Arsine, you don't smell it, you just die!

Arsine is an unpleasant gas and I had a big cylinder full of it.  We used it in gas deposition chambers to dope semi-conductor surfaces in our microelectronics lab in Queens. The main route of exposure is via inhalation although poisoning through the skin has been documented.  This gas attacks the haemoglobin in the red blood cells causing them to be destroyed by the body.  

Most people are more familiar with hydrogen cyanide as a means of killing.  Hydrogen cyanide irritates the eyes and the respiratory tract.  There is a faint smell of almonds that around 50% of the population will be able to detect.  In forensics, both gases will leave the victims with particularly red blood, a usual indicator that some sort of poisoning has occurred.  Unfortunately, with Arsine you will be dead long before you smell it.  There may be a slight smell of garlic on the breath of a victim of arsine poisoning and for cyanide poisoning that sweet almond smell can sometimes be detected.  It is particularly scary that Arsine does not smell, you know your nose will not alarm you to its presence.  

I reckon arsine even looks ugly, but that could be my paranoia. This flammable gas, ignites spontaneously in air, and as well as being highly toxic is one of the simplest compounds of arsenic. Here is a picture of a molecule of the stuff.  Perhaps, you are more familiar with its other form arsenic?  

Years ago they used the Marsh test to determine if arsenic had been used on a corpse.  This test produces arsine as an intermediate product. Despite its lethality, it finds some applications in the semiconductor industry.  Which is why, when I worked in university in N. Ireland, I had a huge canister of the stuff in the access corridor of our laboratory.  Not a small tiny campsite gas cylinder a huge one a meter and a half high.  

Remember that exposure to arsine concentrations of 250 ppm is rapidly fatal: concentrations of 25–30 ppm are fatal for 30 minute exposure, and concentrations of 10 ppm can be fatal at longer exposure times.  That is 10 parts per million, not an awful lot of the stuff is needed to take you down, silently without a smell not even a sniff of warning.  So, to have a huge tank of the stuff sitting in plain view was giving the fireman heart palpitations.  He had come to do the yearly fire inspection of the building and had reached the tenth floor without any major complaint.  Finding a corridor full of some of the most toxic gases, on this the last floor, was like a nightmare.  Part of their job is knowing when they are called to a building, in the event of a fire etc, exactly what the major dangers are.  Being aware that here in a quiet innocent corridor such dangers lurked was very important.  I felt sorry for him filling in all his papers.  For firemen it must seem the rest of the world is just trying to be difficult, lighting fires in forests, putting oil on stoves and forgetting, or buying in huge quantities of extremely toxic gas.  

He was a reasonable man in an unreasonable world.  I sympathised, he shrugged his shoulders and said not to worry.  They had just done a safety analysis on a Monsanto factory in N. Ireland and had found there, the biggest store of mustard gas in Western Europe.  That is the stuff used during the world war I.  Mind you that it turns out is the tip of a very unpleasant iceberg.  Among the many achievements of this company Monsanto has:

1.   Produced rBGH, also known as Bovine Somatotropin. It is a synthetic hormone that is injected into cows in order to increase milk production. However, many studies have shown that this produces adverse effects, behaving as a cancer accelerator in adults and non-infants. This biologically active hormone is associated with breast cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer and prostate cancer.

2.   Other major products have included the herbicides 2,4,5-T, and DDT. The excitotoxin aspartame, and the controversial PCBs were also developed and produced by Monsanto. The company was sued, for the side effects of its Agent Orange defoliant used by the US military in the during the Vietnam War. More than 21,000,000 US gallons (79,000,000 L) of Agent Orange were sprayed across South Vietnam. According to the post-war Vietnamese government official statistics, 4.8 million Vietnamese  were exposed to Agent Orange, resulting in 400,000 deaths and disabilities, and 500,000 children born with some form of birth defect.  Furthermore, internal documents from the companies that manufactured it reveal that at the time Agent Orange was sold to the U.S. government for use in Vietnam, it was known that it contained a dioxin. 

3.     Its most recent pesticide Round-up is thought to be worse than DDT. Monsanto is the world’s largest producer of the herbicide “Glyphosate”, commonly used in “Round-Up”. (Glyphosate is the most used herbicide in the USA, and Roundup is the number one selling herbicide worldwide since at least 1980.) Roundup is also at the heart of much controversy in the scientific and health community, concerning human and mammalian side effects. A 2008 scientific study has shown that Roundup formulations and metabolic products cause the death of human embryonic, placental, and umbilical cells in vitro, even at extremely low concentrations.

  

I remember being reassured, all the years ago, that whatever horrors we had in our university Microelectronics Lab at least we were not the worst offenders.  Several decades later I am no longer reassured and am wondering what these guys are doing to us and our environment.  I won’t call it the most evil company on earth but some do.   Mind you be warned this article is a bit over the top!

See http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-complete-history-of-monsanto-the-worlds-most-evil-corporation/5387964

Desperation, perspiration, information and inspiration,

Exams are tortuous.  We have all been there, paper before us, the clock ticking.  The terrifying sound of others asking for more writing paper, while you stare mesmerised by your single blank sheet. There are the rare few of us who, from this dire situation, conjure up magic.  To those that pull that off, I salute you.  For example, the high school student who when asked to write a concise expressive essay on stubbornness, put pen to paper and wrote,
"No!"
But there are the even more creative that aught to be remembered.  This student was really putting his back into solving this equation and then at a certain point found an expressive way to sum up his despair.  Just love that little man hanging on the last integral sign.

Of course, the artists among us have a real opportunity to vent their frustration eloquently.  After all, they have the three basic necessities, a paper, pencil and hours of time!  Here's one who obviously decided this subject was not for him.

Then, there are those who use quirky dry humour to answer what defeats them otherwise, as Peter so brilliantly accomplished here.

I just have to admire their tenacity and application, instead of putting their head down in despair, from somewhere within a revolt occurred.  In the scariest of all places they found an answer.  Mind you, I cannot believe this student actually got an A+ for the following response!

Just occasionally, in this education system that is so questionable, sausage factory filling and exam driven, a question can elicit a response that makes the whole dire business worthwhile.  Here, was a student determined to fight back!

Finally, exams are a metaphor for life in many ways.  Our response to them both usually requires the same attitude.  This last one summarises it all nicely.  So, if you too are facing tests remember this useful guidance.

Religion, Rooster Cogburn and a lack of grit

In searching for progress we are sometimes nudged gradually, painfully in certain directions.  For me one of the earliest turning points occurred during my confirmation classes at my local Church of Ireland.  The clergyman when alone with a dozen 13 year olds, instead of preparing us spiritually, engaged in a bit of indoctrination instead.  He lectured us on the disgusting betrayal marriage to Catholics would entail.  He then proceeded to spout a narrow minded evangelistic agenda that even I, a fairly naïve 13 year old girl from the high on the Sperrin mountains, could not tolerate. 

His predecessor the reverent Wills had been a mild elderly man, with metal circular glasses, who lectured in his sermons with soft pleas for humanity and understanding of one’s neighbours.  My father had queried this gentle little man, during a visit to our home, to be more demanding in his sermons.  He asked him,

“Why don’t you tell them to not just love their neighbours, but tell them to love their Catholic neighbours in particular.  Don’t you think that’s what Christ meant?”

The tiny man had carefully wiped his glasses in his lap and said apologetically,

“Now, Mr Stringer, I have to be careful not to offend the congregation, you know yourself what people are like in these parts.”

Rev Wills raised his narrow shoulders in sympathy but continued,

“Sure, if I did anything like that, I’d be preaching to an empty church and what purpose would that serve?”

Having just watched John Wayne in True Grit, I listened to this conversation with disappointment and could not help thinking what the nice Reverent Wills lacked was grit.  I’d have preferred if he had mounted the pulpit, a bible in each hand, and blasted the church goers left right and centre (like Rooster Cogburn), whatever their particular prejudices.  

Unfortunately, his successor lacked the essential goodness of Rev Wills and his gentleness.  His sermons were full of hell and grinding of teeth for all sinners.  His children classes were sufficiently traumatic with their burning pits and devils with horns that I’m sure he kept psychologists/counsellors and psychiatrists in business for decades later.  I had been dragged, by my father, to Sunday School classes and services for years and had complained bitterly.  It was the confirmation classes perversely that really confirmed my suspicions that this man was not good.   So clearly did I articulate my abhorrence for the content of these confirmation classes my father accepted my decision never to enter church premises ever again.  I viewed this new clergyman with the distain I had previously reserved for villains in a Dicken’s novel.   It was hardly fair but adolescents are many things but not forgiving. 

When, I was obliged to attend weddings or funerals I did so out of politeness and respect.  However, I listened to the sermon like a literary critic finding satisfaction when he spouted something that I disagreed with.  When the clergyman asked the congregation to kneel or bow their heads in prayer, I refused to do either.  Instead, he and I would often find ourselves eyeballing each other across the bowed heads of the devout.  I cultivated an accusing stare while he had a bewildered look.  I was confident my stare told him exactly what I thought of him.  Hardly fair, I am sure he had more good qualities than I.  To my adolescent mind he had fallen short of St Francis’s standard and did not deserve my respect or ear.  Ah, the black and white clarity of youth.  There are not even greys, just right and wrong.  The good guys and the bad ones.  In a divided community between Catholic and Protestant I found myself examining both with forensic intensity.  There was so much this autopsy unearthed I felt like a coroner disengaged from both sides.  It was a blessing that my father read so widely as through him I had an appreciation of the Bible and knowledge of Buddhism, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism.  In our family, reading was an obsession, whether it was the Quran, the recently translated  Dead Sea Scrolls  or the writings of Zoroaster.   It has long shocked me how terrified people are to truly investigate.  To search for the truth.  To set aside petty prejudices and really look.  This independent investigation was a constant call to arms.  Truth becomes obscured by ignorance and gradually disclosed by rational effort.  It leds to an appreciated of the essential truths that all the main religions share.  It helps elucidate the qualities that are needed in society if we are to improve our civilisation.  There have been enough rises and falls of civilisations to chart the symptoms of deterioration.  Even without a historical perspective an examination of present day society would suffice to tell us we are on a downward curve. 

After fifty years I am no longer an adolescent and colours have entered my palate.  There are forces of disintegration all around and people’s lives are caught up in this old world order. That is being rolled up.  Look into any institution and you cannot fail to find the corruption just beneath the surface.  Even the most well-intentioned bodies are hounded to a standstill by persistent selfish agendas.  But, I am no longer hopeless or in despair.  There are worse days ahead I’m sure.  Human society will weather storms we cannot even guess at now.  The intensity of such catastrophes will serve to decrease the strange lethargy we are all afflicted with.  Perhaps, anything that serves to allow us to come forth from the sheath of self will transform not just us but society.   The degree to which we engage in building that noble society the happier and more positive our mind-set.  Fighting the forces of darkness is like trying to dam a flood.  Constructing our personal defences, uniting with others who share a vision for a better future is empowering.  Change is coming, we can choose to endure it or embrace the transformation it entails.  It had ever been so. 

In the second century the early Christians were the victims of persecution. Polycarp, the venerable bishop of Smyrna was arrested and imprisoned. While under guard he prayed so fervently and powerfully the guards regretted that they had been involved in his capture.  Later, called upon to recant his faith he refused. "Eighty and six years I have served Him, and He has done me no wrong", Polycarp goes on to say, “Bring forth what thou wilt."  This elderly gentle bishop in his nineties was burnt at the stake.  Talk about true grit!

I firmly believe we are designed to be noble.  To be better, than we can even possibly imagine.  In reaching that goal a new and better civilisation becomes inevitable.