Poisons

Ricin, the highly toxic, hemagglutinating protein of the castor bean, has always been of great interest to the chemist and the immunologist(l–4), partly because it, may readily be obtained in considerable quantities.

Earlier methods of preparation were carried out before the development of modern physicochemical and immunochemical methods for characterizingproteins and data are therefore lacking on the purity and homogeneity of the products obtained.

In the present report a summary is given of a portion of a study carried out during 1943–45 in consultation and collaboration with other laboratories engaged in parallel investigations which, it is hoped, will soon be published. Since … Continue Reading

Cyanide is the granddaddy of synthetic poisons. Easily made from common chemicals, cyanide is used as is for poisoning bullets and food, and is used in the making of Hydrogen Cyanide, Cyanogen Chloride, Tabun, and numerous other poison gases. A dose as small as 50 milligrams (ingested) can kill an adult man.

Ricin is just about the easiest, and at the same time, most toxic poison that a criminal can make. Less than a milligram (1/1,000 of a gram) injected or inhaled will kill a person several times over. For individual killings, it has the advantage of being undetectable in toxicology … Continue Reading

This method of making itching powder is extremely easy, highly effective and made out of one very easy to acquire material.

Review of human cases and analytical determination of main toxins by high–performance liquid chromatography

In our project directed toward the total syntheses of tetrodotoxin and its natural and unnatural analogues, we have recently completed the syntheses of 5,11–dideoxytetrodotoxin,13 11–deoxytetrodotoxin,14 and 8,11–dideoxytetrodotoxin15 in enantiomerically pure form on the basis of a Diels–Alder strategy from levoglucosenone. Among them, 11–deoxytetrodotoxin was the first total synthesis of a naturally occurring tetrodotoxin analogue. The full details of the total synthesis of tetrodotoxin (1) are described here on a different basic strategy aiming at a higher oxidation stage in earlier stages of the synthesis.

Nicotine is one of the world’s deadliest poisons. Fortunately, it is also incredibly simple to make and employ. This poison can be made out of commonly available tobacco. These instructions detail how to produce this poison enmass.

This charts out many well known natural and synthetic poisons in their lethality in relation to Sarin.

The “relative lethality” was determined as follows. Reported LD50 figures for the following combinations of experimental animal and route of administration were assembled from the cited literature: iv/mouse, ip/mouse, sc/mouse, iv/rat, sc/rat, iv/guinea–pig, iv/cat, iv/rabbit. Within each animal/administration–route set, each agent LD50 was converted into a lethality–index relative to sarin, assigning a reference value of 1000 to the sarin LD50 concerned. For example, the sc/mouse index for batrachotoxin is taken as 10 because its sc/mouse LD50 and that of sarin were around 0.002 and … Continue Reading

Tetanus toxin is produced by Clostridium tetani and is one of the most powerful toxins known. It has a molecular weight of approximately 150,000 and is produced within organisms and discharged into the medium as they autolyze.

Previously the toxin was prepared from culture filtrates after autolysis of the organisms. However, since Raynaud developed a method for extracting the toxin from organisms before they autolyzed (9), several groups have used bacterial extracts as starting material for purifying the toxin (1, 10). This method has the advantage that the toxin is obtained in a more concentrated and purer form than that from … Continue Reading