If you watched the show last Thursday, you know there was a woman who was killing joggers and eating their organs. Great show!
Anyway, she explains to Grissom the medical condition she has. She says the name, and Grissom says “The madness of King George,” then she says something else and goes on to explain her condition and how she discovered her “treatment.” I guess I was distracted because I just didn’t get it. I think her tissues would break down, maybe including her brain. But I’d really like to understand this. I assume the show is fact-based.
I hope someone else saw the show and can bring me up to speed.
Thanks to Survivor, I’ve become a regular watcher of CSI in the last couple of months, so I know the answer. The ailment the doctor had was “porphyria”, which is caused by the body’s inability to produce enzymes (porphyrins) which are used to make blood. It’s called the “madness of King George” because King George III of England had it, as did many members of the British royal family.
As for the accuracy of the show, IANA doctor, but I think the writers exaggerated a little: only the rarest form of porphyria causes the disfigurement shown in the show, and while there are a variety of treatments for porpyria, drinking a human-liver milkshake probably ain’t one of them. Still, it was a pretty entertaining episode.
another fact based question from the same episode.
One of the crime scene guys ‘found’ a piece of dirt smeared ice at the scene, placed it in an evidence jar. Next day, jar is empty, they concluded it was dry ice.
First of all, I’d always thought/assumed to be true that dry ice, left out in the open wouldn’t really last a whole long time. And, generally, since it’s cinematography use (and we know that’ always accurate, right?) is to create that lovely smokey/spooky stuff, I’d always thought that dry ice, exposed to the air would be evaporating in that sort of cloud pretty consistently. Therefore - 1. wouldn’t said chunk of dry ice be gone by the time, several hours later that the CSI folks were looking for evidence? (and seems to me, they got it from their second foray into the scene, but anyhow)… and 2. if it had still been there, wouldn’t it have been exuding that cloudy stuff?
(and this may be a really stupid question) Secondly, would the jar have been empty? ie, if you have dry ice sealed into a container, would there be any likely residue at all or would it all become gaseous?
As a police detective, I can’t watch CSI. The glaring errors in crime scene processing and forensic science simply drive me mad! The creator says he got the idea from watching the forensic science shows on Discovery and TLC: maybe he should have paid a little more attention (or hired a good consultant).
I don’t know at what rate dry ice evaporates, but it would have had to be a very large chunk in the beginning to last a day. And someone would have surely noticed the vapors being given off when they collected it. I can’t imagine even water ice lasting a day in Las Vegas, and someone should have noticed there was no puddle around the piece of ice.
thanks Badge that’s what I thought. The piece was about the size of a golf ball (though angular) and certainly wasn’t emitting noticeable vapor. Ostensibly this was supposed to have been left over while the bad person was packing the organs into a container, so I can’t believe that it could have been that large to start off with.
Dry ice will last a good while, and won’t produce visible vapors (technically, fog: Very few true vapors are visible) unless it’s in a very humid environment, or in contact with water (this from personal experience… Back in my undergraduate days, we astronomers would occasionally “borrow” a chunk from Chemistry and play around with it). On the other hand, it doesn’t look at all like water ice.
Another question about that same episode:
In the other storyline, the mother gave Catherine a statement about what happened to her daughter. Later in the story, Catherine mentioned that she missed the fact that the woman looked the “wrong way” while talking.
Supposedly, when you are recalling facts, you look right; when lying or making something up, you look left.
Is this true?
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