Dr. Neil Bradbury, a Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at the Chicago Medical School. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland in Biochemistry, and his Ph.D. from the Welsh National School of Medicine in Medical Biochemistry. His research has focused on genetic diseases, particularly Cystic Fibrosis, and has spoken on the topic at national and international scientific conferences. He is also an award-winning teacher, and A Taste for Poison is his first book.
Topics covered in this episode:
Poisonous Plants and Toxins
Historical Use of Poisons
Atropine Poisoning
Disguising Poisons
Detection of Poisons
Modern Cases of Poisoning
Therapeutic Index of Substances
Ergot Poisoning
Polonium Poisoning
Radioactive Materials
Political Assassinations
Allergic Reactions
Misconceptions About Chemicals
Industrialized Farming
Dark History and Tourism
To learn more about Neil Bradbury and his work, head over to https://neilbradbury.org/
Poison Help Line (1-800-222-1222)
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-lindsey-elmore-show--5952903/support.
Topics covered in this episode:
Poisonous Plants and Toxins
Historical Use of Poisons
Atropine Poisoning
Disguising Poisons
Detection of Poisons
Modern Cases of Poisoning
Therapeutic Index of Substances
Ergot Poisoning
Polonium Poisoning
Radioactive Materials
Political Assassinations
Allergic Reactions
Misconceptions About Chemicals
Industrialized Farming
Dark History and Tourism
To learn more about Neil Bradbury and his work, head over to https://neilbradbury.org/
Poison Help Line (1-800-222-1222)
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-lindsey-elmore-show--5952903/support.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
As any reader of murder mysteries can tell you, poison
is one of the most enduring and popular weapons of
choice for a scheming murderer. It can be slipped into
a drink, smeared on the tip of an arrow, or
on the handle of a door, or even filtered into
(00:21):
the air that we breathe.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Today, we're going to talk about.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
How exactly poisons work and break down our bodies, and
what we have learned through history about the damage they inflict.
We're going to talk about everything that is popular science,
medical history, and true crime with my guest, doctor Neil Bradberry,
(00:48):
who is exploring in his new book the most morbidly
captivating method of murder that takes place on a biochemical
love in the cells.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
This is The Lindsay Elmore Show.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Welcome to The Lindsay Elmore Show, a podcast for people
who deserve to be healthy. With honest, open and enlightening
conversations with doctors, thought leaders, creatives and spiritual gurus. You'll
walk away with simple and tangible tips and tricks that
allow you to live your healthiest life so you can
(01:27):
pursue your dreams, overcome obstacles, and leave your mark.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Doctor Neil Bradberry.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Is a professor of physiology and biophysics at Chicago Medical School.
He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Saint
Andrew's in Scotland in biochemistry and his PhD from the
Welsh National School of Medicine in medicinal biochemistry. His research
(01:55):
has focused on genetic diseases, particularly cystic fibrosis, and he
has spoken on the topic at national and international scientific conferences.
He is an award winning teacher and A Taste for
Poison is his first book. He grew up fascinated by murder,
(02:18):
mysteries and poisons and his book is equal parts true crime,
science and history and it is exactly what everyone.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Should know about what is actually.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
Being poured in their cup of tea. It is a
brilliant blend of science and crime, and A Taste for
Poison reveals how eleven notorious poisons affect the body through
the real life murders that they were used for. Doctor
(02:58):
Neil Bradberry, Welcome to the Lindsay Elmore Show.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
Well, thank you, Lindsay. It's a pleasure to be here.
Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
I am so excited when I saw your book A
taste for poison. I was really intrigued by this history
of all.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
The things that go into poisonings.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
And I was actually thinking of you over the weekend
because I was listening to a podcast called Medical Murders
that I absolutely adore, and there was an entire show
dedicated just to arsenic and so I've been looking forward
to our conversation today. What got you in to the
topic of poisons.
Speaker 4 (03:42):
It really started when I was a student at Saint
Andrew's in Scotland. I took a degree in biochemistry and
what really struck me was how many poisons have been
used in medicine and understanding how the body work. I
think it's probably true to say that without the use
(04:05):
of poisons in experiments trying to figure out how the
body works, we would actually know a lot less about
the body, and also a lot less about how we
can treat problems that arise when the body goes wrong.
So it's really fascinating to me that poisons could be
used experimentally to figure out how to make people better,
(04:27):
and that really fascinated me. We learned about poisons in
class and one day in class I did start to think,
I wonder if this could be used to take someone
out and no one would ever know. I'd been an
Agatha Christie fan growing up, so I was very well
versed in murder mysteries, and it just seemed a case
(04:51):
of putting those two passions in my life together and
coming up with maybe poisons could be used, and then
realizing that actually poisons have been used for millennia throughout
history to do away with people that are not necessarily
desired at that particular time.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
I have so many follow up questions, but I want
to just hear more about this history. Tell me about
some of the early experiments with poisons that helped to
reveal some function of the body that we did not
know prior to that.
Speaker 4 (05:30):
So many people are probably familiar with the Fugufish Japanese
delicacy that contains the toxin to tro detoxin. Chefs in
Japan have to be specially licensed by the government to
be able to sell it to customers. The target for
(05:51):
to tro detoxin in the body is the nerves. It
essentially kills the nerves, takes them completely out. And so
if you're interested in determining whether or not a particular
process in the body is controlled by the nerves or
maybe by hormones. Then you can expose your experiment to
(06:14):
tatrodotoxin and it will completely wipe out the nervous input,
so anything that's left will be purely hormonal. So we
can think about things like insulin secretion. Is that dependent
upon a nervous input or is it dependent upon a
hormonal input, And we now know that it's actually very
(06:36):
much dependent upon hormones that come from the intestines that
tell the pancreas hate we've just eaten a big sugary meal,
get ready to release insulin, and so that helps with
further development of drugs that can be used to treat
patients who have diabetes M.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
I mean, it's it's interesting because when you first started talking,
really the origins of all pharmacy is the experimentation of poisonings.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Even you know.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
If you pre date the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act,
we see lots of different experimentation of like trying to
find what is the LD fifty And you know, we
now do it in rats, but we used to do
it in humans with all kinds of different organic, naturally
(07:31):
occurring substances, and so you know, this origin of poisoning
It really is something that the Earth gives us in
a variety of ways.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
I was just listening the other day.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
There's concern because there's been such a drought in Salt
Lake City that if the Great Salt Lake dries up,
it's going to contaminate all the groundwater with heavy metals
and arsenic and making the groundwater non poe. And so
why do we see poisons occur in nature in both
(08:08):
the plant and the animal kingdoms.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
Certainly for plants, the main reason why they employ toxic
substances in their leaves and seeds is as a protection mechanism.
It's a defense mechanism from being eaten. Obviously, the plants
want to protect both themselves and their seeds so that
they can propagate and continue to grow. And if they
(08:36):
have a bug or indeed a human coming along and
chewing them up, then they're not going to survive very long.
So it's really a defense mechanism. It's not really offensive
in that sense. And the same is true for the
animal kingdom. We think about the blue ring octopus, for example,
(08:56):
which also contains to prototoxin or sneak venoms. None of
those are really designed for the animals to go out
and be aggressive. They're really defense mechanisms. Although actually, in
thinking about that, there is one case of a fish
(09:17):
that actually kills its prey by injecting a slight version
of insulin, and it uses that to kill its prey
by essentially wiping out all the sugar in the other
fish's body, so it just goes into a coma and
the fish can then eat it. So that there are
(09:40):
examples of that, And obviously that's an example of a
fish insulin that has been used by the fish to kill,
but it's also being used and investigate is the potential
treatment for individuals that have diabetes for a quick acting
insulin that can help can that sugar levels if they've
(10:01):
been unexpectedly high.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Well, I mean, it reminds me of the drugs that
are just so popular right now in the media, the
ozepics and wagovis, and everybody is saying like, oh my gosh,
we can lose weight using these these glip one agonists.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
But glip one agonists, we're all, you know.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
The first synthetic glip one agonist was exenotide, and the
reason that it was discovered was because people were investigating
how HeLa monsters in Arizona and New Mexico could go
months and months and months without without eating. And you
know you talking about toxins that can trigger the release
(10:44):
of insulin.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
It also reminds me of the.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Sugar alcohol xylotol, which does not trigger an insulin response
in humans, but does in dogs and can be rapidly
fatal in in dogs. And just because we have different
different metabolisms there.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Now, I would.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Love to know how did poisonings get this reputation of
being a female's way of committing murder. I hear this
all the time, that there is like a feminization of
using poisons for assassinations and murder. How did that reputation
(11:25):
come to me?
Speaker 4 (11:27):
It's a really intriguing question, and I will admit when
I started to write the book that I did have
that presupposition that it was mostly a feminine way of killing. Obviously,
it doesn't require strength, it doesn't require brute force. You
(11:48):
can sprinkle the poison onto someone's food and then sneak
away and just watch them slowly die. So it certainly
does have this reputation of being a female weapon of choice.
But as I was looking through the history of different
poisons that we used in different killers. It became quite
(12:08):
apparent that there were just as many men who were
using poisons to killers that there were women, and there
really wasn't any difference. Despite the common concept that it's
a female thing, it really isn't. There is many men
using poisons. What I did find is that by far
(12:31):
the majority of poisonous do seem to come from the
medical profession.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
That was going to be my very next question is like, because, okay,
so the most intriguing case of poisonings that I have
ever heard, because you know, you hear arsenic you hear
heavy metals, you hear you know, people slipping people benzos
and opiates and whatever. The most intriguing case ever was
(13:00):
Doc that was he was a surgeon and he was
diverting ethosuximide and he was murdering people with ethosuximide, which
is I mean, you know, if you're gonna murder somebody,
a brilliant way to do it because it's almost undetectable
common talk screens are not going to look for it,
(13:20):
and the metabolism of it is in the range of
like thirty to ninety seconds, and so it just it
wears off. So quickly that it's almost undetectable. And so
why the medical field? What is this history?
Speaker 4 (13:39):
I think it probably stems from the fact that individuals
in the medical profession, and I should preface everything by
saying that this is only certain individuals. It's certainly not
an indictment of the entire medical profession. I think there
(13:59):
is the sense that some people have gotten that I
know that I'm clever and I can figure out how
to kill people. I have the balance of life and
death in my hands with my skills and knowledge, and
I'm going to exercise that. So I think that's really
(14:22):
where it comes from. Is really a large amount of
hubris that the people think that they're knowledgeable, they can
get away with this because of their knowledge, and in
fact it was Sherlock Holmes famously stated that doctors are
(14:43):
the worst kind of enemy because they've lack or they
have all the knowledge and they have the skills necessary
to commit.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Murder and the access the access to I mean, I
think about how I didn't at the time realize when
I was in pharmacy school how dangerous what I was
doing was because I worked at a hospital. I worked
at the county hospital in downtown San Francisco in the
(15:16):
mission one of the you know more one of the
poorer neighborhoods in San Francisco. And I was going from
the main pharmacy to all of the extended care facilities,
and you don't think about just how dangerous it is
that you're like carrying two hundred oxyconton, four hundred benzos,
(15:38):
three hundred of you know, hydrocdeon, whatever it was. But
you and I remember at the time being like, if
anybody ever comes and tries to like mug me, they
can have it.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
Take it, take it all, like I will.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
Deal with it, because you know, the the medications have
gotten so potent that in a way, they are their
own special form of poison. And the access level that
healthcare professionals have is so much higher as well as,
(16:14):
like you said, the hubrius of just knowing, I know
what these things can do is very powerful, I think.
Speaker 4 (16:24):
And that's something that I think we don't often think about,
is we use the term poison and think, if you're
exposed to any of these substances, you're going to die,
and that's not really the case because a lot of
the things we consider as poisons are actually very beneficial.
(16:44):
And one example that you may know from the pharmacy
is de joxin, which is a very important tart medication.
It's a very important treatment for congestive heart failure and
has very good clinical uses. But if you add too
much de jox into a patient, it certainly will kill you.
(17:07):
So a little bit absolutely beneficial, has great clinical import
but too much will kill you. And there was the
famous case of Charles Cullen in New Jersey who was
a nurse who was taking dejoxin from his stock of
drugs and injecting it into several patients and murdering them.
(17:32):
He was eventually caught and sent to prison for multiple
life sentences, although even by his own admission over sixteen
or so years he thought that he had maybe killed
four hundred patients by overdosing with a drug that has
legitimate uses for treating art problems.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Well, and we see not just de jockson, but we
see lots of drugs that have what you're referring to
as this like narrow therapeutic index, where a little bit
is great, but too much is rapidly, very very dangerous.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
And dejoxin's a great example.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
Carbamazepine phenytoin the like really common anti epileptic medicine warfarin
the blood thinner is a great one.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
And then you know, of course we.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
Have some of the more aggressive chemotherapy agents like cyclosporin
and tachrollamus, which also have this very narrow therapeutic index
where if you don't get the dose right, your patient
will either not get the therapeutic benefit or will become
(18:49):
rapidly will become rapidly fatal. And I think it's also
important to note, you know, dejoxin digitalis is a natural product.
It is a natural ingredient of the foxglove plant, and
it also reminds me of Angel's trumpets, which the seeds
(19:09):
of Angel's trumpets also have a very narrow therapeutic index
that people who abuse it for the hallucinogenic effects can
get very very sick, very very fast. What other common
poisons are just like hanging out in our gardens?
Speaker 4 (19:26):
Well, certainly you mentioned Angel's trumpet, also known as Devil's trumpet,
which contains atropine. Of course, as you mentioned, that can
be used as a hallucinogen, probably not a terribly good
one because it is lethal, although interestingly enough, the same
(19:49):
chemical is used therapeutically to treat people exposed to nerve toxins,
so this was famously used just recently to treat these
grip hoals who were poisoned with novi chok. He was
a defector from the KGB and has been moved had
(20:09):
moved over to Salisbury in England, and probably just three
or four years ago the order went out that he
was to be taken out and Novi chok, the nerve agent,
was sprayed on his front door so that when he
went out he got the poison into his skin. And
(20:30):
really the best antidote for nerve poisoning is atropine, although
on its own atropine is deadly. One of the other
plants that's fairly common and you can go to any
garden center and pick it up is Monkshod monkshood. It
(20:52):
is a really nice beautiful flower. It looks to all
intents like one of those old fashioned monks cowlds that
you see in movies in monasteries that contains the poison aconite.
The other name monks Had obviously is a fairly benign name,
(21:14):
but the other name that had it has is Wolf
Spain and Bain means to kill, and in fact, this
was a poison that was spread on arrows and was
used to kill wolves, and in fact it was so
effective that it pretty much wiped out the entire wolf
population in England when it was used. There really isn't
(21:41):
much in the way of therapeutic benefit to aconite. It
really is quite deadly. One of the interesting stories there
that I found really fascinating is the number of ways
in which people have tried to disguise they're poisoning. And
(22:02):
there was a particularly interesting case of a woman who
was using aconite to get rid of her lover that
had decided he wanted to end the affair, and she
decided the way she was going to expose him to
aconite was by putting it in a bowl of chicken curry,
(22:22):
and she did that. He ate the chicken curry, as
did his fiance at the time. He ate sufficient that
he died within twenty four hours, very quickly. His fiance
didn't eat quite as much of the chicken curry and
did survive. But I just found that fascinating that someone
(22:44):
would put a deadly poison in chicken curry for someone
to eat.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Well, I mean, you gotta admit all those spices are
going to cover up some flavors because in as a
general rule, and this is making a broad sweeping statement,
but as a general rule, a lot of poisons are
very bitter, and a lot of medications are very bitter.
(23:10):
And that's why, you know, we see in like children's
preparations of meds, there's so much sugar and so many
additives and things because you have to cover you have
to cover it up. And I mean, for me, having
so many years experience as a patient of traditional Chinese medicine,
some of those Chinese herbs that have medicinal properties are very,
(23:32):
very very unpalatable, So I mean, I could see it
going in into a curry and having those spices to
cover up the flavors. But then on the other hand,
we also see poisons that are so dangerous because they
don't have flavor. We see things like GHB that doesn't
(23:55):
have that doesn't really have any flavor, and the rohipnol
that you know, everybody call it getting roofy, but it's
not roof and all.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
It's rohypnol.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
But that's another date rape drug that is so dangerous
because it just has no flavor and it blends in
into everything and so you know, I mean, we'll be
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And now let's get back to the show. Give us
some examples of people who have figured out that they
(27:10):
are being poisoned, because we've certainly seen that over the
course of history, of people like realizing, hey, somebody is
trying to take me out here.
Speaker 4 (27:23):
I think probably a really good example of that is
going back to the atropine that we talked about coming
from Bragmancy of the Angel's trumpet. There was a case
in Scotland where a professor of biochemistry actually which has
got me interested in it, had decided to kill his
(27:46):
wife with atropine. As you said, a lot of these
plant poisons are very bitter tasting. They're in a broad
class of plant alkaloids, and generally those are bitter tasting,
which is actually a good thing because it warns people, hey,
don't eat this. But he decided he was going to
(28:07):
disguise the atropine by putting it in a glass of
gin and tonic for his wife, tonic being somewhat bitter itself. Again,
he decided he was going to be clever about this,
and so what he did was to go into a
local grocery store and squirt some atropine into random bottles
(28:31):
of tonic water and left them on the shelves, so
the tip would appear as if there was a disgruntled
employee that had doped all the bottles of tonic water,
and it would presumably disguise the fact that the real
target of all this was his wife. It turned out
(28:53):
that one of the people that bought a bottle of
tonic water, it was a young student went into the
grocery store with his mother to buy some of these
bottles of tonic water and developed very serious symptoms. Fortunately,
her husband was an anesthesiologist and recognized the symptoms of
(29:18):
atropine poisoning right away. He called up the paramedics to
come take his wife and son to hospital. They did survive,
but then he became worried that the police would think
he had done it because he had the knowledge of
what that was. But that's probably the best example of
(29:38):
where it was realized that someone had been poisoned, and
fortunately in that case they both recovered and suffered no
ill effects.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
I mean, that is just I mean, atropine is another
example of a drug that gets used all of the time,
but too much of it can be.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Very, very dangerous.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
And you know, not everybody is able to recognize those symptoms,
and so you know, just shout out people. I have
people reach out to me all of the time on
social media and concerned about like you know, my kid
just drank a bottle of this or had whatever. Like friends,
don't reach out to me, you call poison control. Call
(30:24):
poison Control. It's open twenty four hours a day, seven
days a week. Like if you think something is wrong,
call and ask and I'll put the number to it
in in the show notes, because I think that it's
an underutilized, underutilized resource. What's the status of people currently,
(30:45):
you know? I mean, or is poisoning still a common
method of murder? And we haven't even talked about, you know,
politically motivated murders and assassinations, Like how common is poison
still used today?
Speaker 4 (31:01):
That has an interesting history. For many years, arsenic was
a very popular poison, mainly because there was no way
to detect it, and so if you died from arsenic poisoning,
no one was going to know. Until a chap called
(31:22):
John Marsh developed a test for arsenic and it became
very widely used in criminal cases where arsenic poisoning was suspected.
And because of that, the number of arsenic poisonings dropped.
Like mad people stopped using arsenic but moved on to
other poisons. And nowadays it is fairly easy and routine
(31:47):
to detect poisons. Some of them you have to know
what you're looking for, that's for sure. But in any
case of suspicious death, it is usually true that it
will be looked at as a case of suspected poisoning.
Even just last year, there was a case for poisoning
(32:10):
with thallium that came up in the Old Bailey in London.
An individual had killed his mother in law and was
attempting kill his father in law with thallium that he'd
placed in coffee. I just read in the paper recently,
just a couple of months ago, that there's a dentist
(32:32):
in Colorado who has also been accused of poisoning his
wife and children. And so this happens quite often. Actually,
there was a case in Indiana just last year where
someone had tried to kill an individual. It was a
(32:52):
woman who killed her husband because she was having an
affair and used mushrooms. Bill bar to mushrooms which also
affects the nervous system and send it haywire. She used
mushrooms to kill him. But that was just last year.
So poisoning doesn't seem to be a method of getting
(33:13):
rid of people. That's historical. It occurs still today. Even
though the chances of getting away with it are very
much reduced, people still think they can.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
It's extraordinary that so many murders go unsolved these days,
because it has gotten just increasingly increasingly harder to get
away with it, and yet just resources are so slim
(33:49):
that it becomes very difficult to solve every murder out there.
And you know, speaking of mushrooms, I think that people
you know are familiar with not going out and just
randomly eating in eating mushrooms.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
But I tell you it, honestly, it scares me just.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
Having a dog and knowing that like Aminita Floyd's like
literally just grows, it just grows all the places, and
it is very very toxic and very very very dangerous.
And having lived in Asheville, North Carolina and seen so
many mushroom foragers, it just I would ask all these
(34:28):
questions like how do you know what you're actually getting?
And people spend a lifetime understanding and pursuing and trying
to differentiate which of these mushrooms are foods and which
ones are going to are going to kill us?
Speaker 4 (34:46):
Right. I was fortunate enough to be invited this past
summer to any castle which has a poison God. Oh,
they have it to set up to go through all
the differentferent poisons. The Duchess of Northumberland, who founded the
Poison Garden, also wanted it as an educational tool. They
(35:08):
have cannabis plants in there and cat plants in there
to reach out to school kids to explain the dangers
of using drugs, but they also have many other plants there,
some of which people grow in their own gardens. I
was talking to the head gardener there and he said
(35:30):
that he thinks probably ninety percent of all plants probably
do contain some level of poison. So it's not as
if you can find some plants that don't have any poison,
that the vast majority actually do. And that was one
of the things that occurred to me as I was
writing the book and thinking, you know, if I had
(35:54):
there was no grocery stores available, that I had to
go out foraging and looking for plants to eat, I
would probably end up having to starve to death because
I would have no idea which plants were edible and
which I should stay away from.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
I mean, it is the irony of modern American farming
that an Iowa farmer can't feed themselves, right, you know,
it is this irony that farming in America has become
so industrialized that I mean, you know, I hate to
(36:29):
tell you, but you're screwed.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
During the zombie apocalypse. You are not going to make
it friend.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
Yeah, I mean, but to your point that most plants
contain some kind of poison, even just the aromatic molecules.
Like you think about eanathol, which is a common chemical
constituent in penyl in basil. It has that anie kind
of smell to it. It's poisonous if you take enough
(36:58):
of it. And certainly in some of the more assertive
plants that are used for parasite cleansing, the things like
wormwood and black walnut, those we are actually using for
their poisonous properties in order to kill off parasites.
Speaker 2 (37:22):
And you know, and.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
Wormwood also gets used as a recreational drug in the
form of absinth, which is not as common in the
United States, but like I mean, you can really get
some like very powerful absentth across Europe and internationally. And
(37:45):
so it's interesting that poison isn't just about killing, about murder,
about assassination, about anything. It's it's actually just part of
our everyday life and part of the chemistry that we
are a part of in the world.
Speaker 4 (38:04):
It is you see some of these podcasters and influencers
suggesting that I don't want to eat any chemicals. No,
chemicals are going in my body, which is quite silly.
Everything we eat is a chemical. You can't get away
(38:26):
from chemicals. Your old body is made of chemicals. But again,
there's nothing really intrinsically good or bad about the chemicals.
That the chemicals themselves have no moral compass, that they're
just chemicals. We can even think about something as innocuous
(38:46):
as water. If you drink enough water, you will die.
So you can't say that I'm never going to take chemicals.
But we have to think about things. We have to
be rational and decide what risks we can take, what
(39:06):
foods we're interested in. Certainly some people have allergies to shellfish.
For example, to me, I can eat as much shellfish
as I like, and hav an occasion indulged a lot
of shrimp. But for other people friends that I have,
(39:27):
just tasting shrimp or being exposed to shrimp can be
deadly to them. So there are things that are not
just poisons for everybody. Some things can be poisonous to
some people but not to others.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Yes, oh, absolutely certain things are allergenic to some and
some people just tolerate it just fine. So I feel
like we would be a miss if we don't at
least touch on ergots and the importance of ergots in
history as well.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
As is in medications.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
Give us a little bit of a crash course and
what you learned about GOT toxicity.
Speaker 4 (40:10):
So ergots come from mold, and this was probably brought
to prominence, most notably in the sale of witch trials,
where there was obviously a lot of people being accused
of witchcraft. People were burnt at the stake. Probably some
(40:34):
of that was just cultural and people getting rid of
people that they had a disagreement with because it was
easy to just accuse someone of being a witch and
have them burnt at the steak. But there probably were
people who generinely did have hallucinations and see things that
(40:57):
would be normally associated with witchcraft, and that lightly is
because the grains that they were storing were contaminated with
this fungus mold that produces GOT poisoning. It's a very
powerful hallucinogen and is even today something that can be
(41:19):
quite problematic if grain is not stored properly.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
M and is also used as a last line agent
for the treatment of migraines, and so even though we
know that it has this profound side effect profile. If
nothing else will stop the migraine, that intrnasal ergot is
(41:46):
that last line option for a lot of a lot
of people.
Speaker 4 (41:53):
And of course the same is true for botox. Yes,
botox is used for migraine, but it botulinemtoxin is probably
one of the more deadly things that it really doesn't
take a whole lot of boty of line and toxin
to kill a person. So again it comes back to
as you were mentioning that idea of a therapeutic index
(42:14):
of a little bit is good for you, but don't
take too much more because it might have lethal consequences.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
Yes, it is one of those things.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
But if you have that narrow therapeutic index, it is
it is dangerous and it's you know, one of the
reasons that I'm such a huge advocate for pharmacist dosing
of these of certain types of medications because if you
have to do long form math, which you know now
you have calculators online and everything that does it for you,
(42:47):
but back when I was in school and we had
to do you know, the long form math to dose
things that had more neuro therapeutic indexes, things even things
that are quote safer like vankam Isin, and you still
have to get the dosing riter or you're going to
take out somebody's kidneys. It's not as dangerous as an aminoglycoside,
but it still has its own risks. So take us
(43:12):
out and just tell us one of your favorite stories
of all time about poisons, poisoners, murder, killers, whatever. Just
take us out with something, because one of the things
that I love about the reviews of your books is
somebody said it is a fascinating tale of poisons and
(43:33):
poisonous deeds that both educates and entertains, and I certainly
have been educated and entertained this whole conversation. So tell
us in just one of your absolute favorite stories that
you learned along your research.
Speaker 4 (43:46):
Oh well, one of the things we've not really mentioned it,
and how I mentioned just as we conclude here is
the use of poisons in political assassinations. Yes, but one
that really struck me was the Litvinenko case. Litvinenko was
(44:06):
a KGB agent who also defected to London and for
a time was actually working as a double agent for
m I six in London, and it was decided to
take him out, and they disguised their poison in this case,
it was polonium, a radioactive substance that they disguised in
(44:31):
a pot of tea at a hotel in London. Polonium
is a heavy metal. We do need metals in our diet.
We need magnesium, we need iron in our diet. But
unfortunately the mechanisms in our body that allow us to
(44:51):
take up those metals really don't discriminate between good and
bad metals. Probably more recently in the US was the
lead poisoning cases that we heard about around Detroit that
were brought about by the same process. But what really
fascinating me about that the Litvinenko case was where it occurred.
(45:17):
It was at the Millennium Hotel in London, which just
happened to be around the corner from the US embassy
at the time, and I was able to actually go
and sit in that same restaurant in the hotel at
the same table that Litvinenko was poisoned with radioactive tea.
(45:39):
Fortunately that the hotel had been cleaned and cleared, it
still very radioactive. Sinks had to be ripped out from
the hotel rooms where the Russian agents had collected the
plonium to put into the tea. Even Litvinenko's body is
now encased in legs and buried so that people don't
(46:03):
get access to it. But just being that close to
where things actually happened in that situation, it was just
really fascinating to me. And so I do have a
particular interest in polonium just because I sat at essentially
the same table in the restaurant. Well, the nanco was poisoned.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
That is absolutely fascinating. And I mean, I think the
lesson here is don't defect from the KGB and go
to work for mi I six.
Speaker 2 (46:35):
It's not a good life plan.
Speaker 1 (46:39):
Yes, it's so fascinating how these radioactive materials they just
last and they never go anywhere, and it's.
Speaker 2 (46:51):
It's intriguing.
Speaker 1 (46:53):
You know, you are a great example of this kind
of tourism that has come out about poisonings and about
murder and about all of this like sort of you know,
dark history that we have. I mean, I think about
people who go and tour Chernobyl and I'm just like,
(47:13):
I don't know if I would do that if I
were you. But to your point, it's got to be
really well decontaminated. I mean, Neil, this has been one
of my favorite conversations. Ever, I love your work. I
love this combination of science and murder mystery and how
you've brought it all together. So listeners go pick up
(47:35):
a taste of poison. And thank you so very much
for coming in and being a guest today on the
Lindsay Elmore Show.
Speaker 4 (47:44):
Well, thank you for the invitation. It's been in delight
for me chatting with you, and I hope the readers
of the book learn something and find something enjoyable as well.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
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As any reader of murder mysteries can tell you, poison
is one of the most enduring and popular weapons of
choice for a scheming murderer. It can be slipped into
a drink, smeared on the tip of an arrow, or
on the handle of a door, or even filtered into
(00:21):
the air that we breathe.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Today, we're going to talk about.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
How exactly poisons work and break down our bodies, and
what we have learned through history about the damage they inflict.
We're going to talk about everything that is popular science,
medical history, and true crime with my guest, doctor Neil Bradberry,
(00:48):
who is exploring in his new book the most morbidly
captivating method of murder that takes place on a biochemical
love in the cells.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
This is The Lindsay Elmore Show.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Welcome to The Lindsay Elmore Show, a podcast for people
who deserve to be healthy. With honest, open and enlightening
conversations with doctors, thought leaders, creatives and spiritual gurus. You'll
walk away with simple and tangible tips and tricks that
allow you to live your healthiest life so you can
(01:27):
pursue your dreams, overcome obstacles, and leave your mark.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Doctor Neil Bradberry.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Is a professor of physiology and biophysics at Chicago Medical School.
He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Saint
Andrew's in Scotland in biochemistry and his PhD from the
Welsh National School of Medicine in medicinal biochemistry. His research
(01:55):
has focused on genetic diseases, particularly cystic fibrosis, and he
has spoken on the topic at national and international scientific conferences.
He is an award winning teacher and A Taste for
Poison is his first book. He grew up fascinated by murder,
(02:18):
mysteries and poisons and his book is equal parts true crime,
science and history and it is exactly what everyone.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Should know about what is actually.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
Being poured in their cup of tea. It is a
brilliant blend of science and crime, and A Taste for
Poison reveals how eleven notorious poisons affect the body through
the real life murders that they were used for. Doctor
(02:58):
Neil Bradberry, Welcome to the Lindsay Elmore Show.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
Well, thank you, Lindsay. It's a pleasure to be here.
Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
I am so excited when I saw your book A
taste for poison. I was really intrigued by this history
of all.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
The things that go into poisonings.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
And I was actually thinking of you over the weekend
because I was listening to a podcast called Medical Murders
that I absolutely adore, and there was an entire show
dedicated just to arsenic and so I've been looking forward
to our conversation today. What got you in to the
topic of poisons.
Speaker 4 (03:42):
It really started when I was a student at Saint
Andrew's in Scotland. I took a degree in biochemistry and
what really struck me was how many poisons have been
used in medicine and understanding how the body work. I
think it's probably true to say that without the use
(04:05):
of poisons in experiments trying to figure out how the
body works, we would actually know a lot less about
the body, and also a lot less about how we
can treat problems that arise when the body goes wrong.
So it's really fascinating to me that poisons could be
used experimentally to figure out how to make people better,
(04:27):
and that really fascinated me. We learned about poisons in
class and one day in class I did start to think,
I wonder if this could be used to take someone
out and no one would ever know. I'd been an
Agatha Christie fan growing up, so I was very well
versed in murder mysteries, and it just seemed a case
(04:51):
of putting those two passions in my life together and
coming up with maybe poisons could be used, and then
realizing that actually poisons have been used for millennia throughout
history to do away with people that are not necessarily
desired at that particular time.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
I have so many follow up questions, but I want
to just hear more about this history. Tell me about
some of the early experiments with poisons that helped to
reveal some function of the body that we did not
know prior to that.
Speaker 4 (05:30):
So many people are probably familiar with the Fugufish Japanese
delicacy that contains the toxin to tro detoxin. Chefs in
Japan have to be specially licensed by the government to
be able to sell it to customers. The target for
(05:51):
to tro detoxin in the body is the nerves. It
essentially kills the nerves, takes them completely out. And so
if you're interested in determining whether or not a particular
process in the body is controlled by the nerves or
maybe by hormones. Then you can expose your experiment to
(06:14):
tatrodotoxin and it will completely wipe out the nervous input,
so anything that's left will be purely hormonal. So we
can think about things like insulin secretion. Is that dependent
upon a nervous input or is it dependent upon a
hormonal input, And we now know that it's actually very
(06:36):
much dependent upon hormones that come from the intestines that
tell the pancreas hate we've just eaten a big sugary meal,
get ready to release insulin, and so that helps with
further development of drugs that can be used to treat
patients who have diabetes M.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
I mean, it's it's interesting because when you first started talking,
really the origins of all pharmacy is the experimentation of poisonings.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Even you know.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
If you pre date the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act,
we see lots of different experimentation of like trying to
find what is the LD fifty And you know, we
now do it in rats, but we used to do
it in humans with all kinds of different organic, naturally
(07:31):
occurring substances, and so you know, this origin of poisoning
It really is something that the Earth gives us in
a variety of ways.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
I was just listening the other day.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
There's concern because there's been such a drought in Salt
Lake City that if the Great Salt Lake dries up,
it's going to contaminate all the groundwater with heavy metals
and arsenic and making the groundwater non poe. And so
why do we see poisons occur in nature in both
(08:08):
the plant and the animal kingdoms.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
Certainly for plants, the main reason why they employ toxic
substances in their leaves and seeds is as a protection mechanism.
It's a defense mechanism from being eaten. Obviously, the plants
want to protect both themselves and their seeds so that
they can propagate and continue to grow. And if they
(08:36):
have a bug or indeed a human coming along and
chewing them up, then they're not going to survive very long.
So it's really a defense mechanism. It's not really offensive
in that sense. And the same is true for the
animal kingdom. We think about the blue ring octopus, for example,
(08:56):
which also contains to prototoxin or sneak venoms. None of
those are really designed for the animals to go out
and be aggressive. They're really defense mechanisms. Although actually, in
thinking about that, there is one case of a fish
(09:17):
that actually kills its prey by injecting a slight version
of insulin, and it uses that to kill its prey
by essentially wiping out all the sugar in the other
fish's body, so it just goes into a coma and
the fish can then eat it. So that there are
(09:40):
examples of that, And obviously that's an example of a
fish insulin that has been used by the fish to kill,
but it's also being used and investigate is the potential
treatment for individuals that have diabetes for a quick acting
insulin that can help can that sugar levels if they've
(10:01):
been unexpectedly high.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Well, I mean, it reminds me of the drugs that
are just so popular right now in the media, the
ozepics and wagovis, and everybody is saying like, oh my gosh,
we can lose weight using these these glip one agonists.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
But glip one agonists, we're all, you know.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
The first synthetic glip one agonist was exenotide, and the
reason that it was discovered was because people were investigating
how HeLa monsters in Arizona and New Mexico could go
months and months and months without without eating. And you
know you talking about toxins that can trigger the release
(10:44):
of insulin.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
It also reminds me of the.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Sugar alcohol xylotol, which does not trigger an insulin response
in humans, but does in dogs and can be rapidly
fatal in in dogs. And just because we have different
different metabolisms there.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Now, I would.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Love to know how did poisonings get this reputation of
being a female's way of committing murder. I hear this
all the time, that there is like a feminization of
using poisons for assassinations and murder. How did that reputation
(11:25):
come to me?
Speaker 4 (11:27):
It's a really intriguing question, and I will admit when
I started to write the book that I did have
that presupposition that it was mostly a feminine way of killing. Obviously,
it doesn't require strength, it doesn't require brute force. You
(11:48):
can sprinkle the poison onto someone's food and then sneak
away and just watch them slowly die. So it certainly
does have this reputation of being a female weapon of choice.
But as I was looking through the history of different
poisons that we used in different killers. It became quite
(12:08):
apparent that there were just as many men who were
using poisons to killers that there were women, and there
really wasn't any difference. Despite the common concept that it's
a female thing, it really isn't. There is many men
using poisons. What I did find is that by far
(12:31):
the majority of poisonous do seem to come from the
medical profession.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
That was going to be my very next question is like, because, okay,
so the most intriguing case of poisonings that I have
ever heard, because you know, you hear arsenic you hear
heavy metals, you hear you know, people slipping people benzos
and opiates and whatever. The most intriguing case ever was
(13:00):
Doc that was he was a surgeon and he was
diverting ethosuximide and he was murdering people with ethosuximide, which
is I mean, you know, if you're gonna murder somebody,
a brilliant way to do it because it's almost undetectable
common talk screens are not going to look for it,
(13:20):
and the metabolism of it is in the range of
like thirty to ninety seconds, and so it just it
wears off. So quickly that it's almost undetectable. And so
why the medical field? What is this history?
Speaker 4 (13:39):
I think it probably stems from the fact that individuals
in the medical profession, and I should preface everything by
saying that this is only certain individuals. It's certainly not
an indictment of the entire medical profession. I think there
(13:59):
is the sense that some people have gotten that I
know that I'm clever and I can figure out how
to kill people. I have the balance of life and
death in my hands with my skills and knowledge, and
I'm going to exercise that. So I think that's really
(14:22):
where it comes from. Is really a large amount of
hubris that the people think that they're knowledgeable, they can
get away with this because of their knowledge, and in
fact it was Sherlock Holmes famously stated that doctors are
(14:43):
the worst kind of enemy because they've lack or they
have all the knowledge and they have the skills necessary
to commit.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Murder and the access the access to I mean, I
think about how I didn't at the time realize when
I was in pharmacy school how dangerous what I was
doing was because I worked at a hospital. I worked
at the county hospital in downtown San Francisco in the
(15:16):
mission one of the you know more one of the
poorer neighborhoods in San Francisco. And I was going from
the main pharmacy to all of the extended care facilities,
and you don't think about just how dangerous it is
that you're like carrying two hundred oxyconton, four hundred benzos,
(15:38):
three hundred of you know, hydrocdeon, whatever it was. But
you and I remember at the time being like, if
anybody ever comes and tries to like mug me, they
can have it.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
Take it, take it all, like I will.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
Deal with it, because you know, the the medications have
gotten so potent that in a way, they are their
own special form of poison. And the access level that
healthcare professionals have is so much higher as well as,
(16:14):
like you said, the hubrius of just knowing, I know
what these things can do is very powerful, I think.
Speaker 4 (16:24):
And that's something that I think we don't often think about,
is we use the term poison and think, if you're
exposed to any of these substances, you're going to die,
and that's not really the case because a lot of
the things we consider as poisons are actually very beneficial.
(16:44):
And one example that you may know from the pharmacy
is de joxin, which is a very important tart medication.
It's a very important treatment for congestive heart failure and
has very good clinical uses. But if you add too
much de jox into a patient, it certainly will kill you.
(17:07):
So a little bit absolutely beneficial, has great clinical import
but too much will kill you. And there was the
famous case of Charles Cullen in New Jersey who was
a nurse who was taking dejoxin from his stock of
drugs and injecting it into several patients and murdering them.
(17:32):
He was eventually caught and sent to prison for multiple
life sentences, although even by his own admission over sixteen
or so years he thought that he had maybe killed
four hundred patients by overdosing with a drug that has
legitimate uses for treating art problems.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Well, and we see not just de jockson, but we
see lots of drugs that have what you're referring to
as this like narrow therapeutic index, where a little bit
is great, but too much is rapidly, very very dangerous.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
And dejoxin's a great example.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
Carbamazepine phenytoin the like really common anti epileptic medicine warfarin
the blood thinner is a great one.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
And then you know, of course we.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
Have some of the more aggressive chemotherapy agents like cyclosporin
and tachrollamus, which also have this very narrow therapeutic index
where if you don't get the dose right, your patient
will either not get the therapeutic benefit or will become
(18:49):
rapidly will become rapidly fatal. And I think it's also
important to note, you know, dejoxin digitalis is a natural product.
It is a natural ingredient of the foxglove plant, and
it also reminds me of Angel's trumpets, which the seeds
(19:09):
of Angel's trumpets also have a very narrow therapeutic index
that people who abuse it for the hallucinogenic effects can
get very very sick, very very fast. What other common
poisons are just like hanging out in our gardens?
Speaker 4 (19:26):
Well, certainly you mentioned Angel's trumpet, also known as Devil's trumpet,
which contains atropine. Of course, as you mentioned, that can
be used as a hallucinogen, probably not a terribly good
one because it is lethal, although interestingly enough, the same
(19:49):
chemical is used therapeutically to treat people exposed to nerve toxins,
so this was famously used just recently to treat these
grip hoals who were poisoned with novi chok. He was
a defector from the KGB and has been moved had
(20:09):
moved over to Salisbury in England, and probably just three
or four years ago the order went out that he
was to be taken out and Novi chok, the nerve agent,
was sprayed on his front door so that when he
went out he got the poison into his skin. And
(20:30):
really the best antidote for nerve poisoning is atropine, although
on its own atropine is deadly. One of the other
plants that's fairly common and you can go to any
garden center and pick it up is Monkshod monkshood. It
(20:52):
is a really nice beautiful flower. It looks to all
intents like one of those old fashioned monks cowlds that
you see in movies in monasteries that contains the poison aconite.
The other name monks Had obviously is a fairly benign name,
(21:14):
but the other name that had it has is Wolf
Spain and Bain means to kill, and in fact, this
was a poison that was spread on arrows and was
used to kill wolves, and in fact it was so
effective that it pretty much wiped out the entire wolf
population in England when it was used. There really isn't
(21:41):
much in the way of therapeutic benefit to aconite. It
really is quite deadly. One of the interesting stories there
that I found really fascinating is the number of ways
in which people have tried to disguise they're poisoning. And
(22:02):
there was a particularly interesting case of a woman who
was using aconite to get rid of her lover that
had decided he wanted to end the affair, and she
decided the way she was going to expose him to
aconite was by putting it in a bowl of chicken curry,
(22:22):
and she did that. He ate the chicken curry, as
did his fiance at the time. He ate sufficient that
he died within twenty four hours, very quickly. His fiance
didn't eat quite as much of the chicken curry and
did survive. But I just found that fascinating that someone
(22:44):
would put a deadly poison in chicken curry for someone
to eat.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Well, I mean, you gotta admit all those spices are
going to cover up some flavors because in as a
general rule, and this is making a broad sweeping statement,
but as a general rule, a lot of poisons are
very bitter, and a lot of medications are very bitter.
(23:10):
And that's why, you know, we see in like children's
preparations of meds, there's so much sugar and so many
additives and things because you have to cover you have
to cover it up. And I mean, for me, having
so many years experience as a patient of traditional Chinese medicine,
some of those Chinese herbs that have medicinal properties are very,
(23:32):
very very unpalatable, So I mean, I could see it
going in into a curry and having those spices to
cover up the flavors. But then on the other hand,
we also see poisons that are so dangerous because they
don't have flavor. We see things like GHB that doesn't
(23:55):
have that doesn't really have any flavor, and the rohipnol
that you know, everybody call it getting roofy, but it's
not roof and all.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
It's rohypnol.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
But that's another date rape drug that is so dangerous
because it just has no flavor and it blends in
into everything and so you know, I mean, we'll be
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And now let's get back to the show. Give us
some examples of people who have figured out that they
(27:10):
are being poisoned, because we've certainly seen that over the
course of history, of people like realizing, hey, somebody is
trying to take me out here.
Speaker 4 (27:23):
I think probably a really good example of that is
going back to the atropine that we talked about coming
from Bragmancy of the Angel's trumpet. There was a case
in Scotland where a professor of biochemistry actually which has
got me interested in it, had decided to kill his
(27:46):
wife with atropine. As you said, a lot of these
plant poisons are very bitter tasting. They're in a broad
class of plant alkaloids, and generally those are bitter tasting,
which is actually a good thing because it warns people, hey,
don't eat this. But he decided he was going to
(28:07):
disguise the atropine by putting it in a glass of
gin and tonic for his wife, tonic being somewhat bitter itself. Again,
he decided he was going to be clever about this,
and so what he did was to go into a
local grocery store and squirt some atropine into random bottles
(28:31):
of tonic water and left them on the shelves, so
the tip would appear as if there was a disgruntled
employee that had doped all the bottles of tonic water,
and it would presumably disguise the fact that the real
target of all this was his wife. It turned out
(28:53):
that one of the people that bought a bottle of
tonic water, it was a young student went into the
grocery store with his mother to buy some of these
bottles of tonic water and developed very serious symptoms. Fortunately,
her husband was an anesthesiologist and recognized the symptoms of
(29:18):
atropine poisoning right away. He called up the paramedics to
come take his wife and son to hospital. They did survive,
but then he became worried that the police would think
he had done it because he had the knowledge of
what that was. But that's probably the best example of
(29:38):
where it was realized that someone had been poisoned, and
fortunately in that case they both recovered and suffered no
ill effects.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
I mean, that is just I mean, atropine is another
example of a drug that gets used all of the time,
but too much of it can be.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Very, very dangerous.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
And you know, not everybody is able to recognize those symptoms,
and so you know, just shout out people. I have
people reach out to me all of the time on
social media and concerned about like you know, my kid
just drank a bottle of this or had whatever. Like friends,
don't reach out to me, you call poison control. Call
(30:24):
poison Control. It's open twenty four hours a day, seven
days a week. Like if you think something is wrong,
call and ask and I'll put the number to it
in in the show notes, because I think that it's
an underutilized, underutilized resource. What's the status of people currently,
(30:45):
you know? I mean, or is poisoning still a common
method of murder? And we haven't even talked about, you know,
politically motivated murders and assassinations, Like how common is poison
still used today?
Speaker 4 (31:01):
That has an interesting history. For many years, arsenic was
a very popular poison, mainly because there was no way
to detect it, and so if you died from arsenic poisoning,
no one was going to know. Until a chap called
(31:22):
John Marsh developed a test for arsenic and it became
very widely used in criminal cases where arsenic poisoning was suspected.
And because of that, the number of arsenic poisonings dropped.
Like mad people stopped using arsenic but moved on to
other poisons. And nowadays it is fairly easy and routine
(31:47):
to detect poisons. Some of them you have to know
what you're looking for, that's for sure. But in any
case of suspicious death, it is usually true that it
will be looked at as a case of suspected poisoning.
Even just last year, there was a case for poisoning
(32:10):
with thallium that came up in the Old Bailey in London.
An individual had killed his mother in law and was
attempting kill his father in law with thallium that he'd
placed in coffee. I just read in the paper recently,
just a couple of months ago, that there's a dentist
(32:32):
in Colorado who has also been accused of poisoning his
wife and children. And so this happens quite often. Actually,
there was a case in Indiana just last year where
someone had tried to kill an individual. It was a
(32:52):
woman who killed her husband because she was having an
affair and used mushrooms. Bill bar to mushrooms which also
affects the nervous system and send it haywire. She used
mushrooms to kill him. But that was just last year.
So poisoning doesn't seem to be a method of getting
(33:13):
rid of people. That's historical. It occurs still today. Even
though the chances of getting away with it are very
much reduced, people still think they can.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
It's extraordinary that so many murders go unsolved these days,
because it has gotten just increasingly increasingly harder to get
away with it, and yet just resources are so slim
(33:49):
that it becomes very difficult to solve every murder out there.
And you know, speaking of mushrooms, I think that people
you know are familiar with not going out and just
randomly eating in eating mushrooms.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
But I tell you it, honestly, it scares me just.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
Having a dog and knowing that like Aminita Floyd's like
literally just grows, it just grows all the places, and
it is very very toxic and very very very dangerous.
And having lived in Asheville, North Carolina and seen so
many mushroom foragers, it just I would ask all these
(34:28):
questions like how do you know what you're actually getting?
And people spend a lifetime understanding and pursuing and trying
to differentiate which of these mushrooms are foods and which
ones are going to are going to kill us?
Speaker 4 (34:46):
Right. I was fortunate enough to be invited this past
summer to any castle which has a poison God. Oh,
they have it to set up to go through all
the differentferent poisons. The Duchess of Northumberland, who founded the
Poison Garden, also wanted it as an educational tool. They
(35:08):
have cannabis plants in there and cat plants in there
to reach out to school kids to explain the dangers
of using drugs, but they also have many other plants there,
some of which people grow in their own gardens. I
was talking to the head gardener there and he said
(35:30):
that he thinks probably ninety percent of all plants probably
do contain some level of poison. So it's not as
if you can find some plants that don't have any poison,
that the vast majority actually do. And that was one
of the things that occurred to me as I was
writing the book and thinking, you know, if I had
(35:54):
there was no grocery stores available, that I had to
go out foraging and looking for plants to eat, I
would probably end up having to starve to death because
I would have no idea which plants were edible and
which I should stay away from.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
I mean, it is the irony of modern American farming
that an Iowa farmer can't feed themselves, right, you know,
it is this irony that farming in America has become
so industrialized that I mean, you know, I hate to
(36:29):
tell you, but you're screwed.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
During the zombie apocalypse. You are not going to make
it friend.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
Yeah, I mean, but to your point that most plants
contain some kind of poison, even just the aromatic molecules.
Like you think about eanathol, which is a common chemical
constituent in penyl in basil. It has that anie kind
of smell to it. It's poisonous if you take enough
(36:58):
of it. And certainly in some of the more assertive
plants that are used for parasite cleansing, the things like
wormwood and black walnut, those we are actually using for
their poisonous properties in order to kill off parasites.
Speaker 2 (37:22):
And you know, and.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
Wormwood also gets used as a recreational drug in the
form of absinth, which is not as common in the
United States, but like I mean, you can really get
some like very powerful absentth across Europe and internationally. And
(37:45):
so it's interesting that poison isn't just about killing, about murder,
about assassination, about anything. It's it's actually just part of
our everyday life and part of the chemistry that we
are a part of in the world.
Speaker 4 (38:04):
It is you see some of these podcasters and influencers
suggesting that I don't want to eat any chemicals. No,
chemicals are going in my body, which is quite silly.
Everything we eat is a chemical. You can't get away
(38:26):
from chemicals. Your old body is made of chemicals. But again,
there's nothing really intrinsically good or bad about the chemicals.
That the chemicals themselves have no moral compass, that they're
just chemicals. We can even think about something as innocuous
(38:46):
as water. If you drink enough water, you will die.
So you can't say that I'm never going to take chemicals.
But we have to think about things. We have to
be rational and decide what risks we can take, what
(39:06):
foods we're interested in. Certainly some people have allergies to shellfish.
For example, to me, I can eat as much shellfish
as I like, and hav an occasion indulged a lot
of shrimp. But for other people friends that I have,
(39:27):
just tasting shrimp or being exposed to shrimp can be
deadly to them. So there are things that are not
just poisons for everybody. Some things can be poisonous to
some people but not to others.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Yes, oh, absolutely certain things are allergenic to some and
some people just tolerate it just fine. So I feel
like we would be a miss if we don't at
least touch on ergots and the importance of ergots in
history as well.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
As is in medications.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
Give us a little bit of a crash course and
what you learned about GOT toxicity.
Speaker 4 (40:10):
So ergots come from mold, and this was probably brought
to prominence, most notably in the sale of witch trials,
where there was obviously a lot of people being accused
of witchcraft. People were burnt at the stake. Probably some
(40:34):
of that was just cultural and people getting rid of
people that they had a disagreement with because it was
easy to just accuse someone of being a witch and
have them burnt at the steak. But there probably were
people who generinely did have hallucinations and see things that
(40:57):
would be normally associated with witchcraft, and that lightly is
because the grains that they were storing were contaminated with
this fungus mold that produces GOT poisoning. It's a very
powerful hallucinogen and is even today something that can be
(41:19):
quite problematic if grain is not stored properly.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
M and is also used as a last line agent
for the treatment of migraines, and so even though we
know that it has this profound side effect profile. If
nothing else will stop the migraine, that intrnasal ergot is
(41:46):
that last line option for a lot of a lot
of people.
Speaker 4 (41:53):
And of course the same is true for botox. Yes,
botox is used for migraine, but it botulinemtoxin is probably
one of the more deadly things that it really doesn't
take a whole lot of boty of line and toxin
to kill a person. So again it comes back to
as you were mentioning that idea of a therapeutic index
(42:14):
of a little bit is good for you, but don't
take too much more because it might have lethal consequences.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
Yes, it is one of those things.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
But if you have that narrow therapeutic index, it is
it is dangerous and it's you know, one of the
reasons that I'm such a huge advocate for pharmacist dosing
of these of certain types of medications because if you
have to do long form math, which you know now
you have calculators online and everything that does it for you,
(42:47):
but back when I was in school and we had
to do you know, the long form math to dose
things that had more neuro therapeutic indexes, things even things
that are quote safer like vankam Isin, and you still
have to get the dosing riter or you're going to
take out somebody's kidneys. It's not as dangerous as an aminoglycoside,
but it still has its own risks. So take us
(43:12):
out and just tell us one of your favorite stories
of all time about poisons, poisoners, murder, killers, whatever. Just
take us out with something, because one of the things
that I love about the reviews of your books is
somebody said it is a fascinating tale of poisons and
(43:33):
poisonous deeds that both educates and entertains, and I certainly
have been educated and entertained this whole conversation. So tell
us in just one of your absolute favorite stories that
you learned along your research.
Speaker 4 (43:46):
Oh well, one of the things we've not really mentioned it,
and how I mentioned just as we conclude here is
the use of poisons in political assassinations. Yes, but one
that really struck me was the Litvinenko case. Litvinenko was
(44:06):
a KGB agent who also defected to London and for
a time was actually working as a double agent for
m I six in London, and it was decided to
take him out, and they disguised their poison in this case,
it was polonium, a radioactive substance that they disguised in
(44:31):
a pot of tea at a hotel in London. Polonium
is a heavy metal. We do need metals in our diet.
We need magnesium, we need iron in our diet. But
unfortunately the mechanisms in our body that allow us to
(44:51):
take up those metals really don't discriminate between good and
bad metals. Probably more recently in the US was the
lead poisoning cases that we heard about around Detroit that
were brought about by the same process. But what really
fascinating me about that the Litvinenko case was where it occurred.
(45:17):
It was at the Millennium Hotel in London, which just
happened to be around the corner from the US embassy
at the time, and I was able to actually go
and sit in that same restaurant in the hotel at
the same table that Litvinenko was poisoned with radioactive tea.
(45:39):
Fortunately that the hotel had been cleaned and cleared, it
still very radioactive. Sinks had to be ripped out from
the hotel rooms where the Russian agents had collected the
plonium to put into the tea. Even Litvinenko's body is
now encased in legs and buried so that people don't
(46:03):
get access to it. But just being that close to
where things actually happened in that situation, it was just
really fascinating to me. And so I do have a
particular interest in polonium just because I sat at essentially
the same table in the restaurant. Well, the nanco was poisoned.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
That is absolutely fascinating. And I mean, I think the
lesson here is don't defect from the KGB and go
to work for mi I six.
Speaker 2 (46:35):
It's not a good life plan.
Speaker 1 (46:39):
Yes, it's so fascinating how these radioactive materials they just
last and they never go anywhere, and it's.
Speaker 2 (46:51):
It's intriguing.
Speaker 1 (46:53):
You know, you are a great example of this kind
of tourism that has come out about poisonings and about
murder and about all of this like sort of you know,
dark history that we have. I mean, I think about
people who go and tour Chernobyl and I'm just like,
(47:13):
I don't know if I would do that if I
were you. But to your point, it's got to be
really well decontaminated. I mean, Neil, this has been one
of my favorite conversations. Ever, I love your work. I
love this combination of science and murder mystery and how
you've brought it all together. So listeners go pick up
(47:35):
a taste of poison. And thank you so very much
for coming in and being a guest today on the
Lindsay Elmore Show.
Speaker 4 (47:44):
Well, thank you for the invitation. It's been in delight
for me chatting with you, and I hope the readers
of the book learn something and find something enjoyable as well.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
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That's Lindsaylmore dot com slash amara to save ten dollars.
The Lindsaylmore Show is written and produced by me. Lindsay Olmore.
Show segments are produced by Soueproco and Derek Lugo. Sound
design and editing is by Jive Media. Support the Lindsaylmore
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