This Podcast Will Kill You - Ep 41 Ricin: A Bad Seed

Episode Date: January 7, 2020

Have you missed learning about plant poisons? Well, it’s your lucky day! Today is our first crossover of season three with our friend Matt Candeias of In Defense of Plants. In this episode we delve into the castor bean plant Ricinus communisand its two notorious products: castor oil and the star of the show, ricin. Join us as we learn about ricin’s storied history, which leads us through political assassinations and efficiency in engines, the biology of ricin, which horrifies us with its lethality, and finally, the ecology of the plant, which surprises us with its strategic partnerships.Looking for more ways to cure your plant blindness? Check out In Defense of Plants at indefenseofplants.com and follow Matt on twitter @indfnsofplnts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Val, bad fun. Outdo it with Intuit QuickBooks. Feature availability varies by product. Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh. And I'm Aaron Elman Updike. And I'm Matt Kandaius. Yay. I'm back.

Our favorite. Oh, hey, thanks for having me. And this is a crossover edition of this podcast, kill you and in defensive plants. Woo-loop. Yeah. Cool. Well, we're very excited to have you, Matt,

and we've been looking forward to recording another poison cast for a long time. I know. These are so much fun, and it's just fantastic to be back, so thank you so much. Yeah. So what are we doing this week, guys? Oh, this week we're doing ricin. Yes. Yeah.

One of my all-time favorite exotic plants. We'll call it that. Oh, I didn't know it was an exotic plant. I mean, where do you draw the line for exotic? I don't know. It's a distance metric, I think, from like where your front doorstep is. Okay, that's fair. And to me, this qualifies.

Okay. That's fun. Well, by the end of this episode, I'm pretty sure that everyone out there, it's going to be their favorite poison, exotic plant, episode, et cetera, et cetera, right? I agree. I think so. Can we promise that this early on? I mean, I feel like this is one of the weird areas where I can actually feel confidence, so sure. Okay, yeah.

Well, let's make that claim. Let me have this. Do we have any business before we jump right in? I have one piece of business. That's why I'm asking. Okay. Go ahead and share with the class, Erin. I wanted to make one correction from one of our more recent episodes, the toxoplasmosis episode.

Uh-huh. We got an email, and this is an important point of clarification that I wanted to make. Cats are not contagious for their entire life with toxoplasmosis. So when cats get infected, they only... shed toxoplasma for like a few weeks of their life and then they're immune for life. And I think that maybe didn't come across in our episode. So I wanted to make that clear and thank you to the people who emailed us to clarify that. Right. All right. Okay. Well then. Unexpected tidbit for me. Thanks.

Moving back to poison. Yes. What time is it? It's quarantini time. I got nervous. It's got me there. I was like... It's 7.30. Well, 7.30 also means it's quarantini time. Definitely. 730 somewhere.

It's quarantining time somewhere. Cool. So what are we drinking this week, Aaron? We are drinking the ticking time bomb. Ooh. And it's named this for reasons that will become clear later in the episode. But for now, let's talk about what's in the ticking time bomb. Let's talk about it.

What is this? Basically, it's hot buttered rum. Yes. So you have some rum, you make a little mix of butter and spices, and then you drop that into the rum, add some hot water. Boom. It's really delicious. It sounds weird to put butter in your rum, but it is very tasty. It works really well. Y'all are blown my mind. I did not know that that was a possibility.

A thing that you could do. But this is a great winter drink. It is. Yeah. It's perfect. Okay. So, I mean, everyone's got their quarantini in hand. And now we just have one last piece of business, which is the episode itself. Oh, well, let's do it. I'm not ready. I'm just kidding. We're good. All right. We'll take one quick break before we get started. Dinner shows up every night, whether you're prepared for it or not. And with Blue Apron, you won't need to panic order takeout again. Blue Apron meals are designed by chefs and arrive with pre-portion. ingredients so there's no meal planning and no extra grocery trip. There, assemble and bake meals,

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order some more. Refresh your wardrobe with Quince. Go to quince.com slash this podcast to get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E-com slash this podcast. podcast to get free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash this podcast. There are so many reasons that I'm excited for this episode. And the very top reason is one that we kind of talked about as we were coming up with quarantini names. And that's the etymology of

ricin because I didn't realize it. Like it took me researching this episode to understand the links between ricin and ricinus, the species or the genus name. And, another creature that is very near and dear to my heart. So anyway, we'll get into that in a second. The second reason that I'm super excited about this episode is because the history of Risen is like pretty long, like much longer than I thought, and super interesting, and has a couple of murders along the way. Yes.

At least a couple. And the best final reason is because I feel like it's been so long since we have done this. Yeah. Yeah, it has too long. Especially like, I mean, we did aspirin earlier this year, but we haven't done a poison in a really long time. Yeah. So I feel like my plant blindness has really gotten out of control. I mean, I can sense it from here, so let's get on this. Well, I remember during our episode, or after our episode on Kittred, and we talked about how basically the world is crashing around us and everything's going extinct. And you were like, uh, plants are at the biggest risk of all.

And I was like, no, my plant blindness. And I tried to preface that with like all of the hand wavy hand motions and goofiness and even like picturing the accent. But Sarah didn't. She was like, you guys, come on. Yeah, that was just pure anger on her part. I can't speak for her. It's understandable.

It is true. Plants are leading the extinction charge and it's frightening. Yeah. Well, so there's our second correction of the episode already. Oh, no. And I was the cause. No. No, no. Okay. All right. So basically what I want to do for this section of ricin is to break it down into two parts. And that hopefully should then lead into your discussion about biology, Aaron. Cool. And the reason that we're doing this episode. Okay. So we've established that the poison ricin, actually, we haven't established this.

Get to the establishing part. Yeah. The poison ricin comes from the castor bee. plant, ricinus or ricinous communis, which is also what is used to produce castor oil, which is just like, as far as that before this episode, I was like, oh, it's that old-timey oil. Yeah. Old-timey oil. Yeah. And up until this episode, I just thought it was an unfortunate overlap in naming.

And then I was like, oh, it's the same. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay, so this section, I'm going to talk about the history of the plant itself, starting with its uses as a medicine in the form of castor oil. and then wrap up with how it was used as a poison in the form of ricin. So I think I'll start off where I usually do, which is in ancient Egypt.

Yes. And basically, archaeologists have found that people have been using this plant for thousands of years. So they've found castor bean seeds in ancient Egyptian tombs dating back to 4,000 BCE. And then in ancient times, like in ancient Egypt in the Middle East, it was known by various names, including Palma, Christy because of the red leaves of the plant, which were supposed to look like the hands of Christ. So it was known also as the African wonder tree because of how fast it grew or grows. Yeah. And so it's this fast growing quality that actually landed at a mention in the Bible as probably

the tree that sprung up overnight to shade Jonah from the sun. It's a story I'm not familiar with. Oh, geez, all right. Yeah. It's also called the mole plant because it has compounds. that deter moles, Matt? Maybe you'll tell us more about that? Sure.

You're like, Google, Google this right now. And the common name for the plant, the castor bean plant, actually came about accidentally. So people confused it with another shrubby plant, Vitex, Agnes Castas, but the name stuck. Okay, so all that's interesting enough, little bits of trivia that hopefully you'll take home with you. But I was so excited for the etymology of ricin and the castor bean plant because of the scientific name for the plant, rissinous communis, is where we get the word ricin. And Carl Linnaeus happened to choose this name, communis, the second part, because it was found worldwide. And he chose risenus because risenus is the Latin word for tick. And Linnaeus thought that the seeds were shaped and looked like a tick, specifically the European sheep tick or the castorubes.

bean tick. I've also seen it called. And I was just like, oh, my God. Exodes Rucinus is the tick that I literally studied in Europe. What? Exodus recinous, yeah. Oh, how fun. I made a little noise when I read that. I was like, duh, Aaron. And I was looking at pictures of the seeds, the castor bean seeds, and I was like, oh, man, it's like not, you know, it's not far off. It does kind of look like a slightly engorged exodus racinous tick. It's great if you have someone with them in their garden, pick one up, put it in your pocket and then just go like, ah, I think I just

found a tick on your floor and pick it up and show it to them and just have them lose it for a little bit. I've never done that before. Sinister. That's a very specific thing to imagine. That's something that you've never done before, Matt. Imagine what entomology can do for you. Okay.

So now that my favorite revelry, is over? Should we just like stop and go right onto biology or do you want to hear more about Are we just done here? The end of history. Things happen. Things happen. Plants and poison and that's it. I mean, never have we had an under 10 minute history section, Aaron. Let's get real.

Listen. Our episodes just get longer and longer. So do mine. Okay. Would it even be an episode of this podcast will kill you if I didn't mention the Ebers, Iber's, Papyrus. No, it would not. Yep. I think every time we've recorded, we've talked about it. Yeah.

So just as a refresher, the Iber's papyrus is the ancient Egyptian medical treatise from about 4,000 years ago. And in this Ebers papyrus, Ebers papyrus, castor oil, makes several appearances. It was prescribed for various illnesses, mostly skin-related. Also, it was mentioned as a use for oil lamps, as a lotion to prevent head lice, as laxative and purgative. So in ancient Egypt, people would actually mix the oil with beer to, you know, like get rid of everything. Just evacuate everything. Like what they use for before you get a colonoscopy now. Yeah. Eject. And so that's why we did hot butter drum, to be honest,

because oil in the drink. A few more of these and it might not be too far off the symptoms. I mean, yeah. It is a ticking time bomb. You got there we go. Oh, so thank you for reminding me. The ticking part is because rissinous and the link between ticks and castor bean plant. So that's the first part. The ticking time bomb part of it will all get into that also.

Okay. So even though people were ingesting the oil, the dangers of the oil were known about somewhat. it. And so it wasn't used that frequently. And some cultures didn't use it at all to like, you know, ingest. And so during this time, the plant didn't spend too much time out of these roles, out of these like medicinal or useful roles in terms of either topical treatment for skin conditions or oil for lamps. And at a point, like, so it became super widespread, but then cultivation in much of Europe apparently kind of died out, except in places like Greece. And then the plant started to be harvested from Jamaica or parts of Asia.

And so that was like sort of from the, I don't know, 1,500s down to the late 1800s. And then what happened was the 20th century comes around. And then we have this huge boom in technology. And particularly in the development of cars and other heavy machinery, you know, or improvements in trains that needed big engines. And these engines needed to be more efficient. efficient. So in order to be more efficient, these super powerful engines needed a lubricant that could be

liquid at cold temperatures, but then remain thick at hot temperatures. And it turns out that if you add castor oil to the existing lubricants, it would increase the temperature range over which these engines could operate. And so it made them much more efficient and you could build much more powerful engines, which is really cool without castor oil, who knows. And so... What are like weird resurgence in the popularity of something? Yeah. And so in this is really what, you know, some papers suggest kind of pave the way for airplanes

or at least allowed them to develop. And, you know, in World War I, for instance, if you, okay, actually, do me this. Picture a pilot from World War I. I got a Red Baron thing going on right now. Yeah. He's got like, you know, a scarf around his neck, kind of flapping in the wind. He's got that little like leather cap and goggles and stuff. Totally.

That wasn't just like fashion. That was function. Because apparently the castor oil lubricant would just like spray all over the cockpit. And so the silk scarf was to wipe his eyes, his goggles his face. And also like the windshield or whatever, you call it in a plane. I would say you probably still call it a windchip. The ultimate windshield. What?

Isn't that interesting? You know, we have a painting of my grandpa in his flight outfit, and it looks just like that with the hat and the goggles and the scarf and everything. If only I could ask him, be like, what's it like to be sprayed with castor oil and 7,000 feet? He was not in World War I. That's true. You would be quite the anomaly. I think that they had better control over it. I think they had cockpits by that point.

Yeah. Yes. So then, you know, this was used heavily during World War I. And then World War II, of course, you know, using planes to drop bombs and shoot things and whatever else increased a ton. And so the U.S. was like, hey, we're going to run out of castor oil. So they were encouraging farmers in the Midwest to grow castor bean plants. But then they realized is that this pollen caused like a huge increase in hay fever and asthma. and so people were like getting sick everywhere.

And they were like, yeah, we got to dial this down. Also, castor oil was used medicinally during, throughout like up all through World War II. And also in ways that are a little bit less than medicinal. So even though this isn't the poison section, this kind of feels a bit more like poison section. Let me just explain this. So parents would give their kids a small spoonful of castor oil sometimes for purging. or as a punishment, apparently. Oh, God.

And then in Italy, during World War II, Mussolini and his fascist militia would force feed up to a leader of castor oil, sometimes mixed with gasoline, to people who dissented. What? What? So that would result in internal burns, extremely painful diarrhea, dehydration, and death for most people. Wow. So even though castor oil was like a medicine, it wasn't, you know, here's that whole thing about too much of a good thing. Yeah.

Yeah. A leader too much of a good thing. A magician, a physician, etc. Yeah. Exactly. That's disturbing. Yeah. But the good news in terms of, well, in terms of that, I guess, if there is good news, is that as medicine advanced throughout the 20th century, less harsh purgatives and laxatives were developed.

and castor oil kind of just like fell by the wayside. But that's only one half of this story. Okay. Are you ready for the reason for this episode? The poison cast part of it? Yeah. Bring it. Risen.

It's very human that archaeologists believe that they have detected the use of rison as a poison thousands and thousands of years before they could detect a medicinal use of the plant. So in a cave in South Africa, researchers found a ball of beeswax that also had ricin in it. And the archaeologists think that this beeswax, which is approximately 35,000 years old, was used to attach stone points to arrows and spears. And they also found in this cave, the same cave, a stick that was around 20,000 years old, that was thought to be used to apply ricin to spearheads. It's, whoa. Right? Human nature.

If that really was used for that purpose, that would be the earliest known use of poison, period. Like, people probably use poison forever, but yeah. Wow, dude. That's super interesting. Where did you say they found this in what part of the world? South Africa. Wow, that is so interesting. Yeah.

Yep. Let's see. Okay, so Ehrlich stumbled upon the possibility that you could build up an immunity to ricin and other toxins by feeding animals, tiny doses over time, and gradually ramping up. He tested it where you could get them to be resistant to a dose of ricin that was 800 times more than like the deadly dose, if that makes sense. Yeah, I'm not saying that. Yeah, the lethal dose. Yes, exactly, the lethal dose. Yeah. But this was not a new idea.

So in parts of India, farmers had been doing that to their cattle for hundreds of years. Nice. But, yeah, Ehrlich was like, oh, I have this new idea. And other medical uses of ricin, not just castor oil, were developed as researchers learned more about the mechanism of action. So it's been used as a tumor suppressant and in other ways that I'm sure you're going to talk about, Aaron, in more detail. Oh, yeah. Uh-huh. Cool.

All right. So just as World War I and World War II afforded castor oil the opportunity to shine as a lubricant for plane engines, these wars let ricin share a bit in the glory as well. During World War I, it's not good. During World War I, the U.S. looked into using ricin as a weapon, a bioweapon, mostly by coating bullets or shrapnel or like whatever with the toxin, resulting shrapnel with the toxin. the resulting shrapnel with the toxin. Oh, whoa. That's dark. It's very dark. That's really dark. So here's a quote from one of the researchers on this particular research project. It is not unreasonable to suppose that every wound inflicted by a shrapnel bullet coated with ricin would produce a serious casualty,

i.e. a casualty much more severe than from the bullet without the ricin. Many wounds, which would otherwise be trivial, would be fatal. Dang. Isn't that? I mean, from knowing. the plant, not surprising, but that is dark. Right? Yeah. It's, um,

yeah. Yeah, it's very dark. Okay. So, believe it or not, this weaponization of Risen was actually frowned upon and was found to be against international laws and could only be used. It was ruled that it could only be used if the Germans used similar weapons

first. So it could only be used in retaliation, which is kind of messed up. Okay. Okay. Sure. So, of course, they could keep developing it and so on. That's what it means is they can keep doing research on it just in case. I'm pretty sure they used it. Just saying.

And this also didn't stop the U.S. from investigating how ricin could be aerosolized because aerosolization apparently wasn't viewed as a poison. Like, that wasn't viewed as a poisoning event. I don't understand. Naisma or whatever. Yeah. I'm sorry. We can aerosolize this and spray it all over a whole city of people, but don't worry, that's not poisoning them.

That's magic death. I don't, yeah. I'm not sure what was happening. Wow. Yeah. In any case, fortunately, rice and dust wasn't found to be an effective or efficient aerosolized weapon because breathing it in wasn't as toxic as ingesting it or having it injected. And so efforts to develop it were a band.

Also, it would be really difficult to, like, get the amount that you needed and, like, disperse it over an area. Like, it's just, yeah. So, anyway, fortunately. But then in World War II, the word had gotten out about ricin because countries everywhere were trying to develop it as a weapon. And people got, like, pretty far with this, especially in the U.S., where they were able to make this, like, super concentrated deadly powder that they called Agent W. But, yeah. Why W? I can't remember.

I think I saw it somewhere and I forgot. I'm sorry. I saw it. It's gone. I saw it, I think. Interesting. But now it's gone. Now it's way out of my head.

But yeah, so the Agent W was like way, it was like way too much work. So they were like, now we're not doing this. There are way easier, you know, toxic things that we can make. Oh, totally. Yeah. Low-hanging fruit. Yeah. Well, and then also the other thing is at the time, and I don't know about now, but at the time, at least, there was no remedy for...

Still true. Oh, okay. Yeah, for ricin. There you go. But, okay, so biological warfare was banned in 1970 in the U.S. and in 1975 that also included toxins. And so since then, ricin, as a substance alone, has been highly regulated in the U.S. Okay. So that's in the U.S., but what about abroad?

Well, okay, the USSR was reported to have continued developing ricin as a bioweapon throughout the 70s and 80s, and it would end up making some headlines during this time. Oh, I know what you're going to talk about. I think I might, but surprise me. This is the only thing I knew about ricin before going into this episode. Yeah, I just, and I was like, I wasn't even sure entirely. So the more I read about it, the more I was like, what is happening? Okay.

I knew, like, the only thing I knew was that ricin was used in some kind of spy murder and there was an umbrella. All right. Yeah. So that's why I think that you should serve this drink with an umbrella in it. I'm just saying. I didn't even think about that when you said that earlier. I suggested that and I think it's a pretty good idea. Yeah, I like that.

Okay. So, in the 1970s, Bulgaria. was part of the Eastern Bloc, so the USSR. And as you might expect, opposition or dissent to the communist state was pretty risky business. It was going to get you disappeared. Was it Risenesky? Risky. I tried too hard.

Say that three more times really fast, though. So there was this Bulgarian writer named, and I have listened to YouTube videos about the news. and I've heard it pronounced two ways. So I'm going to say it both ways at the beginning. Georgi Markov and Georgi Markov. Okay. I think it's Georgi, most likely. Yeah.

Yeah. But anyway. So Georgi Markov was initially friends actually with the president of Bulgaria, but then he eventually got disillusioned with communism and he moved to England where he continued to be a prominent novelist. And he wrote about and spoke about these criticisms that he had of the Bulgarian government. He would go on TV and stuff like that as a BBC correspondent. No, no, no.

Yeah. So his former friend, the president of Bulgaria, Todar Zhikov, decided that Markov should be silenced because he was insulting the citizens of Bulgaria. And they might take offense to what he was saying. But really he was like, he's saying mean things about me and I want him to be killed. He is my ex best friend. Yeah. And so he wanted to kill Markov in a way that wouldn't be easily traced to the Bulgarian government. And so he worked with KGB to develop a method.

And they ended up deciding that what they would do is take some ricin and put it in a tiny, tiny pellet that could be surreptitiously somehow injected into Markov. and then the coating surrounding this pellet would wear off or like burn off and then the ricin would then start to disintegrate and go through the body and poison you. So they tested this out with a horse and a prisoner with mixed results. Yeah. The horse died and the prisoner did not. What? Okay. Yeah. Not what I was expecting.

Yeah. And then they were like. okay, 50% chance of working good enough. Let's try it out. Go for gold. Yeah. So on September 7th, 1978, Georgi Markov was waiting for a bus at the Waterloo Bridge. And as he was sitting there, he felt a sting on the back of his thigh. And he turned to see a man, apologized to him, walk away, pick up his umbrella, and leave in a taxi. And reportedly he had a foreign accent. this person who was saying goodbye and left in this taxi.

And Markov went on to work and was like complaining to a coworker like, hey man, like the back of my leg really hurts. There's a little bit of blood there. It was this weird incident that happened. And I don't know, you know, you know, it was kind of weird. And then by that night, things were getting much weirder because he was experiencing symptoms like muscle cramps, dehydration, fever. and he eventually went into the hospital,

but the doctors were like, we don't know what's going on, maybe it's some sort of weird infection. You know, your white blood cell count is going up and up and up, and you're not getting any better. And then four days after this incident, he, so on September 11th, he died of cardiac arrest. Wow.

And initially, his death was attributed to septicemia because his leukocyte count was 33,200. That's very high. Yeah. But at the same time, his status as a dissident was well known. And so this was ruled a mysterious death. And Scotland Yard was like, uh-uh, we're looking into this. So they ordered an autopsy.

And sure enough, they found, I think, on an x-ray, a tiny, tiny metal pellet measuring 1.52 millimeters in diameter. 1.52 millimeters in diameter, buried in his thigh, like almost to the muscle. And there was a tiny hole in the middle of the pellet where about 0.2 milligrams of ricin had been placed, apparently, because they could test for the residue. And the whole thing had been coated in a waxy material that was designed to melt at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit or 37 degrees Celsius, human body temperature. So this pellet was injected into Markov, either by, a spring-loaded pen or umbrella or something like that.

Probably the guy who left in a taxi, hence common name of this murder being the umbrella murder. Okay. Jeez. This is so interesting. Yes. I did not know that there was a metal pellet involved. That was silly of them. If they had just used something that was radiolucent, they never would have gotten caught.

What? Was that word you just used? Something that doesn't show up on an x-ray. Nice. Right? All right. Yeah. Well, so then I was reading, though, like, so this is a really fascinating read. It was like a report. It wasn't the autopsy report, but it was the one of the physicians who I think had examined Markov and then one of the physicians who had done the autopsy or the medical examiner who had done the autopsy. And he talked about how they had cut out the little sections of the thigh on both sides of the thighs, the back of them, and the one that had had like the bruises. and the red mark.

Yeah. And he was looking at it and he saw like a pin pushed to the head in it. And he thought, oh, it's my, you know, my coworker is just doing that to keep the piece of tissue in place. But then he, like, touched it to make sure and it rolled. And he, like, caught it on the table and was like, what is this? Wow. So, yeah.

I don't know, like, some places have said x-ray, some places, anyway. How bizarre. It's still, like. How bizarre. Human ingenuity that goes into killing someone. Oh, yeah. It's like, it's really creepy. Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating up until the whole killing thing.

And then you're like, oh, it's gross. Yeah, yeah, yeah. After news of this was made public, it turns out that this was not the first time that this method of assassination had been attempted and it wouldn't be the last either. Go figure. Yeah. So there was another dissident, another dissident from Bulgaria had heard about. Markov's death on the news. And he at the time was living in France. And he was like, hey, something very similar happened to me a couple of weeks ago. He was like, oh, I was near

the someplace. And I felt someone bump into me and like a sharp pain and stinging. And I felt like a little bit bad. But yeah. And he went to the doctor and got an x-ray. And sure enough, they found a tiny little pellet in his back. But this guy, had experienced just some, like some of the symptoms, like a fever, but he was still alive. Like this was a couple weeks before Markov had been assassinated. And so they removed the pellet from his back. And they were like the ricin. So this is how they actually could see the full structure of it because the ricin was still inside the little, or mostly inside the little pellet.

Because the waxy outer surface hadn't melted because it was mostly in like, it was too close to the surface of his skin. Wow. Yeah. That's wild. It's, yeah, it's bizarre. And then in 1981, there was another assassination attempt. Same way. This time on a Polish double agent who was working with both the CIA and KGB.

And he was found out at the KGB. So he fled to the U.S. He was at the grocery store a couple years later, just mining his own business. And then he gets shot by an air pellet gun and gets shot. super sick but recovers, and then he passes a suspicious-looking kidney stone, which turned out to be the ricin pellet. No way. Yeah, it like went into his kidney or something.

Whoa. Yeah. Yeah. And there are at least a couple other instances that I could find. That made me like a little squeamish. Yeah. Yeah. So these are sort of like isolated assassination attempts, but ricin has also been used in more

like I would say larger bioterrorism plots as well. And also important to say reportedly. The reason I say reportedly is because it hasn't been, like the use of ricin hasn't been traced to any attack in particular, but there have been some stockpiles of ricin that have been found or of castor beans or castor seeds. But like it would be nearly impossible to deliver with any efficiency. Like you would need literal tons of rice, which would be very difficult to produce. And you would be difficult to target, like, the dispersal area would be very limited.

You'd be, again, it would be the inhalation and so on. But it could still be used to create chaos or in targeted attacks, as had been suspected, in a couple of supposed ricin plots. So there was one that I read parts of a book about called the Wood Green Risenplot, in the UK in January in 2003. Oh, wow, recent. Yeah. And so there were five North African men who were arrested for their involvement in an alleged

rice and ring. And they were all acquitted except for one. This was, so you have to remember, this was a couple years after 9-11, not even a couple years, like a year and a half. And tensions were running super high. And so this case that had been brought to the in court in the UK was people were spending tons of time, tons of money, and they really wanted, like, we're being very successful at finding and then getting rid of would-be terrorists. And it was very shaky evidence that they had.

It was like a couple of caster seeds, castor beans seeds. That's it? Basically. And there were, I mean, there were other, like, alleged poisons and recipes and stuff like that, but for the most part, it seemed like the people who had been arrested were not in the no. Anyway. And so, later in that same year, like, it was like a year for ricin, man, because in October in the U.S., a ricin-containing envelope was discovered at a South Carolina mail processing facility. Like, there was actual ricin in this number. Yeah. Yeah.

And then, and you probably remember it because of this next part, which is that a month later, a similar, like, newly identical envelope showed up at the White House. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there was definitely ricin on the South Carolina envelope, but it seems a lot of, less conclusive that there was ricin on the White House envelope. But the, but the envelopes were basically the same and they contained similar messages and they're both signed by Fallen Angel.

They demanded that the new trucking regulations for the number of hours in the sleeper birth to be reduced. Or sorry, yeah, to be reduced. So it had recently changed from eight hours in the sleeping birth to 10. And Fallen Angel was like, no, no, let's get it back to eight. So they were like a trucking supervisor and they were worried about the efficiency of their workers or something. I think something like that. So, yeah, and so nothing happened. I mean, no one got sick anywhere. I don't think the trucking regulations were changed. And no one got poisoned with ricin. So, but it was definitely like, of course, as you can imagine, 2003, like, tensions running extremely high. Yeah, a little bit. A little tense back then.

I mean, ricin has been used as a poison for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. And it seems to have made the headlines like fairly recently, I guess, if we're talking about 2003. But a lot of these seem like isolated cases. And as I keep saying, like, oh, it would be very inefficient to create or to use ricin as a weapon, blah, blah, blah. But Aaron, should we be scared? Uh-oh. Let's talk about it. What does it actually do to you?

What does it do? I am dying to know. Oh, don't die. I'm sorry. Let me tell you. We'll take a quick break and then we'll jump into it. Anyone who works long hours knows the routine. Wash, sanitize, repeat.

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Every paper about the biology of Bryson starts with the same sentence. So I'm going to read it to you. Risen is a heterodimeric type 2 ribosome inactivating protein. Duh. Duh. There's your whole answer. Well, at least they're starting with everything you need to know. Everything you need to know about ricin.

Okay. I swear every paper started with that same sentence. What does that mean? It means that ricin is a toxin. And in this case, it's a protein toxin. So it's a peptide. Is that unusual? No, it's not unusual.

A lot of, yeah, a lot of, so it's actually a very similar protein in structure to a protein that we've, sorry, it's a very similar toxin in structure to a toxin that we've talked about very recently, and that is Shigatoxin. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh. Yeah. So these are, these are toxins that are made of two peptides strung together by bonds. So two different strands of protein. And these two strands of peptide work in this way.

They are kind of like a rocket ship, at least how I think a rocket ship works. So you know how when a rocket ship launches, there's the part that like launches the rocket ship into outer space. And then there's the like spacey part that goes out of the launcher and does the space things. Yeah. Right? I've seen Apollo 13. Exactly. Okay. So those two pieces, the launchy part and the spacey part,

Matt can't handle the way I'm describing this. That is the same way that this ricin toxin works. There's what's called the B part and that's the launchy part. So that part of the toxin is what allows for this toxin to enter into our cells. So it binds on to carbohydrates, so sugars on our cell surface, and launches the A part of the toxin into our cells. What? Yeah. Like a virus almost? Yeah. So it gets engulfed like in a little vacuil just like a virus would in some ways. Yeah. That's incredible. And then that part inside of the cell interacts with the ribosomes. So that first sentence, it told us it was a ribosomal inactivating protein. So the ribosome is in these little balls inside of our cells that are made of RNA and protein that are

integral in protein synthesis. So this toxin inactivates ribosomes, which means it blocks protein synthesis. That's like the main function of a cell. Yeah, that's really bad. Yeah, if a cell can't make protein, a cell can't function and the cell will die. So in effect, it causes irreversible cell death. Wow. I mean, Rison's like, hey, I'm here to stop sell things. Yeah. All of them. All the things. Exactly. Real quick, is there reversible?

You know, no, but there could be reversible ribosome inactivation. That's, that's zombies. Yeah. We're getting a zombie territory. I know. That's what I was thinking. I was like, what? Okay. So that is how Risen functions as a toxin. Dang. That's pretty cool, right? Pretty wild.

Okay. That was fun. I've never used rockets as an analogy before. And you did it so well, too. Thank you. You know, I followed A to B to C. It was all good. Okay.

And you learned what that really, like, complicated sentence means. No, you broke it down. Heterodimeric, so it's two different parts, ribosome inactivating. Cool. Now you can read every paper about ricin. Boom. What does it mean when you are exposed to ricin? What does that actually look like?

Like you kind of mentioned, Aaron, there are a number of different ways that you can get exposed, right? The most common, though, would be eating a caster bean. Yeah. Quick question. Okay. Is it a bean or would you call it a bean or a seed? It's a seed. Okay.

Is a bean not a seed? I just associate beans with Fabasi, so like one type of family. Okay. From the fruit of them. But, I mean, they're shaped like beans, but they're all seeds at the end of the day. Okay, okay. Yeah, eating a bowl of castor beans would be the easiest way to get exposed to ricin. Don't do that.

You will definitely die. If you ate just a few, here's what would happen. Since the toxin would be entering your GI tract as like its first point of entry, most of your symptoms at the first are going to be GI symptoms. So we're talking nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, intense, abdominal cramping, abdominal pain. these are usually the first onset of symptoms and they're very rapid. So we're talking within a few hours of being exposed. Oh, geez.

Those are the kind of symptoms that you're going to have. And in general, if somebody has ingested caster seeds and they don't have those symptoms within 12 hours, they're probably safe. Makes sense for reasons I'll talk about later. Oh, cool. I'm excited. I just thought it was like they pooped them out by then. It has a lot to do with that.

Okay. Yeah. We'll get into it. But these symptoms progress. throughout your body as the toxin leaves your GI tract, gets into your bloodstream, and starts affecting other organs. Because that launcher part of the protein, that B side of the protein, it is very nonspecific. So it'll attack any cell that it can, essentially. So as it moves through your bloodstream, it'll start causing damage to your liver, and it can cause liver failure. Your

kidneys, it can cause kidney failure. Most people end up dying from hypovolemic shock. So shock is when your blood, you basically don't have enough blood perfusing your organs. Oh, really? And there's a number of different ways that that can happen. In this case, it's from volume loss. So I'm not sure if that's because you're bleeding out of like every orifice or if it's just because it's causing such damage to your cells that you are losing volume from your blood plasma. Like literally, like letting the air out of the balloon, so to speak. Wow. I got a question. Okay. So you are. bleeding out of every orifice?

Well, you don't bleed out of every orifice, but you can have very bloody diarrhea and nausea. Because this is causing cell death. And any time that you have cell death, like, you're going to have blood probably as well. Yeah. So that's ingestion. And the poisons, like the murders that you talked about were via injection, which is also a little bit different. So that ingestion is the most common root, but it's not what keeps the body. Bio-warfare Division of the United States government up at night. Of course not.

So you can also get ricin poisoning, like you mentioned, Aaron, from injection or inhalation. The difference, we'll talk in a second about the difference in potency of ricin between all these different methods. But the difference, there's also a big difference in how your symptoms manifest, as you might guess, since you're starting with different organ systems essentially. So if you start with an injection of ricin, like in the case of the umbrella murders, then the first symptoms that you're going to have are localized symptoms where that injection happened. So muscle pain and you actually can have necrosis, so tissue death of the muscle where it was injected. And then that toxin will travel through your lymphatic system to your lymph nodes and cause

necrosis of your lymph nodes. You need those. You need those. then it can get into your bloodstream and end up causing widespread organ failure. So you'll get overall weakness. You can get fever. You also often get vomiting. I think it because it has action on protein synthesis in cells, it probably has an especially bad effect on rapidly dividing cells like in your GI tract. So that's probably why you see the vomiting really commonly.

Yeah. How do like, so there's these differences in symptoms between ingesion. and injection, and then I'm sure you'll talk about inhalation. And so those things, like the ingestion and the inhalation kind of makes sense to me. Like if you're working with, in terms of why they would know these symptoms. But the injection part, is that simply from the murders? That's a good question. I mean, I would guess so. Like, I don't, I mean, I think once it's in your bloodstream, it's going to probably have similar effects on your organs as it would, once it's your bloodstream from ingesting it, if that makes sense.

So like a liver infected with ricin is going to look probably like a liver infected with ricin no matter how it got infected. Yeah. If that makes sense. It's like a matter of which tissues it hits first. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But that's a good question. And similar to ingestion, this is very rapid symptom onset in the case of injection. So very rapid. Within a few hours, you're starting to have that muscle pain, et cetera.

But it explains why these victims were able to get to work. can have the wherewithal to come it wasn't like a neurotoxin that just exactly yes precisely and then the scary way of course the bioterrorism fear is inhalation and what's interesting about inhalation and it's interesting erin that you said it wouldn't be very efficient i can think of a couple reasons why it wouldn't be very efficient one is that it actually doesn't cause the widespread multi-system disease that we see with the other two methods. It's localized to your lungs when you get infected. Don't ask me why. Like, how come it can't make it into your bloodstream and go everywhere? Like so many other things inhaled to do? I don't know, but it doesn't seem to. The effects are localized to your lungs.

Now, keep in mind, your lungs are pretty dang important. Yeah, I kind of need those two. Yeah. So does it cause necrosis and your lungs? Yeah, so it causes equally deadly symptoms. So the first symptoms that you'll have are like cough and flu-like symptoms. And then you'll get respiratory distress, pulmonary edema. Eventually you still will get hypotension. So like your blood pressure will fall and you'll end up dying and you can't breathe, etc. But yeah, you don't see it as far as I can tell. You don't see it affecting other organs as much.

But what's interesting, and I think this is probably one of the reasons, Aaron, there's two reasons why it probably isn't that efficient. One is that the severity of the disease very much depends on the particle size. So small, small particles are going to have a much more drastic effect than larger particles because they make it down deeper into your airways. And larger particles are going to have less of an effect and at some kind of very little effect. And so I think probably to purify the exact type of ricin, like the part of the point.

particle size of ricin that would be extra deadly is probably difficult. I don't know anything about that. Good question. And then also, there have actually been no confirmed reports of a human ever getting inhaled rice in poisoning. Oh, wow. Huh. We just know it's possible? Yes. Okay. So there's one, like, maybe case report from the 40s where they think maybe a group of people could have been killed by ricin inhalation, but not definitively, and that's the only one. What were the circumstances surrounding? I don't know. I didn't read about it. I thought you might talk about it, so I didn't want to, my bad. Sorry. Sorry. No, but yeah, so all of this information that we have about the effects, it's from monkeys. Oh, that's sad. Yeah, yeah, it is sad. Anyways. I don't want people to die

either, but monkeys. I know. So how much does it take to kill you? How much ricin does it? it actually take to kill you? That's the next question. As little as 500 micrograms. Whoa. That's a small amount. That is a, I tried to quantify how small this is. I can see it on your face. It's small. A quarter teaspoon of sugar. That's your smallest measuring spoon is one gram. Okay. So half of that, an eighth of a teaspoon, is a half a gram. Okay. That is 500,000 micrograms. So one tenth of that can kill you. Wow.

Yeah, it's incomprehensibly small. But that's by like injection or I think in theory by inhalation as well if it was like the right kind of inhaled ricin. But nobody has purified ricin sitting around in your lab. So what about castor beans? How many castor bean seats do you have to ingest, turns out not many. I was going to say that if you didn't. It's like three, right?

Yeah. So it can be as low as like two or three because even though you have to ingest like a thousand times more, there's so much per seed, I guess, that you can die from just a few seeds. Cool. Okay. Cool.

I read some like instances of, because the seeds are sometimes used as jewelry, like beads and bracelets. And there were a couple of case reports I came across of like a girl who was chewing on her bracelet and one of the seeds like and she she recovered. But. Why would you give it to a child? I mean, I think she was like 15. Have you ever been to any air? I mean, you both spent time in Panama or gone to any airport, especially in a tropical country and you've seen those beads.

They're red with black. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I have a bracelet. same story there. So these are extremely common. Are you, but those aren't, those aren't. No, they're not, but we'll talk about those too. Okay. Yeah. Are they at abrim? Abrin. Abruous. Precatorious. Wow. Okay. They're pretty. Yeah. Yeah, they are.

Well, so that's what happens if you get exposed. That's how much it takes to kill you. If you do get exposed, like if you eat a spoonful of castor seeds on a dare, Then you're ridiculous. But go to the doctor. There's no cure. There's no antitoxin. Oh, man. It's all supportive care.

There is, however, very cool research going on with ricin that I want to chat about real briefly because I think it's awesome. First of all, there are a couple of different vaccines that are under development. That's how scared the U.S. government is of a ricin attack. Huh. Yeah. At least two different vaccines have undergone at least five. phase one trials. That's in humans. That's pretty significant.

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. And it's only for military. Like, they're never going to give this to civilians because there's no situation in which it makes sense to do that. Right. So I'm not interested in that actually. What I am interested in is the fact that people are trying to use ricin as a cancer therapy. Yeah. Judging by what you told us, this makes some sense. Yeah. So because ricin inactivates ribosomes and inhibits, It's protein synthesis, it has very strong effects on rapidly dividing cells like tumor cells. What do you know?

So in theory, if you can get ricin into tumor cells, you can kill tumor cells really easily. Problem is that launchy part, the B part of ricin, is really nonspecific. So how do you get it to only target tumor cells and not your whole body cells? Is it tiny little beads in an umbrella? It's only. It kind of is tiny little particles, nanoparticles. Oh, no. So people are trying to conjugate or attach the A part, the toxic part of ricin, to tumor-specific

particles that will only target tumor cells. And then you can make a highly specific, targeted, super, super-toxic compound to kill cancer cells without affecting other cells in your body. How cool is that? That gave me goosebumps. I know. So I'm not sure if anyone has managed to do it like how far the research has come. There's at least a few papers that I found that are like, you know, we're working on it and we've like we've conjugated it and it works at least in a petri dish. So that's very, very cool. And what's cool is that people are trying to do this with other types of toxins as well. But plant toxins, Matt, are.

are like really toxic. They're so bad. They're like way more toxic than bacterial and fungal toxins in general. Yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with plants tend to be more on the menu than bacteria and other microbial organisms. That makes sense. And they can't run. They can't run. Yeah.

We always come back to that. I know. So, yeah. So if they could work, if this could work, then you could potentially have a drug that's super potent and very specific. So I think that that's really incredible. So it's very cool work that's going on in the field of ricin cancer research. In a few days, actually, maybe after the holiday season, I'll have an article coming out with a similar concept. So stay tuned for that.

Ooh, cool. Just subscribe to the blog. I can't wait. So anyways, that's the biology of ricin. That is fascinating. Oh, good. And terrifying. Yeah.

Any additional questions? I have so many questions. A lot of my questions revolve around why. Yeah. Why? And I think that's where Matt you come in. Yeah. Take one quick break and then Matt, tell us all about how these plants are trying to kill us. I can't wait. After hearing all of this, it's easy to think that this is something that would be extremely regulated, at least in this country.

We regulate a lot less harmful substances that plants produce. But it turns out that this plant, ricinous communis, the castor bean, is readily available in most garden centers. I see it all the time planted in town. People love to grow this plant because it is a beautiful plant. Really? Yeah, which is why you mentioned only a couple seeds were found. I was like, I probably have a couple of castor bean seeds.

Am I a terrorist now? You can buy them at the store. Right. So, Casterbean is a plant that we've established has an incredibly long history with humans. It's thought to have been indigenous to the same. southeastern Mediterranean basin, eastern Africa, and India. So some of these stories about Egypt makes sense.

But because of the aforementioned long history with humans, it's been spread all around the globe. And anywhere there's a climate that can support it, it's growing in some capacity. It's a member of a family of plants called the Spurge family, Euphorbi AC. And as we're recording this, some of you probably have plenty representatives in your house in the form of a poinsetta. Oh! Yeah. amazing, and it's also extremely toxic in most cases. I know you can't let your cats eat Poinsetta.

Yeah, Poinsetta gets overplayed as being toxic, but for cats, you definitely don't want them to eat it, but your kid could make a mistake and be totally fine with it. So the people freak out about it with their kids. Poinsettas are fine. Most of the others aren't. The Spurred family is huge. It's incredibly diverse, and we could have a whole podcast probably devoted to just that. So what I will say...

Spurge. Spurge is. What does Spurge mean? Oh, no. Is it like a splurge? Like it's such a fancy family? It might have something to do with the latex and the fact that you probably shouldn't eat them. Let me actually look that up right now.

Aaron always asks hard questions. I just thought of anemology. No, this is, I'm really glad you did. Okay. So Spurge happens to have Latin roots. in the word ex-spergeret, which means to cleanse or to purge, which actually has roots in the fact that a lot of the toxic latexies from Euphorby AC, the Spurge family, were used as purgatives.

Oh, that's cool. Amazing. So in thinking about starting to do these crossover podcasts with you all, I thought that my role in all of this was to always come in and go, they just don't want to be eaten, that this is a story of anti-urbivory. And in every instance, I've had fun learning that it. It's not that simple or straightforward. And in this case, the story really comes down to seed dispersal.

Oh. Yeah. Oh. Okay. Cool. I'm excited for this. So, ricinus produces two types of flowers. There's the male flowers, which actually kind of look like the alveoli of your lungs.

They're just little tiny, highly branched, and they all end in little pockets of anthers that carry the pollen on the wind. the hay fever issue. This is a wind-pollinated plant. And the female flowers are these have big, chunky ovaries that are covered in spikes, and the stigma stick out just enough to capture pollen on the breeze. And then afterwards, the fertilization occurs. The ovaries swell into these big tick-like seeds. And they have this amazing primary dispersal syndrome that is termed ballistic. So the capsules dihist to a point in which the tension just causes them to rip open along their seams and they catapult the little tick-like seeds out into the environment. Are these the ones that you can walk along and touch them and they poof? It's not that much.

You're thinking of the impatience. This isn't that intense, but it's still enough to get these fairly large seeds a decent distance from the parent plant, which when you think about it, you don't want your children growing up in the same soil you are. They're going to be competing for all of the same nutrients and needs that the parent plant are. So the farther they get away, the better. But the plant has another trick up its sleeve. Now, the reason this is a story of seed dispersal is because there is a preferred and optimum seed disperser for ricinus. Oh, what is it? Can you guess? It's got to be something that's not affected by. Potentially. Is it a bird.

Is it a lizard? Is it a mammal, a small mammal of some sort? It is not a mammal, but it is small. It is a bug. In the generic sense. The seed dispersers for ricin are ants. No. Yes.

This is what we call a mermecocchorus species. Miramex is the root word for ant and cockery is the root for dispersal. So ant dispersed seeds. Oh my God. If you look at the weird little ticks, right where the tic is, tip narrows to the top of the actual seed, you'll see this fleshy little structure. It's called an oleosome. It's full of fats and proteins, and it oftentimes will have chemicals that are very attractive

to ants. If you want to mimic this in the forest, all you need is some canned tuna. For some reason, a lot of the proteins are the same. Don't ask me why. It's disgusting to do mermicocry experiments sometimes. But this brings up the question is, why would you want something to disperse your seeds, but also make your seeds so darn toxic. Yeah.

It's to protect them so that only the ants are getting them. So they're big, they're fleshy, a lot of seeds are edible. It makes sense that animals would want to eat them. And isn't that part on the end, the alloysome, like super, like, isn't that nutritious, too? Yeah, yeah. So potentially all of it could be a nutritious meal. And that's really bad if you want your seeds to germinate and grow. into your offspring. So the biggest threats to seeds of this size come in the form of vertebrates.

So evolution through all of this selective pressure of seed predation has imbued these seeds with ricin to counteract any potential threat other than an ant taking the seeds away. So. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So this is truly like protect thine offspring, invest in the future. And it's interesting because when you think about, it's got to be expensive to produce toxins like this, right? So you think why would a tiny seed need something so potent and powerful that it can kill a full grown human in just a couple of seeds? Because plants produce a lot of seeds. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

But to be able to like kill a human with a few seeds, you're producing a really potent toxin. Why make something so strong that like, but it's, oh, that's just. So say a plant, a mature plant. would produce 50 to 100 seeds, a human would be dead within a few hours of eating 10 of those. Yeah. Or any animal, hypothetically speaking. So make a few more than you need. Make sure they're super toxic and you pretty much take care of all of the issues from that point on.

Oh, my God. Wow. But ricin isn't alone in producing these proteins at all. In fact, this is identical, nearly identical to the toxin produced by the aforementioned Abrin, Aberus Precatorius, which is in the... Lagume family, it's a Fabasi, it's native to Asia. That's the red one? Little red beads with the black spots that you see in jewelry.

And they're beautiful. But same deal. Even just from people eating them, but also the people that make those seeds, they're piercing them with needles. And if it goes through the seed and then into your finger, there's been instances of death or at least severe illness caused from the bead making factory or companies, I guess, for that. Whoa. Yeah. I have a question real quick about these seeds. in general is how much does the amount of toxin vary either within a plant or like latitudinally or

geographically or anything like that those are all incredible questions and I can't answer most of them but I do know that the the ricin content of an actual caster bean seed varies from about one to 10 percent so like one to 10 percent of the mass of the seed is ricin I believe that's the case Dang. Yeah, these are pretty potent. Yeah. And we talked a little bit earlier about being able to eat them and have them just pass through. So if you have an animal, and this varies from, especially within mammals and especially with birds, not everything chews.

And some things just have such large teeth that they're not going to do much damage to a smaller seed. This is a little hypothetical. But a lot of the seeds that produce this rice and like compound or protein similar to this can pass through your gut. unharmed if they are not crushed. Crushing the seed destroys the seed, but if it can pass through a gut unharmed, then it can pass through a gut unharmed. That's not a real threat to this. So a lot of plants will make the seeds toxic, but not the fleshy fruit around them.

Obviously, the eliasome is totally fine for the ants themselves to consume. Birds could hypothetically eat these seeds and pass them through unharmed, but it's the chewing, especially the mastication of mammals that they really want to avoid because that's the end of that seeds, any potential it might have had. So could we just like pop them like pills and be okay? Like on a dare? I mean, let's not. That's a bored evening if you're resorting to that, truth or dare.

Yeah. And so I love that these proteins have a specific affinity for animal cells because it just goes to show you that the proof is in the pudding. The plant, I'm putting big air quotes here, knows what it's trying to avoid. Yeah. And evolution does not do anything necessarily wasteful in that department. when it comes to reproduction. Fascinating. Yeah.

That's so interesting. Yeah. So, I mean, like you said, one to two beans has been enough to kill smaller, especially smaller mammals. So you think about what's going around, chewing on this forest floor. And these plants, you can just, like, if we walked around the neighborhood, could you show me these plants? Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I know a bunch of people around our neck of the woods here that have them in their garden. And the amazing part, too, is the plant itself isn't all that. toxic, especially for a spurge. They do produce these, they call them foliar phenolics, but that's mostly just to get rid of the tiny little caterpillars and maas. There are some specialists that do eat the foliage itself, but all of this comes down to ensuring the reproductive effort is conserved and more likely to make it to the next generation. So this one's all about sex for this point. I love it. So what is the, like you said it grows everywhere, that the climate is right for

it. What is that climate? And is it more of like an urban guy or a rural guy or anything and everything in between? I think it's a disturbance lover. Really what it comes down to it. And that would make a lot of sense. Again, so many of the useful plant species that humans have stumbled across over the ages are plants that do well in disturbance. So edge habitat, clearings, that sort of stuff. And so this plant is extremely visible on the landscape. It is gorgeous. That's the reason it's got such horticultural value nowadays. It's got these beautiful palmate leaves that get massive. Oftentimes the whole plant itself is like a deep burgundy.

Yeah, it's a very attractive plant, and it looks really exotic. Like we mentioned that at the beginning. It truly looks like something that doesn't belong here, but it's despite hailing from, you know, what I would consider like Mediterranean or scrubby arid habitats, if you give it a warm enough season and good draining soil, it'll do well in most countries over the summer. It grows so fast, as we mentioned, that it does well in the gardens.

You just treat it mostly like an annual in temperate climates. And going back to the mole plant name, turns out farmers used to just sprinkle seeds down into mole holes in hopes that a mole would eat one or two of them, and that would take care of their mole problem. Did it work? The thing with a lot of animals is they're not as dumb as humans are sometimes, and they tend to, whether it's a sense they have, they can smell it,

or there's just an instinct there. I don't think it's an effective way to take care of your mole if you. But moles are eating pests, so you shouldn't be trying to kill moles. But I think this is another great addition to the devil garden that we have planned for the future. Yes. Because it's easy to grow. It's got a lot of impact visually. We need a lot of visual impact in our devil garden.

And you've really got to mess up big time to have it harm you. And that's another important message to drive home here is, you know, that's the upside of plants. They're sessile beings. They're not getting up and chasing you like a triffid. Did you say like a triffid? Like a triffid, yeah. Are those the Dr. Seuss trees that move? No, there's a whole wonderful science fiction book called The Day of the Triffids.

And I highly recommend it to anyone listening right now. It is a charming sci-fi, and I hope the apocalypse goes as well as that book makes it out to me. Okay, I'm going to have to read it. The dream apocalypse. Yeah. This is a big call for people to just get to know the plants in your backyard. There's no reason this plant shouldn't be grown or enjoyed in and around the home. you just learn to not eat the seeds.

And plants aren't going to get up and attack you. They're not, you know, for the most part, sending off volatile compounds that are hurting you without you really having to come into contact. It's not the happening or whatever. Yeah, that's pretty far out in the field. Oh, fun. Yeah. This was a cool journey down a road with a plant that I thought I knew. Oh, wow.

What a fun episode. Yeah. I love the rabbit holes I go down with you too. It's always a good time. As long as it's not a mole hole with a castor beans. Caster seeds waiting at the end. Well, we're smart moles now. Yeah, we're smart moles.

I love this. So I wanted to mention something back to the quarantini that I realized I completely didn't mention again. But the whole ticking time bomb aspect was the little waxy-coated. Oh, yeah. That's what I guess. Okay. But I guess you didn't say that out loud. I just felt like I should connect the dots.

Also, a big shout out to Amanda who suggested that name. Thank you, Amanda. I appreciate it. Boop-whoop. Good job, Amanda. That was fun. That was great. Yeah.

Thanks for having me. I'm excited for our next crossover. Oh, yeah. Whenever that is. We're going to have a second one this season. Okay. That works. Yeah.

Just let me know. Oh, sources? Sources. I've got those. I read a few. I'll put all of these on the website, but I want to shout out a couple in particular. One is by Martha Hale called Risen, from pharaohs to bioterrorists and beyond. And that was a really great overview of the history of ricin. And then there was the report or the discussion of the autopsy that I mentioned, and that was by R.

Crompton called Georgi Markov Death and Appellate. And then there was that book about the so-called R. ricin ring in the UK in 2003 called ricin exclamation point. So we'll put all of these on the website. And yeah, what do you guys got? So I'll send you a more complete list, but the three main papers I drew from for my contribution here were plant defense against herbivory and insect adaptations by war at all. General mechanisms of plant defense and plant toxins by

Methulfur and Mafiae. I apologize if I butchered that one. And Cedeliazome mediates dispersal by ants and impacts germination and rousinous communis by Sassaharan and Van Ketisan et al. Awesome. I have a number of papers on the sort of toxicology and clinical aspects of ricin. that paper that I found on toxin being used as an anti-tumor agent is by Diaz at all from 2018, and then there's another review from 2015, just about like the status of ricin as an antitumor agent.

All of our sources from every episode, a complete list is posted on our website at this podcast will kill you.com under the episodes tab. Thanks to Bloodmobile for providing the music for this episode and all of our episodes. And thank you to Matt for coming on as a guest. We love having you. It's the most fun. Thank you both for having me. It is always a pleasure to be here.

Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Yeah. If you don't already listen to In Defensive Plants, you should definitely check it out. What are your handles, Matt? All of them are at In Defensive Plants. If you just Google it, you will find it, I promise. There you go. Google's our friend.

Thank you also to all of you listeners out there listening to us. ramble on about all the things things that could kill you yeah we love doing it and you let us keep doing it so yay thank you can i just say that you have managed to cultivate such an incredible fan base i absolutely adore hearing from them they always reach out and tell me that they love everything that they've learned from us and they want us to keep doing it it is so nice to hear from your fans they're very nice people also nice use of the word cultivate I keep doing that on my own show as well. I keep saying, oh, pun intended.

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