Sarah Jensen

“Searching through a library of 16,480 different chemical compounds, two were found to protect mice from a lethal dose of ricin. More research is needed before these compounds can be made into drugs for humans, but it is possible that these drugs may also prove useful against other virulent toxins, such as Shiga toxin, that enter the cell in a similar way to ricin. While the name Shiga toxin may not be familiar, the bug that makes it and the effects of the toxin are well known. Shiga toxin is made by certain strains of E. coli, and causes severe, often bloody, diarrhea, and is the reason for so many E. coli–related food recalls.”
― Neil Bradbury, A Taste for Poison: Eleven Deadly Molecules and the Killers Who Used Them

“From 1952 to 1989, Rocky Flats manufactures more than seventy thousand plutonium triggers, at a cost of nearly $4 million apiece. Each one contains enough breathable particles of plutonium to kill every person on earth.”
― Kristen Iversen, Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats

“In 2016 a clinical study was performed using antibodies that were designed to be attracted to cancerous cells in the bladder. As the antibodies bound specifically to the cancer cells, they took along the ricin A chain. Like a Trojan horse, the cancer let the antibody-ricin complex inside its cells, where the ricin went on to kill the tumor. The realization of Ehrlich’s magic bullet now seems a real possibility. Thus cutting-edge therapeutic uses of ricin would seem to rehabilitate the reputation of even the deadliest of substances.”
― Neil Bradbury, A Taste for Poison: Eleven Deadly Molecules and the Killers Who Used Them

“Knowledge is power, she had argued. And conversely, the withholding of knowledge is an act of oppression.”
― Adele Myers, The Tobacco Wives