Poison Control
The House of Forbidden Knowledge's Professor of Poisons and Venoms and Departmental Chair of the School of Destructive Interventions delivers an introductory lecture on her own area of specialty
Before we get too far into the topic, we need to establish that you have a good concept of the scales of things. We need to make sure that you know that you are made of trillions of cells, and that your cells—any cells, including microbes like bacteria and the simpler fungi and the almost-cells of viruses—are containers knit from countless long chains of polymerized molecules, and that those polymerized molecules are made of large and complicated molecules strung together in long chains, and that those long complicated molecules are made of simpler molecules, and that those simple molecules are made of individual atoms, and that those atoms are made of mostly nothing, but some of those elements of nothing have (for their sizes) relatively strong electrical fields that are the bumps and sockets that make the Lego® that are atoms into molecules and polymers and cell parts and cells and organisms.
A proper grasp of scale may help you understand, say, respirator masks and air filters. The fibers in filters are usually plant fibers like cellulose and lignin which are really long and thick tangles of strands of polymerized glucose and phenols respectively. Air is simply diatomic nitrogen and diatomic oxygen and carbon dioxide molecules, and most things you can smell are also simple molecules and molecular fragments. So a mask doesn’t block smells very well. Viruses, while somewhat cell-like, are fairly small for cell-like things but much larger than simple molecules so it takes a huge forest of fibers to interfere in their progress. Think of trapping mosquitoes with spider webs. It works better if you layer lots of webs. The fibers of a mask aren’t too sticky, though. So getting a virus through a fiber-based breathing mask is a lot like kicking a soccer ball through a dense stand of trees. It can happen eventually, but it might take hours. And larger cells like bacteria just won’t fit through. They have to go around the mask altogether.
The air you breathe, though, goes right through, with a tiny, tiny bit more effort from your diaphragm. A thick stand of trees blocks the wind, maybe, but not the air.
With that out of the way, we can talk about the differences between venoms, toxins, and poisons. First of all, poison is the general category. Toxins are poisons generated or collected and concentrated by an organism’s biological processes, and a venom is a toxin that’s injected into another organism to subdue, injure, repel, and/or kill it.
A lot of substances can be poisonous but non-biological poisons are usually simple molecules or individual atoms. Their actions are usually pure chemistry. They get into tissues and consume critical resources or break down cellular machinery or disrupt transportation of materials or neural communications.
Cyanide is an excellent example. The principal feature of a cyanide molecule is the simplicity: a triple-bond between a carbon atom and a nitrogen atom that is perfect for grabbing up any stray oxygen you thought you were going to use for breathing and cellular energy production.
Your body can handle a small amount of cyanide—and does so on a regular basis. A small amount can be neutralized and excreted by the kidneys, and some of it can be converted into vitamin B12, even. These things are what happens with the natural cyanides found in fruits and vegetables. Too much cyanide, however, overwhelms these processes and simply starts to consume any free-roaming oxygen in your system, which causes you to suffocate no matter how much air there is to breathe.
Respiration isn’t the only process cyanide interferes with when you have too much of it in your system, but it’s the one that’s the biggest emergency.
Simple alcohols like methanol and ethanol are also fine examples of simple molecular poisons. They are small enough (and coarsely similar enough to water) to get transported through the blood-brain barrier, and there they wreak havoc with a number of neuroreceptors, including GABA and NMDA, with the end results being a CNS depressant and a block against forming memories. Methanol goes on to cause permanent damage to nerve myelination, which is great if you wanted to find out what multiple sclerosis and neurodegenerative blindness were like without the decades-long wait, assuming you don’t just die.
Some poisons are bad for you in any concentration, like lead, for instance, which eventually gets excreted but is never incorporated into any useful compounds or metabolic processes and does significant damage when it builds up, especially if you’re still developing. But many popular poisons can actually have a concentration at which they are beneficial, or at least generally tolerated.
Speaking similarly, most medicines and foods and substances critical to continued existence are poisonous in quantities larger than we are prepared to handle—even common substances like oxygen and water. Feel free to look up oxygen toxicity and water intoxication on your own time. Also, many normally tolerated substances are poisonous under conditions of higher or lower ambient temperatures or pressures. Divers and astronauts know about these problems intimately.
A venom can be just about any toxin that can be concentrated, stored in a gland, and then injected into a victim—or sprayed on one, I guess., though the process of injection makes the contrast between categories clearer. Formic acid is popular among hymenopterans, for instance. There’s a central carbon atom, a double bond with an oxygen atom, a single bond to a hydroxyl group, and another hydrogen that’s the one that gets donated as a free proton for, well, any purposes for which it needs to behave like an acid. It’s very uncomplicated and metabolically cheap to make.
Some creatures that use venoms take advantage of their cellular synthesis machinery to manufacture more complicated products, however: complicated protein and polypeptide agents and enzymes that dysregulate a target’s voluntary muscle control and metabolism in fairly specific ways. Like triggering nerve paralysis, blood pressure drop, hemoglobin destruction, involuntary muscle locking, blood coagulation, and massive tissue damage.
While formic acid as a venom seems like a handy nonspecific molecule for causing a little havoc, the typical cocktail injected by a venomous snake seems…premeditated. Like something designed with a comprehensive knowledge of the target’s physiology and neurochemistry. Compared to simple molecular compounds, these molecules are typically massive, composed of hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of atoms—but still substantially smaller than viruses and single-celled creatures.
The design isn’t conscious, of course, but evolutionary. And it may in fact be metabolically cheaper and easier to manufacture and collect the protein and amino-acid-chain based enzymes and metabolic dysregulators than molecular acids because you already make them, or peptide-chain constructs very much like them, to keep your own systems regulated and to break down malfunctioning cells for recycling. Your own internally produced medicine doesn’t need a lot of tweaking to be someone else’s poison.
As I mentioned before, frequently the only difference between a medicine and a poison is dosage.
This covers a good introduction to the topic for hobbyists, at least biologically. But are debilitating harm and death the only legitimate successful outcomes from deliberately poisoning an organism? And biological organisms aren’t the only kind of organisms that one can poison, are they?
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Consider a female Anopheles mosquito that has just picked up a load of malaria-inducing plasmodia. The last thing a plasmodium wants to do with its toxins and venoms is substantially damage the new host. But careful studies show that the chemicals a plasmodium releases have a number of effects.
Infected mosquitoes have their appetite suppressed while spores are developing. This means they wait to bite and feed until it’s possible to infect a human or animal host in order to minimize the chances of getting prematurely smacked to death. Also the plasmodial secretions reduce the effectiveness of the mosquito’s anticoagulant and anaesthetic agents, which requires the mosquito to feed several times—and hopefully from several victims—in order to maximize the chances of transmission to new victims.
Once inside the human they have less of a need to modify the host’s behavior. They just need to multiply quickly and effectively—and possibly make the host smell more attractive to passing uninfected mosquitoes—and less attractive to already infected mosquitoes.
How do we classify these introduced chemical agents? The harms that they do to the mosquito hosts are very finely tuned, but they are definitely harms. Infected mosquitoes must take extra risks for their blood meals, which are a necessary part of their reproductive cycle. The burdens of being influenced to wait to feed aren’t for the benefit of developing mosquito eggs, but for the benefit of developing plasmodium spores. However, malaria plasmodia can’t risk a huge impact to any individual host or substantially reduce the size and viability of a population of mosquitoes in a prime transmission area, just like they can’t afford to completely wipe out the populations of human and animal hosts.
In this case, the suite of venoms released by the plasmodia is much less about causing harm or disability or paralysis or death, but much more about control.
I would also argue that control is the aim of toxins and venoms in every case. A toxin in the tissues of an animal or plant or fungus that is consumed reduces the tendency of the consumer to choose that life form to eat in the future. The enemy that is stung flees and avoids future encounters. The prey that is injected is caused to lie down and cease struggling.
In every case the aim is influence and control. Any harm done is a means of control, not the aim. So of course the materials released by a plasmodium should count as venom.
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And then there are words.
Words and sentences and paragraphs are very much like proteins and other poly-peptide chains, composed of atomic phonemes (or the glyphs that represent them) strung together into little chains of acids that are either active or inert depending on the way that they’re folded or hidden or exposed by other sections of the wad. These little packages are frequently just left lying around like so much metabolic byproduct, but are frequently exchanged in clouds of verbal exhaust among verbal entities to convey information about states of health or mood or diet or recent events, especially crises and emergencies.
I’m not trying to belittle the capacity of verbal communication by comparing it to chemical communications between ants or dogs or cells in an organized tissue. In fact it’s quite the opposite. Chemical communications are very complex and evolved, while verbal behavior in humanity is perhaps a few million years old, and was strictly rudimentary for most of those millions. It has only recently become rich and varied and substantially more versatile somewhere inside the past 20,000 years or so, after the vocabularies of the dead were allowed to accrue and supplement the vocabularies of the living.
But also the purposes for which humans use verbal interactions has changed too. Or interactions in general.
What I tend to think of as genuine communication is an exchange of information that leaves all parties in a better position to respond to or anticipate events. Fact-based exchanges are best for this, most people find.
For some people, however, when they speak, every message they deliver to you is carefully calculated to influence current and future behavior, to improve the chances that you think of them favorably, that you believe that they are willing to perform favors for you in order to convince you to do favors for them, to encourage you to think of them as dominant to reduce the chances of a conflict or as a suitable breeding partner or as someone to be consulted on important matters so that they can continue to exert their attempts to influence and control you.
It’s never a matter of “what might the other party like to know or need to know?” and always “what can I say that will make them give me what I want?”
These people are, in a word, venomous. They see themselves as predators and others as prey. They frequently justify this approach by claiming that everyone else does it too—or at least everyone who is good enough at it to be minimally successful at it does it—and if they don’t employ these tactics, others who do will take their fair share. What they don’t tend to realize is that their behavior makes sure that they aren’t often in the presence of anyone who believes in reciprocity and mutual benefit, thus making their claim self-fulfilling.
At the coarsest levels, the actions of the venoms are what you’d expect—to blind or paralyze or damage the ability to flee or fight back. Some are more subtle and interfere with one’s judgment, with one’s ability to recognize a threat or properly categorize friends, foes, family, or strangers. Some attempt to trigger violence toward inappropriate targets or encourage acts of benevolence that aren’t affordable or likely to generate any desired benefit for the giver or those in the giver’s care.
We are all capable of attempts at verbal manipulations—attempts to modify how someone perceives or responds to external stimuli, motivated by greed or lust or fear or spite—but some humans seem to have no other mode of communication or interaction. If they were to give you a sandwich, it wouldn’t be because they had an extra that would be otherwise wasted and you seemed like you could possibly be in need of one. It would be to manipulate your view of them and/or to put you in debt. Or possibly to insult your physique. Or to establish themselves in a dominant role to you as a parental/provider-type.
Even a free sandwich can be a venomous payload.
Does all that give you plenty to think about? Then maybe it’s time to think about who or what you’d like to poison so we can come up with the most effective approach.
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We can start with something basic, like a human. Something slow and painful and certain, with death as the end goal.
Why not? It’s not like we take death very seriously around here.
If we don’t particularly care who dies, let’s start with introducing an ideology to a population: something about universal compassion being a desirable trait to have in oneself, because no one will object to others attempting to achieve such a goal as long as they themselves aren’t required to attempt it—and anyone who achieves it can be milked by anyone, like that stray goat in the village. Definitely hold up the occasional (possibly fictional, or at least fictionalized) account of a human who achieved such a goal as an example, and then wait for the susceptible—people who see little value in themselves, or who have been told by authorities that they have little value, and who believed it—to dedicate themselves to this goal as a way to redeem themselves for their nonexistent flaws.
This alone can cause someone to either waste away—or cause them to self-destruct when they realize that the goal is basically unachievable and they lose their last scrap of self-worth by repeatedly failing—but we’re looking for a sure thing. The best envenomings are delicious cocktails of nastiness, and we can do better.
The best compassion-based religions have supernatural elements, where people who need help can beg for the assistance of those who have died before them who have (reportedly) been more successful in the religion’s impossible goals: like saints, or those previously mentioned examples of (somehow) achievable perfection. Add the poisonous idea that the truly dedicated can become one of these saints by dying in exactly the correct way: by removing themselves from temptations of any and every kind and spending all of their waking hours meditating deeply on the holiest of topics, sustaining themselves for as long as possible on a minimalist ascetic diet of something that couldn’t possibly sustain life in the long term—and eventually getting someone to seal them in a box for a thousand days once they’ve become too weak to move.
I’m pulling an example from actuality here, of course.
The kicker is that the diet for the final phase was so toxic that the buildup of toxins in the tissues of the deceased were enough to discourage every form of rot—and thus the self-made mummy could be displayed in a shrine to transmit the whole idea of doing this to the next victim. The practice has been outlawed, but some of the victims are still on display.
I understand that as a poisoning, this may seem unsatisfactory. The target is a type of susceptible personality and not someone individually designated. But consider the appeal: there are nearly no legal traditions in any culture that will prosecute someone for deliberately handing out ideas like this for murder, or for any kind of stochastic and undirected solicitation of a crime—especially where there are constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom of expression. It has been problematic all the way back to the days of Henry II of England in 1170—sorry, Thomas Beckett—but the idea of “stochastic terrorism” as a crime that public figures can commit by spreading the appealing idea of a crime widely in the sure knowledge that some lunatic is going to pick it up and run with it—but not specifically which lunatic or when, thus leaving a substantial cushion of plausible deniability—hasn’t been discussed with any seriousness until about 2011.
You’re probably still safe to pursue it is what I’m saying. For a few more years yet.
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Okay, don’t say I don’t listen to complaints and cater to wishes. Let’s talk about techniques that are more direct.
If you wish to make a poison that will kill an organism outright, you have to make a list of what the organism needs on a regular basis that keeps it alive. For humans, think of the 3-3-3 rule: three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food. Even massive violent trauma won’t kill a human unless it disrupts one of these systems. Blood is the vehicle for transporting dissolved air to the tissues. Stop the breath or stop the heart and death is just a few minutes away.
A corporation, by contrast, needs cash flow. To maintain cash flow, they need a good public opinion and steady customers, they need human labor and the products they make or the services they sell, they need a communications infrastructure and access to stored assets. The importance of each of these things varies from corporate entity to corporate entity, but you can paralyze one completely by freezing its liquid assets and locking laborers and executives out of any warehouses or offices or communication systems.
An idea, which is not alive on its own, needs people to think it. An idea can be poisoned by associating something extremely unpalatable with that idea that makes it repulsive for people to think. Associate it with something physically disgusting, with something morally outrageous, with something that would attract laughter and ridicule to the thinker, and it will dwindle. The converse is true, of course, that you can make an idea more appealing by associating it with pleasant experiences and feelings. And that original idea you’d like to kill can be blocked by encouraging people to think an idea that competes with the target or interferes with it logically.
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Control is a little trickier. Control strategies have to be tailored to both your victim and the actions you need your victim to perform.
If you were a plasmodium and you needed to delay your host mosquito’s feeding behavior until your spores are ready for transmission, how would you do it? Would you make sure your unripe spores emit a hormonal appetite suppressant? Would you interfere with a critical sense, like vision or the ability to track CO2 concentrations until the spores were ready? Or would you just cause a general malaise that would make the mosquito want to stay put and rest despite the growing hunger? Or would you temporarily make the smell of prey repellent?
Controlling with poison, with venom, with venomous words, is a creative exercise, and creative thinking is rewarded.
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As an exercise I’d like you to choose two different organisms of different kinds. For one of these organisms you will design a venom that should disable it rapidly, and for the other you will design a more complicated intervention that would make it inclined to perform some action that would be beneficial to you. When we meet again you will present the results of your exercises to your classmates for critique and dissection, and then the class will choose one of each category from the examples presented to enact either in a laboratory or in the wild as appropriate, so that both can be observed for effectiveness.
The Library has a number of references that expand on this topic and detail a number of tasty mechanisms for control that you might not think of on your own. Don’t be ashamed to start there, but read quickly. Class meets again tomorrow morning.