AboutDr. Ravindra Bhaskar Ghooi Expertise I can provide information on drugs and medicines, their actions, uses, interactions and adverse effects. To avoid confusion, generic names of
medicines may please be provided. I am a pharmacologist, having worked
on animal and human pharmacology, and presently I am the Dean of Bilcare Research Academy, where we teach courses on clinical research. We dont work on saturdays and sundays, hence questions reachng me on these days will be replied on Monday, please bear with me.
Question Hello, and thank you in advcance for offering your expertise.
This will likely seem a strange question. I am a sci-fi writer (of mostly unpublished fiction) and one of my characters is poisoned by something that defies explanation. Anyway, his doctor gives his a short primer on known poisons and how they work. Although I wrote it, I have no idea if I'm even close to correct. Here is the paragraph in question:
"The fastest acting poisons, strychnine, cyanide or arsenic, for instance, disrupt the bodies enzyme cycles. They act like food, fooling the digestive enzymes into bonding, but then they adhere to the enzyme permanently removing it from active duty. When enough enzymes are sidelined, the entire chemical balance of the body is disrupted. Oxygen stops permeating cell walls, and nerve conductivity declines which leads to a sort of body-wide short circuit. Bacterial infections, like salmonella and botulism on the other hand infect and kill individual cells which the body then disposes of. Basically, they encourage the body to digest itself. It's a much slower process which follows a biological progression."
So... my question: Can you verifiy this info, or correct it, or suggest other lay-resources? If you can help, and you would like to be included in the acknowledgments at the front of my novel, please let me know how, exactly, you would like your name to be listed.
I can also be contacted through my website at: www.coastnet.com/~nucleareel/Bill
Thank you again for your time and consideration.
William Dean
Answer Hi William,
You are quite close to the truth, but if youare to publish it, I think youshould say something unimpeachable. You should include some facts in your writing. One of the most important is that Cyanide is among the least toxic of the so called lethal poisons. The mamount of cyanide required to kill is immense (about 100 mg /kg which meand about 6 gms for an adult!)
My suggestion is that you modify it to mean the following:
Cyanide is a inhibitor of the oxidative enzymes like cytochrome and causes a breakdown of oxygenation processes. Strychnine is inhibitor of certain inhibitory receptors in the central nervous system. Following poisoning with strychnine the tiniest stimulus leads to massive muscular contractions leading to convulsions and death.
Botulinum toxin binds to specific acceptors on the neuronal membrane at the neuromuscular junction eventually leading to its paralysis. Salmonella shigella and some other bacterial toxins act via intracellular messengers like cyclic nucleotides.
I know this is difficult to put in a paragraph but if you wish I may try my hand at it. Incidentally I too am a writer of sorts and I have about 25 short stories published on the net. The stories are on e magazines, and the sites are:
www.sulekha.com
www.zine5.com
www.adbhut.com
All these sites are Indian, but i write in English.
Now if you send me your email id, I will attempt to put this information into a readable paragraph and send the same to you.
I do not need to trouble you to give any credit to me, as a fellow writer, this is the least I can do for you.
Regards
Ravi Ghooi
