#ricine

Un drame familial dans un village italien À Pietracatella, une petite commune située à 260 kilomètres au sud-est de Rome, ce qui devait être un repas festif en prélude aux célébrations de Noël s’est transformé en tragédie. En décembre dernier, Antonella Di Ielsi, 50 ans, et sa fille adolescente Sara Di Vita, 15 ans, ont été prises de violents malaises après un déjeuner familial. Le père, Gianni…

One of the plants that can, will, and have killed humans is the castor bean plant.

This plant produces beautifully patterned beans in visually stunning seedpods which burst open when the beans are ready to grow, sending them a few feet into the world.

It's worth it to mention that this plant has many uses. It's used in gardens to add color in its various variants. The beans it produces have large amounts of oil in them, which can be used for wood polishing to train upkeep to cooking. But what I, and the government at one point, find interesting about it is a protein found in the bean of this plant called ricine.

Ricine is a protein that isn't oil soluble, but is water soluble. This means that when the beans are processed for oil, this protein remains in the mash. The mash then can be heated to denature the ricine or it can be washed thoroughly to remove the ricine.

The reason you don't want ricine in your mash, if you were to eat it, is that the protein is poisonous.

This on its own is not sufficient in explaining how terrifying this poison is.

Ricine, when ingested or inhaled, will enter your cells and fuck up your ribosomes. This stops the cell from producing proteins and will eventually kill them. Granted that your cells can prevent this if they catch the ricine and send it to be composted. That being said, there is no known cure or preventative method known to work on ricine.

Can it be used in a terrorist attack?

Maybe.

The American government looked into this, and it turns out aerosolizing ricine is very inconvenient, as you'd need to buy a lot of castor beans which would put you on a list. If you were to contaminate a water supply with ricine, however, you'd be much more successful.

One castor bean can contain enough ricine to kill a bitch many times over. In fact, the jewelry made from castor beans has sent many anxious teens to the hospital from chewing the castor bean beads.

Ricine is very dangerous, but it can be separated from the castor mash. This makes the mash safe to eat, and there are many places that eat it. I myself haven't tried it, but I would love to.

Overall, ricine is a fascinating force of nature that comes from a beautiful plant that has a rather long resume.