[MUSIC]
As I said,
poisoning is very ancient.
And in the ancient world, poisoning was
certainly very widespread.
One of the most famous of all poisonings
is the death of the Greek philosopher
Socrates, in 399 B.C. Socrates had been
convicted
of various crimes including corrupting the
youth of the city of Athens.
Well, in those days, corrupting the youth
didn't
mean what we might think it means today.
What Socrates had done was encourage the
youth of Athens to
actually think, and that was considered a
very bad thing then.
Well, Socrates, for these so-called
crimes, was sentenced to death
and the means of execution was drinking
poison.
What the poison he drank was the extract
of a plant called hemlock,
and hemlock contains various different
alkaloids.
One of the major ones is coniine.
Now, we know that Socrates was poisoned by
hemlock because he
was allowed to have some of his friends
around during the execution.
And one of these, Plato, wrote down
exactly what happened.
And from the symptoms, we can deduce that
it was hemlock.
So after drinking the poison, Socrates
experienced numbness, starting with his
feet, moving slowly up the body as the
alkaloids in the hemlock paralysed him.
And of course, when that paralysis
reached his heart and lungs, then he died.
Nowadays, we treat our philosophers a
little bit better than this.
Another famous historical
poisoning, at least according to the
stories that are told,
is that of the first Roman Emperor,
Augustus Caesar in 14 A.D.
Now, what we are told is that Augustus was
poisoned by his wife, the Empress Livia.
According to the stories, Augustus
suspected his wife.
He thought that she, or someone else, was
very, very likely to poison him.
So, he started to refuse to eat any food
that was prepared for him.
In fact, he refused to eat anything except
the figs that
he picked with his own hands from his own
personal fig tree.
But according to the stories, Livia was
too clever for him
and what she did was to take the poison
and inject it into the
figs growing on the tree, so that he would
pick them and eat them.
That's ancient poisoning, but some things
don't change.
This is a rather tragic tale from just a
few years
ago concerning this unfortunate man,
Lakhvinder Cheema, who lived in London.
And he'd had a long relationship with this
lady Lakvir Singh.
But then their relationship had ended, and
he found
himself a new fiancée who he was going to
marry.
Well, Lakhvinder Cheema and his fiancée had
dinner one night.
They were eating some leftover curry from
the refrigerator
and soon after, they both became extremely
ill.
So he called the emergency services, and
he tried
to tell the emergency services that he had
been poisoned.
But as I said, poisoning is not very
common nowadays.
So at first, the guy answering thought
that he was saying he had food poisoning.
But no, he explained, he thought somebody
had poisoned him.
And the emergency responder asked, who
would want to do a thing like that?
And he said, his ex-girlfriend, and then
they understood.
So, the ambulance was sent to take him to
the
hospital, but it was too late and he died
soon after.
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His fiancée survived.
She was very ill, but she survived.
And the reason, it appears, that she
survived is that she only
had had one helping of the curry, whereas
he had had two.
Well ultimately, the ex girlfriend,
Lakhvir Singh, was
convicted of this crime and sentenced to
spend a minimum of 23 years in prison.
Now how had she done this poisoning?
How had she got such a potent poison to
kill him just with one meal of curry?
And the answer is this plant here,
Aconitum Ferox.
Now this plant is native to the Himalayas
and
it's been used for centuries as a poison
in India.
And Lakhvir Singh had travelled to Northern
India,
travelled to the Himalayas, to collect this
plant
and she brought it back with her.
She'd gone into Cheema's house,
she'd been seen putting something in his
refrigerator,
and it's assumed that what she'd done was
put this plant in the curry.
Indeed, traces the plant could be found in
her
clothes and in her handbag, leading to her
conviction.
The reason this plant is so toxic is that
it contains this very complex alkaloid
here, called pseudaconitine,
and this is another of these alkaloids
that will shut down the nervous system.
Like many alkaloids, even though it can
shut down the nervous system, it
cannot penetrate the brain, so the
horrible
thing about this kind of poisoning, as
happened to Lakhvinder Cheema, is that
even though the body is shutting down, the
brain is still working and the person is
completely aware that they are dying.
But, there is of course nothing they can
do about it.
Well, there is a moral to be drawn from
this tale.
So, as the poet said, as William Congreve
said, "Hell hath no fury like a women
scorned."
So, if there are any young men watching
this lecture, the lesson to you is
to treat the ladies right, otherwise your
curry may be a lot spicier than you expect.
Plants can also be a cause of accidental
poisoning.
It doesn't have to be deliberate.
Here for instance, is wild garlic
and this is a really good stuff.
It has a wonderful garlic flavour.
And, I read a report of a man in Croatia
who used to go out into
the woods and collect wild garlic leaves
because
he liked to put them in his salads.
Well, if you're going to do that you have
to know your botany,
because this person also collected some of
a plant called Meadow saffron by mistake.
Meadow saffron is very toxic and it led to
his death.
Meadow saffron is toxic because it
contains this compound, colchicine.
Now, colchicine is an interesting
compound, because
it is actually used as an anti-cancer
compound.
It will kill cancer cells, and it can be
used to
help cure this disease, provided it's used
in the right dose.
But this man's salad had obviously
contained
an overdose of colchicine, leading to his
death.
Some other very common plants are also
toxic, for instance, the potato plant.
Now, pretty much all of us eat potato
quite a lot
and we don't think of potato as a source
of poison.
Well, the reason is that the only part of
the
potato we eat, typically, is the tuber,
which is perfectly harmless.
But the fruit of the potato plant, which
looks
a little bit like a green tomato, is
toxic.
It contains a chemical called oxalic acid.
It's not very toxic, it's unlikely that
potato fruits would kill an
adult, but they could have serious,
serious effects for instance, on a child.
Another plant that contains oxalic acid is
rhubarb.
Rhubarb is eaten quite widely around the
world.
It's also a part of Chinese, traditional
Chinese medicine.
But when we eat rhubarb, we are always
careful
to only eat the stems, the nice bright red
stems.
It's the leaves that contain oxalic acid.
So, if you eat rhubarb leaves, you can
become really quite ill.
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