 Okay, the two o'clock block on Friday. Usually we call this likable science. Today we're going to call it thoroughly dislikeable science. That's Ethan Allen. Hi, Ethan. Good to see you, Jay. He's a real host. We're doing a QAnon on who's a real host. And today we're going to talk about something completely unlikable, dislikeable, toxins, weaponizing toxins. It came to my attention this week how much is going on in weaponizing toxins in the world. So today we want to study that and talk about the actions of how it works biochemically and talk about how people make them and issues of safety and self-protection and how you deal with them either on the battlefield or in the water supply. Okay? Wow. So, Ethan, as in so many other things, you are an expert in biotoxins and we want to ask you about it. So the first thing is, let's define our terms. What is a toxin, a biotoxin? How does it come into being and what does it do to people? So, toxins are substances that are produced by organisms and that's a real key distinguishing there. They're not artificial chemicals or chemicals you've extracted just from the environment. They're substances produced by organisms. That other organism is basically the harm other organism, usually by chemically reacting to it. You don't do it synthetically. It's got to be by an organism. Right. It's got to be by a bacteria or virus or a fungus or an animal. Oh, wow. Or a snail. We do a show on snails. Exactly. Cone snails. Yeah. Plants can have toxins. Right. Any living thing, if it's not living and it produces it, it's not a toxin. It may be a poison, which has basically the same impacts, but it's not a toxin technically. It's a toxic kind of thing they would call it. So how am I exposed to a toxin? Well, that can be through any number of different ways. If they are injected into you by their animal host or call venom, typically snake bite is a classic example, bee stings are a classic example. The bee is injecting a substance that's produced into you and that substance is causing your tissues to react rather badly. Usually a bee sting, it's not too bad. Right. Just a little wealth of some sort, but if you're allergic to bee stings, it can be quite deadly. It's anaphylactic shock. It could be fatal. Yeah. If it's something like a coral snake or a cobra, the toxins it's injecting are heavy-duty neurotoxins that affect your nervous system and stop your nervous system from working pretty soon when you can't breathe. And when you can't breathe, you can't live. When you can't breathe, you've got three minutes left. Okay, so they can operate in different ways, but it sounds like the most lethal of them is the kind of toxin that's a neurotoxin that stops you from breathing. Those are something, a very, very deadly class of them, because we rely on a nervous system so much. Yeah. Others can be, there are others, the necrotizing coxins that just start sort of chewing away at whatever cells they end up on causing these cells to start leaking out their contents and dying off. That'll be the rattlesnake toxin. Yeah, those are some, the brown recluse is a class example, a little spider bites you, you first get a little wealth, but the wealth just doesn't heal. Instead, gradually your skin just starts deteriorating and sloughing off and it goes deeper and your underlying tissues begin to die off and the muscles beneath it begin to die off and your tissue just begins to just corrode away, basically. It flows through the body, it's just limited to one site. Some of these bacteria or viruses can be infectious. So when they create a toxin in one person, that can pass to another person by virtue of the originating bacteria or virus. Right, exactly. It's a living system that is a bacteria or virus or a fungus that's in you and replicating. It's not only poisoning you, releasing its toxins into you, but then you may be spreading it around, giving your friends and families new colonies of these bacteria or viruses or fungi or whatever and start poisoning them too. Yeah, so this is really the whole thing about toxins, at least as far as human beings are concerned. It's a study in poison. It's a study in lethal poisons. A lot of these are lethal and you may think that a certain introduction of a certain toxin, you can deal with that, you can shove it off, but sometimes it's pretty clearly going to be lethal and you cannot escape. Yeah, man. Most of them do have, they've got what's called an LD50, a lethal dose, 50%, right? That is a tiny amount that won't hurt you and a bigger amount will kill off half the population and a still bigger amount will kill off anyone who gets it. Indy, this is the principle that they use toxins, cosmetically, the botulinus toxin is a classic example. Botox. Botox, right. So a little bit is okay. Very, very tiny. That toxin is so nasty that literally a few micrograms, I believe, will kill a person. And so when they're giving it to you to get rid of your wrinkles, they're giving you nanograms or adograms, I mean they're giving you just really a few tiny molecules. I mean it's really remarkably tiny doses. It's hard to think that having the benefits of Botox justifies having the dangers of botulinum toxin. You would think so, but again, the people who eat the puffer fish, right, to talk toxin is incredibly toxic, incredibly dangerous. The chefs who prepare the puffer fish have to be carefully trained because they purposely leave just a little bit of the tissue that has this toxin on the meat that you cook and then eat because it gives the funny mouth feel to it and all that. It ain't worth it. Sorry. I don't care how good it is. You don't want a chef in training to fix your puffer fish away. Yeah. Nice slips a little bit of the way, boom, you're out of there. Well, but our show today is, it assumes, it sort of wraps around the notion that these toxins really don't in general do any good for anybody. They kill you. Yeah, I mean they're meant, biological organisms are producing them for one or two reasons. They're either defending themselves against potential threats or they're going after other organisms to try to stop these other organisms. They're super poisons. Yeah. And so, of course, naturally, you know, mankind, humankind is imperfectible and therefore there are those among us who will take these toxins and all these biological processes and weaponize them. Yeah. So can you talk about that? Sure. So, I mean there was a classic example back in the 1980s in Oregon, the Rajneeshis, the followers of the Bhagawan Shri Rajneesh, decided they wanted to win the local election in their county basically and they had their own candidate up who they knew wouldn't win, basically. So they went and put some toxins in the water systems and sprayed it on a bunch of lettuce and distributed it to all the food stores. They spread it on doorknobs. They did everything. They sickened 700, 800 people. You know, they thought they'd keep the voting population down and win the election this way. And they did. Well, that was, I think, what drove him to try to flee the country. He was ultimately caught in Charlotte and is serving jail time somewhere. But I mean, yeah, people tried to use them on mass scales like that. Well, yeah, there's two levels of it. One, we should talk about Kim Jong-un and how he killed his brother. And my understanding of that is that like the glue, epoxy glue, you have two elements. And either one of them is kind of inert, but if you put them together, they form a very strong bond. That's the same thing with some of these toxins. You have one element and then a second element and either one of them is dangerous. As soon as you put them together, they're fatal. And what he did was he had one woman go to the brother and stroke his face with her hands, you know, hold his cheeks, I guess, and she put on element number one, which was OK. And then a second woman comes around and her hands were coated with the active, activating agent. She put her hands on his face. Now the two were together, OK? And he died. He had neurotoxins in his body, couldn't breathe, and he died. I don't know which one it was, but that was pretty dramatic and very high-tech for North Korea. You've got to give them credit that they knew that much. And by the way, the asterisk in the story is that the second woman, by touching the face of the individual, she had both kinds of toxins on her hands, OK, and her job was to get into a bathroom really quick and wash her hands, but she wasn't quick enough, and she also got sick. Yeah, they're very fast acting often. That biological mixing of things is actually common in the bombardier beetles that produce these jets of explosive, caustic chemicals do that. They have two chemicals that, by themselves, are perfectly fine, and they essentially squirt glands and mix them in a little chamber and get this explosive cloud of acrid, toxic stuff. So this poisoning has been going on since Romeo and Juliet, a long before that, you know, from ancient Rome. Hemlock. Hemlock. Thank you. I wonder what they used for... I guess it was just a plant. It was an agricultural plant. That's directed at an individual, just a single person, like what the Russians did to that, the spy and his wife in the U.K., they killed him with some advanced kind of poison like this, but that's just targeted at one person or maybe two people. Now we have the notion of weaponizing. That changes it. As you mentioned, you could do 700 people in a shot, and if you get the right thing in the water supply for a city which is intensely populated, you're going to be able to reach a lot more than 700 people, and if you use the right mixture in the water system, everybody drinks that water, you could kill the city. In theory. In theory. In theory. In theory. It hasn't happened yet. Most big cities are pretty careful these days about, they look for a lot of different things in their water, because they understand. And they look for them. They look for things like this. Yeah. And they are aware that people may do this. I hope so. Yeah. So, I mean, if you want to weaponize things, you have to figure out how to reach a large number of people, you know, either in a city, in a civilian setting, or in the battlefield, because it really works well in the battlefields where everybody can't breathe. And then you have to deploy that weapon somehow through the water, or the air, or maybe an infectious disease. Right. The same effect. Yeah. So, introducing a sort of a biological toxin is really child's play, more or less. Anyone can do it in their garden shed for a couple thousand bucks, or they crank out the anthrax. Wonderful about modern technology. But then getting into the right format, storing it well, or getting it dispersed, where you want it, when you want it, having it stay only there, and not blow back on yourself and your friends, that's much trickier part technologically. You have to freeze this stuff to keep it. Some things you do, many of these biological ones, though you don't have to freeze it. But they may not be very stable. They may have a very limited shelf life. Yeah. Yeah. So, the weaponization is really the much harder step than actually producing the toxin, you know. Well, I mean, is this something that a terrorist would try? Because there's a standard argument that's been, as you said, it could blow back on you. Right. So, you think, you know, you're going to kill somebody else who went up killing yourself, or you went up killing the whole world, including you. Right. But it may not feel that attractive in terms of a way to go. Maybe there are other better ways to fight a dirty war. But what about that? I mean, is that still a disincentive for people who are capable, for example, of doing suicide bombing? Sure. They don't care. Why don't they do it? Well, I mean, so, again, anthrax is a good example, because anthrax is quite deadly if you're doing an inhalation, dust form, spores, it can be up to 90% in untreated individuals. Now, it can treat people for us and reasonably effectively, but you can also sort of pre-protect yourself with other chemicals, antibiotics, treatment. You can get ready so that even if it blows back on you, if you've given this treatment to yourself and your friends, you guys are going to be okay. As we get more sophisticated biologically, with technologies like CRISPR, that you and I have talked about before, this kind of thing is going to become even trickier because they're going to make more finely-tuned toxins, they're going to make more highly effective anthrodotes. So you can put out a nasty blast of compound that's really toxic to a lot of people. Quick pop yourself with all the anthrodotes and your friends with all the anthrodotes, and now you guys are the only survivors and a big mess of dead people. Now, what's interesting is that you really describe two situations. One is you can vaccinate them in advance, you can take all the troops who are going to go on the battlefield, you can catch them in boot camp and vaccinate them against known risks like this, or you can wait and or wait until they've been exposed on the battlefield and then you can give them an anthrodote of some kind. So which one? Is it different strokes with different folks, different strokes with different kinds of toxins? What is it? It's a situational thing. Some of the protective treatments may themselves have bad side effects and so you're reluctant to do it to a big group of people who you don't know are going to be exposed because it's going to hurt some of them, maybe needlessly, it may debilitate some of your soldiers. On the other hand, far better if you get debilitated in boot camp than 90% of them die on the battlefield. So again, some of these things are quite rapid acting and it's hard to counteract them once they've been exposed. So if you believe that your soldiers are going to go into an area where they're going to be exposed, some of these toxins, yeah, you want to treat them before they ever get these toxins because prevention is better than, you know. Yeah. Well, when we come back from this break, Ethan, we're going to talk about how you test a remedy, an anthrodote or a vaccine, how you test that. It's a pretty dangerous business. And if you want to try to find something that will stop it, you may have a problem on your hands. Oh, yeah. It would be right back. Oh, there's so much more. It would be right back after this break. Hey, Stan the Energyman here on Think Tech Hawaii. And they won't let me do political commentary. So I'm stuck doing energy stuff. But I really like energy stuff. So I'm going to keep on doing it. So join me every Friday on Stan the Energyman at lunchtime, at noon, on my lunch hour. We're going to talk about everything energy, especially if it begins with the word hydrogen. We're going to definitely be talking about it. We'll talk about how we can make Hawaii cleaner, how we can make the world a better place, just basically save the planet. Even Miss America can't even talk about stuff like that anymore. We got it nailed down here. So we'll see you on Friday at noon with Stan the Energyman, aloha. And aloha. My name is Calvin Griffin, the host of Hawaii in Uniform. And every Friday at 11 o'clock here on Think Tech Hawaii, we bring you the latest on what's happening within the military community. And we also invite your response to things that's happening here. For those of you who haven't seen the program before, again, we invite your participation. We're here to give information, not disinformation. And we always enjoy a response from the public. But join us here, Hawaii in Uniform, Fridays, 11 a.m. here on Think Tech Hawaii, aloha. Well, I guess you've been thinking over the past minute or so about exactly how they test antidotes and vaccines with such lethal organisms and toxins. So I guess the question is, who volunteers for that? And how can you actually bring a volunteer force in without getting somebody dead? Yeah, it's certainly one reason that probably not a lot of that formal testing has been done in a rigorous clinical setting. Because essentially, it's completely unethical to expose people to a risk like that with no benefit to it. And if you're the kind of person who's going to think about using these toxins in a warfare situation, the odds are you're not too worried about the niceties of clinical trials and medical ethics and all. So you're probably. If you're unethical in the first place, you're probably going to. You don't care much about research ethics. Find a group of people who you don't particularly care for anyhow and shoot it over them and see what happens to them as your test case. Yeah, but we care. US cares. We're still, I mean, the last time I looked anyway, it was still ethical about that. Yeah, so I mean, the thing you try to find something as closely related as possible. You would figure macaque monkeys might be one of the better bets of very closely related species to us. Likely anything that hurts them is probably going to hurt us and vice versa. But not humans. Yeah. So they can really be no clinical trials with humans. On some of these things, I don't think you could ever get anything past the medical review committee. But I suppose you could take your antidote or your vaccine. And you could try that on a human and see without having the toxin introduced into his body. And you can see whether that hurts him. Yeah, and you can try, again, micro doses of the toxin and see what happens to people who have been vaccinated against it, do better and not suffer any ill effects. But some of these things, you're lying between a safe dose and a deadly dose is very, very thin. I mean, are there other ways to deal with it? For example, sometime after 9-11, people forget now, but there was anthrax. And it was being deployed by envelopes to VIPs and anybody. And they would open the envelope and it'd be this white powder inside. And there were a number of people who had envelopes with anthrax powder inside, which is a bacteria that causes a very serious toxin. It could be fatal toxin. How did that work? Anthrax spores, right. Because they're very, very light. And so as soon as you open the envelope, you've put these things already into the air and you're probably going to start inhaling some. And the inhalation route is pretty deadly with anthrax. Something like 90% of the people who get a decent dose inhale will die unless they're treated pretty promptly. That was really clever, if not to. But it didn't work really well. I mean, there were something like maybe a couple hundred people, 75 people who were impacted, but no deaths, as I recall, and no even really serious illnesses. Do we ever find out who did that? I never heard that they ever tried. They just ran away somewhere. Yeah, there was a spade of them and whether investigations were getting too close to the source and the source stopped doing it because they knew they were being watched or what, who knows? I mean, is it something that the average citizen can learn about this? I mean, about opening the mail, for example? I don't know if that's the best way to deploy anthrax powder, but what do we learn from anything? Well, I mean, right, would this person have been better off instead of setting them up in air conditioning systems or mylar balloons over festivals and having them pop on loose, and just shower stuff down on bigger crowds if they really wanted to cause some chaos and disruption. They were trying to target individuals, obviously, and that's, yeah, again, it's a difference between sort of that broad use, weaponizing for broad military use or versus targeting people who you want to assassinate. The two require some sort of different strategies. Well, you know, we live at a time when things that were considered horrendous before seem to be less horrendous now. Maybe life is cheaper now, I don't know what it is. But don't you think that this could happen? I mean, in the past, we've had, you know, lots of talk about germ warfare, but originally called germ warfare, biological warfare, now it's kind of a biotoxin warfare, and not only that, but, you know, attempts at this disturbing, discombobulating a city or a civilization. Sure, you can do agricultural bioterrorism where you knock out the food supply that's actually been tried and practiced in some cases. I mean, as a technique to get your enemy out of your way. So you're prepared for it. Yeah, all right. You learn how to do it. You have a manual on how to do it. Yeah. I mean, actually, I think that information technology type of terrorism is the best of all, but hey, this other way would be very disruptive as well. Yeah, yeah. So what are we doing about this? You know, I mean, it can just, you know, you went and researched this, you came up in a matter of minutes with a whole lot of material that I don't think the public knows about. No, there are whole groups of biological weapons experts, people who study biological substances and the toxins and the delivery modes and try to keep on top of that, try to, they're in touch with the latest so-called dual use research, research that may have very good applications to help us, but could be diverted into very bad areas. They try, I'm sure, our security agencies try to track the materials that are used and that research very closely to see that everything's going to people who are doing legitimate research and not sort of disappearing into dark alleys where you don't know who's gonna be using it. Oh, so. Yeah. And I'm sure they're coming up with very clever ways to deal with it. But our options for doing that kind of stuff are rapidly expanding with the new sort of biological technologies that are available now, this CRISPR, where you can pull. Let's talk about CRISPR, yeah. Pull genes out, set genes in, so you can begin to fine-tune some toxins, maybe make them more lethal to some people and less lethal to other people. Similarly, make an antidote that might be more effective. So with CRISPR, you're not gonna actually change the toxin itself. Well, you might. That too. You could change the genes of the organism that's producing the toxin. That's what I mean. So. You could change the bacteria. Right. And change the host. Right. You change, you know, the virus. Right. And now the resulting toxin can be stronger. Right. Or targeted. Right. Or the host organism is now tougher and survives longer or replicates more. It takes faster. Right. Or dumps out more of it. Yeah. I mean, there's sort of different ways you can go here and there's so many, these are expanding so rapidly that I do feel that we're living in times where we are likely, at some point, to see some more biological attacks. I don't think we've seen the last of them at all. Oh no. I mean, the Japanese Colt, a few years ago did the Japanese Subway, Sarah, an attack. It botched that terribly and didn't even hurt a single person. But. But it shows you a few of the future. Yeah. Again, I can't believe more people aren't gonna be trying that. It's so much cheaper and simpler than doing something with an atomic weapon. Yeah, right. Well, but you can do it in your garage. Right. Exactly. You can't do an atomic weapon in your... Yeah. So, okay, so we have CRISPR and maybe that's something you can do in a garage, too. I don't know. Pretty much. And we make it more powerful. We make it more focused. We make it easier to store, to deploy. We make every molecule of the toxin stronger. And we make more of it. Right. And maybe, you know, generally make it easier to deliver. So, you know, question though is, how far can you go with this? For example, can I say that I want this toxin only to make American people sick? Probably not that far. But, I mean, so I was just reading something recently that they've developed a new way to encapsulate medicines now in this peculiar new form of crystallization coating that's very resistant to degradation in the body. So, you inject these things and 96 hours later, the stuff is still circulating through your blood, just gradually, one at a time, these old capsules are popping open, releasing this medicine in a nice, time-controlled fashion. So, you might be able to do that with a toxin. Usually, you would disintegrate and degrade within a matter of a few minutes or a few hours in a battlefield. Instead, you make it long-lasting. Now, anyone who steps in that battlefield and gets it on their skin a day later, a week later, may get this thing. So, yeah, I mean, there's sort of some really ugly potentials now for these to change. It strikes me also that you could have that same kind of epoxy process happening where you could introduce one kind of, one element of the toxin, and it's just, it's not doing anything. It doesn't make you sick. And then, when you're ready, so you're setting up the victim, then you introduce the other one in some other easier way. You fly over with your drone and miss the area with component two that drifts down, and suddenly all your surfaces become toxin-laden. And the only person who is affected by this is the one who has received dose number one on the first element. So, your troops have not received dose number one. They're not affected by dose number two. Yeah, but boy, that's... Dangerous business. That's a tricky game to play. I mean, you saw in that British case there was a couple sort of on the side who both got poisoned, too, and nobody quite knows how. They apparently touched something that had the compounds on it, yeah. So it's, yeah, that's the classic dilemma with how do you make the stuff hurt your enemies and not hurt yourself? It's a very... So where is this going, Ethan? It strikes me that when you added CRISPR to the recipe here, CRISPR, we don't even know the possibilities of CRISPR at the microbiological level. We could create somebody in the garage, could create some toxins that would be unimaginable and would be easier to handle. And a state actor wouldn't be so concerned about it blowing back on him because he could control it because of these biological changes that CRISPR could make in it. Where are we going on this, Ethan? Yeah, I don't know. I would like to think that the state actors are all of sufficient moral character, let us say, that they won't mess with us. We do have a treaty with 181 nations that have signed swearing. That's right, there's a treaty against us. They won't develop, they won't deploy, they won't store this stuff, they won't ever use it. But there's no enforcement to that treaty. Right, unfortunately, there is no inspection, no enforcement of any sort. But the non-state actors, to me, are the bigger danger now, that the fanatical cell, a group of people who really don't care too much, and if you've got an appetite for it, even if you've got a few dozen doses, that's enough to take care of you and your dear cell members, right? And it runs all the way from assassination to assassinating a population. A subset population can be reached by a CRISPR-treated toxin. Well, I've really enjoyed this unlikable science with you, Ethan. It's been thoroughly distasteful. It's been the least likable science I think we've had. If you don't mind, don't touch it. Bye, Ethan. Take care, Jack.