Stupidium. The real killer.
And it’s everywhere!
your humble TubaDiva
sorry, couldn’t resist.
Boy did I blow the above answer.
Ricin is a ribosome inactivator, not a plasma membrane puncher. I really should look this stuff up before posting crap, seeing as my memory seems to be worthless.
Sorry about that.
1g LSD (mw 323.43) = 1.86 x 10 ^^ 21 molecules
20 billionth of g = 3.72 x 10 ^^ 13 molecules
One molecule would not have a large effect. 
That dosage is off, too. Clinical LSD dosage was generally about 75 - 150 micrograms, threshold around 20. That’s millionths, not billionths. A quick check gives me:
http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_dose.shtml
A bit of trivia - when discoverer Albert Hoffman accidently dosed himself with the stuff, he decided to deliberately take a small amount to confirm the effects. He took a quarter milligram thinking he was being very conservative - that’s 250 micrograms.
Then rode his bicycle home through Stockholm.
Most of this information came from The Merck Index – Eleventh Edition.
Palytoxin – Potent toxin isolated from zoanthid coral of the genus Palythoa (found in Hawaii) that is the most poisonous non-proteinaceous substance known. Its method of killing is intense vasoconstriction. It is a white amorphous solid that is soluble in water. Its empirical formula is C129 H223 O54 (M.W. =2680.22). I won’t even attempt to give its structural formula (the da’gum thing’s huge). The LD50 in mice is 0.45 micrograms/kg when injected. In dogs, doses of >0.06 micrograms/kg (injected) “caused a transient rise in arterial pressure followed by rapid hypotension and resulted in death within 5 minutes”.
This information is from me:
If you don’t know what LD50 is, it’s the dose of a substance that will result in the death of 50% of the test subjects. If the method of administration is not mentioned along with it (injection was mentioned above), assume the administration was oral. It is usually measured in g/kg or mg/kg. That’s why I put the “micro” prefixes in bold up there. FYI, I’ve noticed that LD50’s on dogs tend to be much lower than LD50’s for humans, but LD50’s for mice tend to be very close to those of humans. In fact, I’ve seen a graph comparing the LD50’s of mice and men in reference to about 100 poisonous substances. (I cannot remember where I saw it, but if I find it, I’ll post it.) You could draw a straight line through the points on the graph. IIRC, the r^2 value for the graph was ~0.85.
If I had to guess on the most toxic element, I’d guess Beryllium. That’s not based on much… just a WAG. I have had little luck finding quantifying toxicity information on pure elements.
BTW, the human LD50 for ricin is 1 microgram/kg (skin).
How many LSD molecules in a gram? About 2*10^21, I estimate. That’s 2 thousand billion billion.
Another entry for dangerous elements:
Polonium-210 is very dangerous to handle in even milligram or microgram amounts, and special equipment and strict control is necessary. Damage arises from the complete absorption of the energy of the alpha particle into tissue.
The maximum permissible body burden for ingested polonium is only 0.03 microcuries, which represents a particle weighing only 6.8 x 10^-12 g. Weight for weight it is about 2.5 x 10^11 times as toxic as hydrocyanic acid. The maximum allowable concentration for soluble polonium compounds in air is about 2 x 10^-11 microcuries/cm^3.
Wrong thinking is punished, right thinking is just as swiftly rewarded. You’ll find it an effective combination.
yabob, memory might be failing me, but I am pretty sure that Hoffman said it was nanograms. I remember because I had to look it up to see what this translated to. I will have to double check and get back to you.
Another interesting note. Hoffman felt that LSD induced a state of religious consciousness and that it would bring humankind to a higher level of awareness. I agree. Everyone should take it twice a year.
The first time he took it (well, actually absorbed it through his skin accidentally) he started tripping on his bike ride home. He had an incredible desire for milk and thought his neighbor was an alien.
::Test post. Please ignore this post. If there are multiposts above, please ignore them too.::
LSD clinical and street dosages are definitely micrograms. Which is still DAMNED small. That link I gave in my first post is in line what I’ve seen elsewhere. Hoffmans own accounts can be found at:
http://www.lycaeum.org/books/books/my_problem_child/
In particular, his account of the accidental ingestion:
Excuse my earlier post, he was in Switzerland, not Stockholm. He goes on to recount his experience of what was essentially 2 to 4 hits of acid, including his assistant accompanying him home by bicycle. It’s an entertaining account.
****** CONTEXT SWITCH ******
What might be interesting is the most toxic element whose toxicity does not stem from radiological hazard. Polonium and plutonium are horribly lethal, as mentioned.
An injected dose of palytoxin has an LD50 of .45 micrograms/kg while an externally applied dose of ricin has an LD50 of 1 microgram/kg. And you think that palytoxin is more potent?
The means of delivery is critical; I’ll still wager that anything cpapable of killing by external application in that small of a dose must have an LD50 ten fold lower when injected.
So if I’m going to visit Kevorkian, make mine a ricin.
[K.J.- it’s aflatoxin, short ]
I believe aflatoxin is the most deadly natural occuring toxin known, or at least was
I never made the claim that Palytoxin was more potent. I’m just giving information that I thought was interesting, and to quote, “Palytoxin…is the most poisonous non-proteinaceous substance known.”. Not “Palytoxin is the most poisonous substance known”. I do realize that any drug taken intravenously will have a much stronger effect than the same amount of the same drug taken orally, inhaled, or absorbed through the skin. That’s why I listed method of delivery after each LD50. I apologize for not having explained the importance of delivery methods in my LD50 explanation.
If you were going to Kevorkian, dead is dead. I don’t think I would choose a means of death based on LD50’s, as I’m quite sure that Doc K wouldn’t have any problems with accidentally not killing you with either of these compounds. I think I would rather base my decision on other factors, such as how quickly you would die, and how painful it would be. Looking at those factors, and having read how each compound kills, I too would probably go with ricin, as I imagine that it would only take seconds to kill, and who cares how painful it is if it lasts only a few seconds.
Things are random only insofar as we don’t understand them.
InutilisVisEst said:
As AWB said, plutonium’s really nasty, and probably beats everyone on a deadliness/mass basis. During the Manhattan project, if you got some dust in a cut on your hand, the procedure (not sure if they actually had to do this) was to remove your arm at the shoulder. Immediately. Alpha particles don’t even penetrate skin, but when the alpha emitter’s inside you there’s nothing to stop them.
Cutting off arms seems unlikely, for several reasons. First, Plutonium was only discovered in 1940, and none of the stuff had actually been isolated before the Manhatten project. There couldn’t have been much experience with toxicity at that point.
Second, it seems to me that once it gets mixed in with your blood, there wouldn’t be much advantage in cutting off your arm compared to just cleaning out the cut. The stuff in your blood is already spread around, and the surface contamination can be cleaned out.
Third, it seems unlikely that there would be a procedure as extreme as amputation when the standard testing method was in the open air.
So, is there any substantiation for this procedure? Is there anyone who actually had it done?
– Mike –
More on the Plutonium stuff…
First, I meant to say “the standard testing method for nuclear bombs was in the open air” in my previous post…
In the 1970’s, the common knowledge among us anti-nuke folks was that 1 microgram, inhaled, could cause cancer in 20 to 30 years. While the stuff still appears to be extremely toxic, and trying to ignore the various rantings on both sides (all the way from ‘1 atom will kill you!’ to ‘It’s safe to eat the stuff!’), it appears that 1 microgram might kill you, but if you were looking for something like an LD50 (50/50 odds that it would kill you), you’d be looking at a significantly larger dose. How much larger seems to be open to no end of debate.
I was at a public discussion many years ago where the ‘1 atom is deadly’ theory was advanced. A researcher from the local University Medical Center got up later and pointed out that because of radioactive fallout, we all have something on the order of 280,000 (*) atoms of plutonium coursing through our bloodstreams right now, and he sure hoped we weren’t all going to die from it.
– Mike –
(*) I recall him saying 280,000 or 280,000,000. I no longer remember which, but I was alarmed at the number, and at the first opportunity calculated how much this was. I figured it would be milligrams, but instead wound up with something like picograms.
Mike Palmer
Do you have any idea of the mechanism by which someone would be killed by a single atom of (were you writing about polonium or plutonium)? I’m just curious, because if it is alpha particle emission, I don’t get it. A single atom of a radioactive element cannot keep emitting alpha particles indefinitely. After a single alpha particle is emitted from polonium, it becomes lead. After 6 alpha particle emissions, plutonium becomes lead. I would doubt that 6 alpha particles would kill you. Although, thinking about it now, perhaps they were saying that theoretically, one of these alpha particles could damage the DNA of one of your cells, and cause cancer down the road, thus leading to an early death. So, I guess if you look at it that way: yes, it’s possible but very unlikely.
Yes, I understand that you are not a proponent of this theory. I am just hoping that you know more about it since you mentioned it.
Things are random only insofar as we don’t understand them.
If the mad cow people are correct, the most deadly molecule is PrPSc, the transformed prion protein. In theory, a single PrPSc molecule can begin a autocatalytic chain reaction resulting in the transformation of all normal prion protein (PrPC) into PrPSc resulting in new variant Creutzfeld-Jakob disease and, ultimately, death.
Steve-o:
What are you doing bringing logic into a religious argument? 
Of course, I have no idea how one atom of Plutonium would kill you, other than the scenario you proposed: one alpha particle causes a mutation that leads to terrible things. Not to likely. As I recall, Pu239 decays into products that are themselves radioactive, and this keeps up through at least a few generations of decay. Nonetheless, one atom is not going to generate a whole lot of nasty stuff. I still remember the young woman who argued so passionately that 1 atom would kill you, and with tears running down her cheeks explained that people had LIED to her and told her that plutonium was SAFE! Could have been that she talked to Bernie Cohen, I suppose, but I’ve never run into anyone who would argue that the stuff was safe.
But, as the guy from the university pointed out, a really small amount is probably not going to do anything bad to you, or we’d all be in big trouble.
– Mike –
I think that recently, maitotoxin has surpasssed paytoxin as the most poisonous of the marine natural products.
For a visualization of LSD potency, a friend told me this:
A dose of 25 micrograms is enough. An average postage stamp is 60,000 micrograms in weight. Powerful stuff.