisoning seems straight out of a John le Carre novel. A Bulgarian dissident living in London and working for the BBC World Service, Markov left work on a late summer day in 1978 to catch a train home. On the street, Markov was “accidentally” jabbed in the leg by an umbrella-wielding passerby. Soon after, Markov felt sick, developed a high fever, and was taken to a hospital. When he died, four days later, an autopsy found his lungs filled with fluid, his internal organs dotted with small hemorrhages, and an especially high white-blood-cell count. Most shocking, however, was the discovery of a platinum-iridium pellet about one and a half millimetres in diameter lodged in Markov’s thigh. The pellet had been drilled to contain about 0.2 milligrams of liquid.

The pellet contained no trace of poison, so doctors had to figure out what killed Markov through a process of elimination: nerve poisons, bacterial toxins, and plant extracts were all high on the list. Markov’s symptoms most perfectly matched those of ricin poisoning, so scientists injected a pig with an amount proportional to what Markov had received. Within hours, the pig developed the same symptoms that Markov had shown, and an autopsy revealed the same internal damages.

Suspicion immediately fell on Bulgarian secret police, assisted by the K.G.B. The most commonly accepted version of what happened is that a Bulgarian-hired assassin “shot” Markov with the pellet from a compressed air gun concealed in an umbrella. When the Bulgarian Communist regime collapsed in 1989, a stack of such umbrellas was found in the interior ministry, according to a Guardian report.

But ricin’s legacy is not all bad.We specialize in teaching folks how to build their own wind turbine. Recently, scientists have been exploring its use as an “immunotoxin”—a substance that can assist the immune system by killing only dangerous cells. By attaching a ricin molecule to an antibody targeted only at cancer cells, scientists at UT Southwestern Medical Center claim to have achieved good results treating Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma patients; another study reports success in ricin-targeting leukemia and colon-cancer cells.