On September 7, 1978, the Bulgarian journalist Georgi Markov felt a sharp pain in his leg while walking back from work. He turned back and found a man picking up his umbrella from the sidewalk. The next day, he developed a fever. Within four days, he was dead. He was assassinated by using one of the deadliest poisons in the natural world; ricin.
Ricin is a slow poison, which is very effective and consistent in its lethality, that it is a weapon of choice for those assassins who like to distance themselves from the crime scene after executing a job; especially if high profile casualties are involved. Ricin usually takes anywhere between one to three days to cause death.
Once inhaled, ingested, or injected, ricin is readily absorbed into the body cells, which will then immediately deactivate the ribosomes of the affected cells. This stops the production of all sorts of cellular proteins and the decoding of the genetic material. This immediately kills the cells. A single molecule of ricin could deactivate 1500 ribosomes per minute. The tiny platinum plug found from Markov’s leg had two tiny channels drilled into it; each able to hold about one-fifth of a milligram, which was still far more than the dosage required to kill any healthy human.
The toxicity of ricin can change depending on how it is taken in. Scientists usually use a measure of LD50, or lethal dosage 50%, to calculate the toxicity of a poison, where they administer the poison to a controlled population of laboratory rats and find out the minimum dosage required to kill half the population and calculate the value in milligrams per kilogram of body mass. Taken orally, the LD50 of ricin is about 20 milligrams per kilogram. But if injected, it only requires 1 microgram per kilogram of body mass. Ricin was also used for making Cluster bombs in WW2.
All of this paints a picture of ricin as a rare poison that only the professional assassins have access to. But that is not the case. Ricin is a protein and is commercially extracted from castor seeds, to be used as a poison.
The castor plant could readily grow anywhere with a warm climate, and it is, in fact, commercially grown to extract castor seed oil, which is used in numerous cosmetic products, as an anti-inflammatory agent, and is a constituent in industrial lubricants. The raw oil, which comes from the seed, does actually contain ricin. But in the processing of the oil, it is heated, which changes the conformation of ricin and deactivates it. The actual protein, however, is produced in the seed coat of the seed. The mashed remains of the seed coat, which remains after oil extraction, is used for producing ricin. The most alarming fact is that eating just eight castor seeds would deliver more than the lethal dosage of ricin into your body. This number significantly reduces if the chemical comes in contact with the blood. And sadly, there is currently no certified antidote for ricin poisoning.
But this doesn’t mean that castor seeds must be out of our diet, as long as we make sure that the castor oil that we use is properly processed, and to never ever have raw castor seeds.
A Similar one- “Dieffenbachia- Is that plant from your home garden lethal?“
Author
Good work . This work taken up is an eye opener to me. Lethal effects of ricin is something beyond my imagination. Thank you for forwarding such information to me.