FACTORALY - E36 POISON

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

Poison is popular in crime fiction and around everywhere in, usually, in safe quantities, unless you live in Australia!This time, we go deep into venom and poison and come out with a healthy respect for toxins - but not the sort you need to flush out after a bit of exercise! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello Simon! Hello Bruce, how are you today? I'm absolutely wonderful, how are you? Good to hear, I am not too shabby, thank you. No, you're looking terribly smart. I'm surprised you turned up wearing white tie and tails for this. Well, it seemed like the sort of day, you know, I found my white top hat sitting in the wardrobe the other day and I thought, why not? Let's use this on an audio podcast where no one but Bruce can sing. Well, I have to say you look very dapper.

Thank you so much. I really am enjoying your bright orange cravat. We'll leave it entirely up to our audience to tell whether we're lying or not. Well, quite. So it's another episode of Fact or Really. It certainly is. Yes. What is Fact or Really? Well, for the uninitiated, Fact or Really is a weekly podcast in which the two of us sit together and we chat

about random facts. We pick a topic each week, we do some research, we find some interesting things to pick out of it, and we talk about them. And you, our lovely listeners, get to listen to our wonderfully soothing tones, spouting all sorts of trivial nonsense for about half an hour. And this week we are talking all about poison. Poison. Now, I always feel the urge to say the word poison in a slightly mysterious, dangerous, creepy voice. Either a sort of a witchy, warlocky,

Poison! Yes. Or something like that. I always say mine with a skull and crossbones. Do you? Yes. Pronounce that for me. Arr.

There you go. Tune in another day for an episode on pirates. Yes. So, yeah, poison. It's another one of those big topics, isn't it? It's like, you know, we might as well have just researched food. Yeah, exactly. It's quite a large topic.

It's absolutely vast and very deadly. It can be quite deadly depending on what it is, how much it is and who's taking it. Yes. Well, you say taking it because there's a difference, isn't there, between something that's poisonous and something that's venomous. Oh, I love the fact that you've gone there because that's exactly where I started. That's great. Well done. Go on then. If it's poisonous, you're biting it. Yes.

If it's venomous, it's biting or stinging or scratching you. Yeah. It's all about the delivery method, isn't it? Yeah. I read this on the Natural History Museum of London website. Aha. And there's a gentleman who works there called Dr. Ronald Jenner. Ah. And he came up with this thing called Ronald's Rule, which I love.

If you bite it and you die, it's poison. If it bites you and you die, it's venom. That's great, isn't it? Isn't that good? Yeah. So simplistic. Yes. So poisons have been around since forever. Yes, I would imagine so.

Because they're usually sort of naturally occurring. Yeah, they exist in plants, they exist in animals, so that other predators are less likely to eat them. There are leaves, there are berries, there are bits of bark, there are mushrooms, there are all sorts of naturally occurring things. When does it count as a poison, though? For example, if you get stung by a stinging nettle. Yes. I mean technically you're being poisoned a bit. Right yes I thought the same thing. It's basically subjective whether or not something is poisonous is subjective. So you often quantify this by virtue of context so chocolate is not poisonous to you and i large quantities of

chocolate can be poisonous to baxter your dog yes yes so it depends on how much of it you're taking and who it is who's taking it human animal grown up or child um many many things are poisonous if you eat enough bananas i'm told they can be poisonous and you could die. Oh. But you would have to eat thousands upon thousands of them. And I reckon if you're eating thousands upon thousands of anything, Yes. you will probably die.

It's going to kill you. So it's all relative and it's all subjective. Actually, there is a way of quantifying it. Oh, go on. There's a scale. There's a poison scale called the LD50 scale. I didn't come across that. Tell me more. So the LD50 scale is lethal dose, 50% of the population.

So if it's lethal for half the population, then how much of that is lethal? It's measured in micrograms or nanograms per kilogram. Oh, I see. Okay. So you'll get an LD scale of like one to three per kilo or something like that. So it's one to three nanograms per kilogram. I see. So that's a recognized way of understanding poison and how strong it is. Quite similar to our previous episode on curries. Yes.

Which don't exist. The heat scale on that. Yes, exactly. Brilliant. Okay. Yes. So, I mean, not on that scale at all, but there are poisons which we take every day, like cyanide is found in rice, wheat, sugar, beans, cassava, maize, so many different things. And then there are things like tomatoes, which are toxic as well. Tomatoes, green potatoes, rhubarb. If you eat enough, rhubarb contains something called oxalic acid. You'd have to eat 11 pounds of raw rhubarb

to actually affect you in any way um but yeah all of all of these things you know elderberries have the ability to make you feel a bit queasy if you eat enough of them yeah um raw bitter almonds contain an amount of cyanide as well yes but you'd have to eat about 1200 of them for it to you know so it's all relative. Yes, it is. There are some foods which are particularly poisonous. There's a Jamaican fruit called the aki fruit, which if it's unripe, can do you some serious harm. Unpasteurized cheese is not forbidden, but I think restricted in America because the bacteria in it can do you some harm. Yes.

So these things are all around us. It just depends on how careful you are with it and how much of it you eat. Yes, exactly. You've mentioned a lot of fruits and vegetables. There's also a lot of animals that we sort of can eat or shouldn't eat. Do you know what? I was chatting with one of our listeners the other day and she said, you know, you really use that quote from Jurassic Park quite a lot these days. Yes. But you've just forced me to use it again. Just because you could, it doesn't necessarily mean that you should.

Yes. Eat a pufferfish, for example. Yes, exactly. Tell us about pufferfish. Well, pufferfish contain a toxin called tetrodotoxin. Well pronounced. Very good. Thank you very much. Which is also found in octopi, salamanders and worms. Really? But the Japanese have this thing where if you serve a sushi of pufferfish,

what it does is the toxin can kill you. Yeah. But it can also give you like a little buzz on your tongue and the inside of your mouth. It's like eating a, if you're allergic to strawberries or something, it's that kind of fizz that you get from an allergic reaction. So you eat the pufferfish for that very slight poisoning of the inside of your mouth. Right. So you deliberately poison yourself for the fun. Yes.. Right, so you deliberately poison yourself for the fun. Yes, but we deliberately poison ourselves all the time.

We drink alcohol. Yes. Alcohol is a toxin. Absolutely, yeah. And it can kill you. There was a guy at Nuremberg Airport, a 64-year-old bloke, who was fed up with this 10-milliliter rule. Right.

And he had a liter of vodka. Okay. I think I can see where this is going. He just downed it completely and then died. Goodness me. So alcohol poisoning, it's all dependent on quantity and rapidity of consumption. So you and I both like a drink.

You're rather partial to wine. I'm rather partial to beer. If you drink it slowly and in a measured and sensible way your body doesn't have the ability to filter it out quite that quickly um your body naturally filters toxins out and if you drink it slow enough then it's okay but if you drink it too fast it doesn't have time to to catch up um and it can cause all sorts of things from sort of nausea and vomiting to um palpitations to heart attacks to all sorts of things from sort of nausea and vomiting to palpitations to heart attacks to all sorts of nastiness. And I saw a figure that said just under two and a half thousand people in the USA die from alcohol poisoning every year. Wow. Two and a half thousand.

But we also smoke. Nicotine is another, again, another poison. It's a defensive poison. You can also find nicotine in tomatoes. Can you really? And peppers and aubergine and cauliflower. I didn't know that. The downside of nicotine is it can increase the incidence of Parkinson's disease. Oh, really? Yes.

Actually, talking of Parkinson. Yes. James Parkinson, who discovered the disease and named it after himself, was once suspected of planning to kill George III with a poisoned dart. Really? Yes. That's a really, that's, wow, that's a very obscure fact. Thank you.

So George III could have been killed by Parkinson's dart. Dart. How interesting. So getting back to frogs. That's a phrase you don't hear terribly often. One has this impression of sort of like South Americans going around scraping their blow darts on the backs of frogs. Yes, you would. And there is obviously aarts on the backs of frogs. Yes, you would. And there is obviously a frog called the poison dart frog.

Yes. But they actually aren't toxic in themselves. Oh. Because if you remove the poison dart frog from the jungle where you find it and feed it a normal diet, it becomes non-toxic. Really? It's only toxic because of what it eats? It eats these beetles, which are incredibly toxic. And then it sweats the poison from the beetles out.

So basically, if you touch a poison dart frog in the jungle, the toxin from the beetles will kill you. Right. So it's not necessarily a deliberate, purposeful, evolutionary defense mechanism. It's just the fact that it eats poisonous beetles. Yes. That's great. But a lot of poisonous things eat other poisonous things as well. Yes, I'm sure.

Because they have a sort of a built-in immunity to the poison. That's right. Yes. And in fact, the Chinese, many years ago, invented a thing called goo. Right. So what they did was they put lizards and snakes and scorpions and beetles all into a box and just let them have at each other. Right. And they would then open the box.

It's not quite like Schrodinger, but they would then open the box and one animal or one insect or whatever would still be alive. And then they would take that animal and use the venom, poison, toxicity of that animal to create the most terrible poison you could ever possibly imagine. I'll put a link to this story in the show notes at factorially.com. A wonderful repository of additional facts for you to read at your leisure, folks. Yes. And this Chinese poison was called Gu. Gu, G-U. Right. I wonder whether the chocolate mousse manufacturer did their research and realised what they were naming it after. Well, quite. As we started off talking about the difference between poisons and venoms,

there's a snake called the spitting cobra, which is actually both. It's poisonous and venomous. Oh, right. It's venomous because it can bite you and inject venom. Yeah. It's also poisonous because it can spit poison through the air, which then lands on your skin and is poisonous. Oh, wow.

So it is both. Meerkats have built up an immunity to snake poison slash venom. And so you'll regularly see a meerkat having at it with a snake. Or indeed, going back to another previous episode, mongooses. Mongeese? Mongeese. Mongi? I think. Mongeese.

The mongoose also has an immunity to this sort of thing as well, which is why they are able to wrangle snakes. Yes. In fact, there's a record. There was a snake charmer called Kum Chaibadi in Thailand who holds a world record, which he got in 2006, for kissing 19 king cobras. I mean, why?

Why? Obviously to advertise his snake charming business. I wonder what stopped him from doing the nice round 20. Was the 20th snake just a little bit too aggressive? So you talked about the Chinese deliberately using the poison or the venom from animals to make a poison. So this is the other side of poison. We've talked about naturally occurring poisons. Then we move into the area of poisoning. Yes.

People using poison to poison other people, which is a big old area in itself. I hadn't quite realized just how many literary examples of poisoning I could think of. It's absolutely everywhere. Poison appears quite a lot in Arthur Conan Doyle's books about Sherlock Holmes. Poison is used in Shakespeare, you know, the witches in Macbeth, if I'm allowed to say that out loud. Hamlet, they put poison on the tip of a sword and pour poison in someone's ear and put poison in someone's goblet. Romeo and Juliet have the whole, spoilers if you haven't read it. It's quite good. They have the whole thing with the poison at the end of the show.

And Agatha Christie, the 1920s, 30s crime fiction writer, was absolutely obsessed with people being poisoned. Out of her 66 crime fiction books, over 30 of her characters were dispatched by use of poison. Ah, interesting. And apparently Agatha Christie was a nurse in the First World War. Not World War I, as the Americans would call it. Thank you very much.

You're welcome. And she passed an exam. I love this fact. She passed an exam to be an apothecary's apprentice, which was still a title back then. And she worked in a field hospital making prescriptions back in the days when prescriptions were made by the chemist by hand from scratch. Yeah. So she really knew her way around the different components to various medicines. Yes.

And she just became really, really interested in it. And she incorporated that in a lot of her stories. People were poisoned with arsenic and cyanide and strychnine and all sorts of things. And arsenic became a favourite because it's clear and it's flavourless. And it doesn't really show an awful lot of symptoms other than death. And it's a lovely bright green colour. Is it? I thought it was colourless. It is colourless, except when you mix it up to make wallpaper colours.

Oh, OK. I feel that needs some further explanation, please. So in Victorian times, when they were making very bright colours, and William Morris was making his brightly colored wallpapers and things like this. In fact, even before then, there were brightly colored wallpapers and they used arsenic as an ingredient to enhance the colors, especially the green colors of patterns in wallpaper. It was said, actually, that Napoleon, through prolonged exposure to arsenic, both in wallpaper and in everything else in the world at that time, died of arsenic poisoning. Really? When they tested his samples of his hair, they found significant amounts of arsenic, which led people to believe that the British had poisoned him. But actually, it could just as easily have come from inhaling wallpaper.

Right. Well, who knew? But William Morris came up with this wonderful, beautiful wallpaper with these vibrant greens in the wallpaper. And then somebody said to him, well, you know arsenic that you're using is a poison. And he went, fake news. It's all just fake news. It's the doctors. They're just trying to get at you. And he wouldn't believe that arsenic was poisonous until it was proved to him that it was.

And then he made this arsenic-free wallpaper. Oh, wow. What branding. Advertised as such. Wow. Wonderful. Isn't that bizarre that of this generation, I didn't realize that arsenic was anything other than a poison. Well, and face powder, of course.

Because, you know, when you see these television shows where they're all wearing powdered wigs and they have, like, white faces? Yes. The white faces that they had then was a powder made of arsenic. Really? Yes. I mean, that's not very healthy, is it? So, again, inhaling and, you know, if you kiss somebody with an arsty face.

Wow. again inhaling and you know if you kiss somebody with an arse sticky face wow now this is an interesting segue you mentioned the use of arsenic in making hair powder yes the powder you put on your wig um a nickname in the early 20th century for arsenic was air powder ah h-e-i-r powder yes because it was such a subtle toxin you know um poisoning someone with cyanide turns their lips blue poisoning someone with strychnine makes them foam at the mouth it's all fairly obvious that they've been done in poison someone with arsenic slip some arsenic in their tea or in their cucumber sandwiches and they die and it's relatively untraceable so it was the favored poison for um should we say people who wanted to make their inheritance slightly faster than otherwise it might be yes hence air powder very good it was always seen i think poison has often been seen as the the woman's weapon it's like you know women would would resort to poison

as opposed to picking up a huge heavy sword and stabbing somebody with it. It's more subtle, it's more clever, it's more cunning, it's more beguiling. A bloke will just charge straight in with a big dagger. One of the experts in poisoning was Lucretia Borgia. Of course. Who actually took her... Before her, there was a woman called Parorgia. Of course. Who actually took her, there was, before her, there was a woman called Parasatis.

Right. Who worked out a way of poisoning one side of a knife so that you could share food with somebody and say, I'm not going to try and poison you. See this apple, or in Parasatis' case, I think it was a chicken or some sort of fowl. Right. They said, we'll eat from the same chicken.

I'll just chop you off a slice here. Yeah. There you go. There's your slice. Here's my slice. Oh, so. And one side of it was poisoned. Did they suspect foul play?

I'm sorry. That was just open for me. Do we have a wah, wah, wah noise? I'll find one. Insert wah, wah, wah noise? I'll find one. Insert wah, wah, wah noise here. Lucretia also invented a thing called Cantarella. Right. Nobody really knows what was in Cantarella,

but it was said that you could actually put a dose that could either bring instant death or death in several weeks. Oh, my goodness. You see this in shows and stuff where they have a ring with a flip top. Yeah. And so you flip up the ring and then inside is a white powder. Then you put that into a drink or something. And Cantarella was tasteless, odorous, transparent.

All that stuff. If you were suffering from flatulence during the 1930s and 40s, in much the same way as Adolf Hitler was suffering from uncontrolled flatulence, you might turn to Dr. Costa's anti-gas pills. That's where I always go. That's where Adolf went. Really? And in Dr. Costa's anti-gas pills. That's where I always go. That's where Adolf went. Really? And in Dr. Costa's anti-gas pills, it was a mixture of strychnine and belladonna.

Oh, great. Okay. Okay. Dr. What's-it-who-is-what-it? Dr. Costa's anti-gas pills. I'll put a link in the show notes. Sounds like he was a friend of Dr. Foster who went to Gloucester. Yes, in a shower of rain.

That's the one. As I was researching arsenic and things like this that were sort of used as a deliberate poison back in the day, I came across a quote which I love, which I'm really upset to find out, may or may not be authentic, but the story goes that it's a conversation between winston churchill and lady aster who were who were not the best of friends and reputedly uh lady aster said sir if i were your wife i would put arsenic in your tea and churchill replied madam if i were your husband i would drink it and um it's one of my favorite quotes and it's completely not true it wasn't those two at all no of course it's true all of these things that may or may not be true are always true all true

um what is definitely true is that groucho marx of the marx brothers once used something very very similar he said he got it from george bernard shaw george bernard shaw said he got it from an old uh newspaper from new york called the listener they said they got it from an old newspaper from New York called The Listener. They said they got it from someone else, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But it's a great quote, so I'm using it anyway. Yeah, I think you should. One thing we haven't talked about. Go on.

And I know that our friend Greg is not going to enjoy us talking about this. Okay. Australia. Oh, no. and I know that our friend Greg is not going to enjoy us talking about this Australia Oh no Sorry Greg I think we should talk about Australia Why anybody would ever want to live there or go there? I have no idea I mean we've just done a section on venomous snakes

I know they have big poisonous spiders. I'm never going to go to Australia. I'm just not. Okay. So on the list of the world's most venomous snakes. Yes. Like the Taipan. Yes.

Australia. Right. The Central Ranges Taipan, Australia. Right. The Coastal Taipan, Australia. And these are all like 0.01 milligrams per kilo. They're like the most deadly thing there is. The black tiger snake, the eastern brown snake.

Then there are funnel web spiders. And that's just on the ground. That's just on land. If you go for a swim, it's terrible. There's a thing called a box jellyfish, which is absolutely deadly. And what it does is you kind of panic to death because it's tiny. It's about the size of a peanut. And there's been 5,000 deaths in the last 10 years from these things.

Crikey. And it encourages you to release a hormone called noradrenaline. And that's basically a fight or flight hormone right and you effectively you panic to death when you're stung by a box jellyfish really wouldn't it be funny if that was all just a gag right so you get stung by this jellyfish and you can't see it because you said it's really small but you panic because it's a jellyfish and we all know that jellyfish are really really dangerous yes and and actually maybe it's not poisonous at all maybe it's a harmless little jellyfish but you panic anyway yeah maybe it's all a ruse and that call causes

hundreds of deaths yes yes no fine so there's also the thing called a blue ringed octopus which is also deadly right and so yeah going in the sea, you're either going to get eaten by a shark, stung by an octopus, or you could also accidentally touch a stonefish. Right. So the barb from a stonefish can kill a shark. Really? It is absolutely excruciatingly painful if you ever touch a stonefish. When you're out scuba diving, if the person in front of you puts their left hand level

and then makes a fist with their right hand and puts that on the top of their left hand, stay away because they've just spotted a stonefish. Wow. And the pain is so severe that people have actually got knives out and tried to cut their legs off and things. They've been stung with it a less extreme way of getting rid of the sting is to put whatever's been stung into very very hot water so like 45 degrees centigrade because that kills the venom so basically cook cook your own leg cook your own leg will kill the venom wow now you mentioned earlier on um that particular poison which shuts down all your nervous system

uh something else that does that is um poisoned apples oh as um as earlier earlier alluded to briefly um one of the first things i thought of when i started looking at poison was the poison apple used in uh snow white okay. And that idea of the apple, because it looks so good, you know, the little old lady gives Snow White the apple, it looks so delicious. And apples used to be a symbol of virility and life. Fertility, yes.

And all that sort of stuff. So the fact that this thing was poisoned and caused her to not die, but, you know, look like she was dead, was a real juxtaposition. And I started looking at poisoned apples. And I hadn't realised two real-life people either died from or tried to kill someone with a poisoned apple.

Oh, wow. One was Richard Oppenheimer. What? Yeah. Richard Oppenheimer, about whom there's been a recent movie made, when he was a student, he laced an apple with arsenic and put it on his teacher's desk because he had a really bad relationship with this teacher.

Thankfully, he had a near miss and either he didn't take it didn't take it or he took it, but it didn't work. I don't think I've found a definitive answer to that. But another person. I know who your second one is going to be. Of course you do. Is it Alan Turing? It's Alan Turing. So I didn't know this, but in 1952,

Alan Turing, computer scientist, enigma guy, et cetera, was found dead with an apple in his hand that had had a bite taken out of it and it turned out that the apple was completely loaded with arsenic um presumably by by himself in order to end his own life he'd he'd had um you know he'd been facing major persecution for for his homosexuality um and um yeah took his own life by eating a poisoned apple. I had no idea. Stephen Fry has a great story about that. Does he?

Which is he once asked Steve Jobs whether the apple logo with the bite out of it was there in honour of Alan Turing having taken a bite out of an apple. That's great. And Steve Jobs said, no, but by God, I wish it was. Well, that's all I've got on Poison. This very nice man has just given me a drink, which I shall now have a little sip of. Excellent.

Did you receive my anonymously gifted cakes through the post? They don't smell of anything funny. No, no, they don't. Although the dog had a little bite of one. No, don't let the dog have it! It's got chocolate in it. So, that's the end of another episode of Fact or

Really. Thank you all for listening. Thank you so much, and by the way, don't use any of the information that we've given you in this episode to harm anybody. No, please don't. No, that would be a bad thing. It would. Please use this information as a warning

and a guide to stay clear of poison. Yes, and don't go to Australia. Cheerio. Bye, everyone. cheerio bye everyone