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Take less than a tenth of an ounce (2.83 grams) at once, and the classic signs of acute arsenic poisoning ensue: nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, low blood pressure, then death.īecause it is colorless, tasteless, and odorless, arsenic was the poison of choice for the Borgias, the Italian Renaissance family skilled at artful murder, as well as for Hieronyma Spara, a 17th-century Roman entrepreneur who ran a school that taught wealthy young wives how to dispatch their husbands and become wealthy young widows. Small amounts taken over a long stretch produce weakness, confusion, paralysis. Arsenic exploits certain pathways in our cells, binds to proteins, and creates molecular havoc. A serpent coiled around a staff symbolizes Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine.Ĭonsider arsenic, the poison of kings and king of poisons. Toxicology and pharmacology are intertwined, inseparable, a Jekyll-Hyde duality. The right dose differentiates a poison and a remedy.' Poison is in the dose. Said Paracelsus, a 16th-century German-Swiss physician and alchemist: 'All substances are poisons there is none which is not a poison. You might say that a toxicologist studies substances that lead to death. Laertes used a poison-dipped sword to kill Hamlet, and Claude Rains's nasty mother kept sneaking poison drops into Ingrid Bergman's drinks in the Hitchcock thriller Notorious. The rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles can be traced to their fall (as pet turtles) into a sewer along with a container of toxic materials. Spiderman exists by the grace of a radioactive spider bite. Without poison, comic book superheroes and villains in plays and movies would be considerably duller. The fatal attraction: Snow White's poison apple, the deathdefying art of the snake handler, the Japanese roulette practiced by those who eat fugu. It's the treachery in the arsenictainted glass of wine. Poison is a stealth killer, effective in minuscule amounts, often undetectable. 'Only lion tamers are killed by lions,' said Kent Sugdan, one of her postdoctoral fellows. How could such a brilliant, meticulous, worldclass toxicologist come to such an end? The mercury had devoured her brain cells 'like termites eating away for months,' one of her doctors said. She was 48 years old, a wife and mother of two. The doctors said it didn't appear that her brain could even register pain.' Her husband saw tears rolling down her face. 'I went to see her, but it wasn't the kind of coma I'd expected,' recalled Diane Stearns, one of her postdoctoral students, now a professor of chemistry herself. After three weeks in a hospital, she slipped into a coma. Five months later Wetterhahn began stumbling into doors and slurring words. The dimethylmercury was volatile enough to penetrate the glove. When she spilled the poisonous droplet in her lab, she thought nothing of it she was wearing latex gloves. Wetterhahn, tall, thin, intense, was an expert on how toxic metals cause cancer once they penetrate cell membranes. On August 14, 1996, Karen Wetterhahn, a toxicologist and professor of chemistry at Dartmouth College, spilled a drop, a tiny speck, of dimethylmercury on her left hand.