Chromatography is a blanket term for a set of techniques used to separate mixtures, usually by dissolving in liquid or gas. You take the “mash” of the castor oil seeds, which contain around 5-10 percent ricin, and perform a process called chromatography. It’s made from the byproduct of the castor oil manufacturing process. There were experiments back around World War I attempting to make wide-scale ricin weapons, packaging it into bombs and coating bullets in it, but these proved not particularly effective and also violate the Hague Convention’s agreements on war crimes, so the U.S. It also is not very long-lived the protein can age and become inactive fairly quickly compared to, say, anthrax, which can remain dangerous for decades. Ricin is much easier to produce than other popular biological weapons like botulinum, sarin, and anthrax, but it is not as potent as any of those, which limits its effectiveness as a weapon. Wikimedia Commons How does it stack up against other poisons? There are some steps you can take if you get to a hospital immediately for ingestion, a stomach pump can sometimes prevent the ricin from reaching the rest of the gastrointestinal system at its full force. The CDC’s website states bluntly that no antidote exists. governments have been working on an antidote for decades- here’s a nice article describing the progression of one such antidote-but there isn’t one available to the public. The seeds of the castor plant, from which castor oil (and ricin) are extracted. An average adult needs only 1.78 mg of ricin injected or inhaled to die that’s about the size of a few grains of table salt-which ricin resembles visually. Injecting or inhaling requires about a thousand times less ricin to kill a human than ingesting, and that’s a very small amount indeed. It’s dangerous in just about any way it gets into your system, though ingesting (eating) it is about the least dangerous way. While this latest incident is a breaking news story, the facts about ricin haven’t changed. What follows is an article originally published in April 2013, when envelopes addressed to Senator Roger Wicker and President Barack Obama were found to contain a white granular substance that was identified as ricin. The FBI is currently testing the suspicious parcels. Update: On October 2, 2018, news outlets reported that envelopes suspected of containing ricin had been found in the Pentagon’s Central Processing Center.
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