The Most Toxic Chemical You've Handled
- Thread starter Slenn
- Start date
Job-wise I've handled quite a few medical things you could describe not as toxic but at least dangerous.
For example Epinephrine, Fentanyl and quite a few ones over their date of expiry that can mess you up quite nice when accidentally absorbed through the skin.
No good chemicals though, in school we were not allowed to use anything more than 1% acid.
For example Epinephrine, Fentanyl and quite a few ones over their date of expiry that can mess you up quite nice when accidentally absorbed through the skin.
No good chemicals though, in school we were not allowed to use anything more than 1% acid.
German army or some US base? Because I would be surprised if they still used opioid pain medication in the German army.Smokej said:during my time at the army (Germany) as a combat medic i had some nice toys to play with especially when i worked with the ABC (=NBC) detachment of our regiment; i left most of their stuff alone because that wasn't really part of my training... but who needs those stuff if you have an army pharmacy packed with morphin, methadon, nitrous oxide etc.
Diaminobenzidine (DAB) is pretty toxic. Beta-mecaptoethanol is also very nasty stuff, stinks too. Concentrated hydrochloric acid is always fun; you don't want to get that in your eye! Xylene is very toxic as well, and it disolves rubber gloves too not to mention that it's highly flamable.
For all the people using ethidium bromide switch to sybrsafe or gel red, both much safer.
For all the people using ethidium bromide switch to sybrsafe or gel red, both much safer.
Diaminobenzidine (DAB) is pretty toxic. Beta-mecaptoethanol is also very nasty stuff, stinks too. Concentrated hydrochloric acid is always fun; you don't want to get that in your eye! Xylene is very toxic as well, and it disolves rubber gloves too not to mention that it's highly flamable.
For all the people using ethidium bromide switch to sybrsafe or gel red, both much safer.
For all the people using ethidium bromide switch to sybrsafe or gel red, both much safer.
tox·in   /ˈtɒksɪn/ Show SpelledSlenn said:
[tok-sin] Show IPA
?noun
any poison produced by an organism, characterized by antigenicity in certain animals and high molecular weight, and including the bacterial toxins that are the causative agents of tetanus, diphtheria, etc., and such plant and animal toxins as ricin and snake venom.
I know it's nitpicky for me to do this, but since this is a sciencey sort of question, I thought that it might be a good idea for the question to be worded in a more accurate way, and "toxic" isn't really the best choice here.
i fly rc planes and some of the guys at our club have gasoline powered planes fun thing is you can make em quicker how you do that by adding nitro to the gasoline so i did have a full gas can of nitrogen in my hands and to have fun we took a little petri scale put the stuff in there and ignited it invisible flames of doom igniting paper 2 meters above the scale is awesum so its higly flamable and probably toxic if you swallow it
Acid is not toxic - it's corrosive.
Chloroform is usually marked hazardous (and flammable!)
Liquid Nitrogen is just cold... totally not toxic.
Mine is probably Ethidium Bromide - it binds to DNA (woot I will have children with 6 fingers on each head!) although I do love the smell of phenol!
Chloroform is usually marked hazardous (and flammable!)
Liquid Nitrogen is just cold... totally not toxic.
Mine is probably Ethidium Bromide - it binds to DNA (woot I will have children with 6 fingers on each head!) although I do love the smell of phenol!
You gave the definition of `toxin'. Not `toxic'. Toxic is just another word for poisonous.Mittens The Kitten said:
Why do you think that corrosivity and toxicity are mutually exclusive? Don't you think that if something is corrosive then it is probably a bad idea to drink it? The same goes for LN2. Don't drink it; you will die.Phototoxin said:
Most toxic? Probably that plastic bottle full of asbestos dust. Looked flimsy, not exactly well sealed. But we did have some fun with it...
4-Dimethylaminopyridine; toxic, corrosive and readily absorbed through the skin. That's probably the most dangerous one i've handled.
Benzyl bromide; which has been used as a war gas (alkylating agent)
Dicyclohexylcarbodiimide, a potent allergen and a sensitizer
thionyl chloride, which releases pure sulfuric acid and hydrochloric acid upon contact with moisture (eg skin)
Hydroxybenzotriazole, an explosive
hydroxylamine, chloroform, dichloromethane, toluene, methanol, sodium cyanoborohydride, acetonitrile, dimethyl acetylenedicarboxylate, potassium tertiary butoxide, benzyl azide, ...
Various solutions of heavy metals for qualitative analysis experiments, some arsenic compound for iodometric titrations, but that was a long time ago.
Benzyl bromide; which has been used as a war gas (alkylating agent)
Dicyclohexylcarbodiimide, a potent allergen and a sensitizer
thionyl chloride, which releases pure sulfuric acid and hydrochloric acid upon contact with moisture (eg skin)
Hydroxybenzotriazole, an explosive
hydroxylamine, chloroform, dichloromethane, toluene, methanol, sodium cyanoborohydride, acetonitrile, dimethyl acetylenedicarboxylate, potassium tertiary butoxide, benzyl azide, ...
Various solutions of heavy metals for qualitative analysis experiments, some arsenic compound for iodometric titrations, but that was a long time ago.
Hmmm ... previous lives as a school science tech and a nuclear medicine tech... and doing a biology degree that included a bit of chemistry on the side. I've kinda lost count and would probably have to pull up some documents.
I don't think I've actually ever been NEAR Hydrofluoric Acid, but I've definitely run across the COSHH data sheet for it in the school's lab safety manual, so there's a possibility they actually had some. It's drastically nasty stuff. Basically if you spill some on yourself, unless a certain life preserving brew is available nearby - itself pretty damaging - to keep you alive until you can be put into an intensive care ward, your best hope of survival is to immediately amputate the affected body part. It sinks through (or just eats through) your skin, muscle, blood vessels into the bone, and dissolves them from the inside. Also travelling rapidly in the blood to do it to the rest of you. The carnage that results, and whole system poisoning, is both excruciatingly painful and eventually fatal. Doesn't take much of it either, and there are very few containers which it won't eventually corrode.
Even more brilliantly, its precursors used to be used in car starter motors, alternators and other major electrical parts, and it could be produced from them by high heat. So if you had an engine fire, even a small one which was limited to the starter, you'd have to be exquisitely careful when replacing and disposing of that part in case you got some HF on you.
Certainly I did enough work in there with high-molar Nitric Acid, and the less troublesome Sulphuric and Hydrochloric; powdered, red Lead Oxide, which you just don't want inside you in any way (dispensed for the teachers to demonstrate with); and the various nasties used for the making-of-nylon, dna extraction, screaming jelly baby experiments. However in the latter cases the teachers and even students were handling the same stuff we were, so it's not really that dangerous. At least in the small quantities they were handling vs the huge tubs or jars in the prep room.
Oh and someone would always insist on breaking a mercury thermometer wouldn't they. Or dropping a test tube with the unsavoury half-completed contents of some experiment or other...
(Though even in my current AV tech post I'm dealing with occasional broken mercury-vapour bulbs...)
At the hospital ... all kinds of radioactive and possibly potentially toxic brews, which were only really safe because of the small volumes in which they were administered. High strength diuretics ... tin-based compounds that would bind to certain cells ... stuff whose name I can't even remember that caused mild tachycardia, on purpose ... etc ... all often bound with isotopic tracers.
Tc99m, fairly friendly isotope, releases pure "soft" gamma rays, decays pretty rapidly, can even do some jobs all by itself (but usually had to be bound to something that would be taken up into kidneys, liver, lungs, whatever from injection or inhalation). All the same, when you see them banging on about the activity released by Fukushima in terms of terabequerels? Divide that into the couple hundred megabeqs we'd drop into someone (and they would then drop in the toilet) to do a regular investigative kidney scan. It's not actually too massive*.
I-131, a little less friendly, particularly if you shove a load of it, raw, into someone with an unprotected thyroid (it could be bound to tracers for other stuff, but it's not recommended)... and was often the point. Metastatic thyroid tumours? Put them in an isolation room, have a senior tech pass them a 3 GBq pill and leave to stew for a couple of days. It'll hunt them down pretty effectively, and blast them from inside with plenty of deadly beta particles and hard gamma. FOR SCIENCE! Er... sorry, I mean, FOR MEDICINE!
Plus handling the Mb99 "generators" that were delivered fresh (& taken away drained) once a week and provided the Tc99m on an ongoing basis (I-131 being a separate supply... whose lead delivery pots gradually built up in a cupboard and were removed twice a year by a truck). They were far higher activity and somewhat more dangerous. Hence a biiiig lead canister and lots of checks and careful handling, and specialist delivery to and removal from site (though we dealt with them once they were there) - as even the stuff that came out of it had to go riiight in the back of a licensed station wagon, and the tech up front with the driver, if having to go to a different site for any reason.
And a few other ones that I can't even remember now. Various gamma or beta emitters specialised for various work, from therapy to imaging to machine-counted blood tests. Always had to be careful of it, but not too scared, as it's all fairly low level and well controlled.
Well apart from that one time the Mb generator malfunctioned and contaminated the Tc supply and it wasn't caught until a particular machine started giving haywire readings... tweak the gamma energy filter band to find out wtf... oh dear. Slightly scary. But after clean up and rigorous testing, no lasting contamination and the patients didn't seem to actually be affected. Just had to make them wait a couple weeks for the Mb to be definitively gone before we could have a second go.
(and this is why I don't give any more detailed histories or clues to myself than I can possibly manage, because I could probably still get sued if I said where/when it happened and who was affected)
Before that, a lot of the stuff used in the university labs was really rather pernicious. Cyclohexamine I think was one... guaranteed to kill anything dipped in it stone dead. Though I think it's now used (at much, MUCH lower concentrations) in mouthwash? All manner of organic compounds with latin names that were impenetrable even at the time, and horrific smells (...probably should have handled them in a fume cupboard, who knows what lasting effects they've had). For genetically modifying plants, preparing bacteria to infect them with, doing the infection work, then the long tedious weeks of collecting a bunch of samples at particular time points, doing a series of processing steps on them (kill, reveal stain, bleach the rest, wash, fix, bla bla bla) so the results of the mods could be seen and photographed.
Though luckily we never had to prat around with photo developing solution. That project was the reason I bought my first digital camera, after I figured out that - as the output was to all be word processed anyway - a 2mpx fuji, 64mb smartmedia (wow! futuristic!) and a stack of CDRs to save the images was going to be FAR cheaper for the amount of pictures I was going to have to take than even a freebie 35mm plus buying all the film and paying for processing (or far less trouble than processing the film in the university labs, and then scanning it into the PC). Plus it had macro zoom built in (no pratting around with a viewfinderless microscope camera) and I could immediately review and see if a second shot had to be taken before chucking the subject in the incinerator if the first one hadn't come out right.
And the learning to identify things by smell was fun, even though I can't remember it. Was it the alkane one that smelt sort of like white wine mixed with nail polish remover and got you almost instantly high off the fumes, or the alkene?
(... I'm stuck at work waiting for an inexplicably slow video conversion to finish, can you tell?)
I don't think I've actually ever been NEAR Hydrofluoric Acid, but I've definitely run across the COSHH data sheet for it in the school's lab safety manual, so there's a possibility they actually had some. It's drastically nasty stuff. Basically if you spill some on yourself, unless a certain life preserving brew is available nearby - itself pretty damaging - to keep you alive until you can be put into an intensive care ward, your best hope of survival is to immediately amputate the affected body part. It sinks through (or just eats through) your skin, muscle, blood vessels into the bone, and dissolves them from the inside. Also travelling rapidly in the blood to do it to the rest of you. The carnage that results, and whole system poisoning, is both excruciatingly painful and eventually fatal. Doesn't take much of it either, and there are very few containers which it won't eventually corrode.
Even more brilliantly, its precursors used to be used in car starter motors, alternators and other major electrical parts, and it could be produced from them by high heat. So if you had an engine fire, even a small one which was limited to the starter, you'd have to be exquisitely careful when replacing and disposing of that part in case you got some HF on you.
Certainly I did enough work in there with high-molar Nitric Acid, and the less troublesome Sulphuric and Hydrochloric; powdered, red Lead Oxide, which you just don't want inside you in any way (dispensed for the teachers to demonstrate with); and the various nasties used for the making-of-nylon, dna extraction, screaming jelly baby experiments. However in the latter cases the teachers and even students were handling the same stuff we were, so it's not really that dangerous. At least in the small quantities they were handling vs the huge tubs or jars in the prep room.
Oh and someone would always insist on breaking a mercury thermometer wouldn't they. Or dropping a test tube with the unsavoury half-completed contents of some experiment or other...
(Though even in my current AV tech post I'm dealing with occasional broken mercury-vapour bulbs...)
At the hospital ... all kinds of radioactive and possibly potentially toxic brews, which were only really safe because of the small volumes in which they were administered. High strength diuretics ... tin-based compounds that would bind to certain cells ... stuff whose name I can't even remember that caused mild tachycardia, on purpose ... etc ... all often bound with isotopic tracers.
Tc99m, fairly friendly isotope, releases pure "soft" gamma rays, decays pretty rapidly, can even do some jobs all by itself (but usually had to be bound to something that would be taken up into kidneys, liver, lungs, whatever from injection or inhalation). All the same, when you see them banging on about the activity released by Fukushima in terms of terabequerels? Divide that into the couple hundred megabeqs we'd drop into someone (and they would then drop in the toilet) to do a regular investigative kidney scan. It's not actually too massive*.
I-131, a little less friendly, particularly if you shove a load of it, raw, into someone with an unprotected thyroid (it could be bound to tracers for other stuff, but it's not recommended)... and was often the point. Metastatic thyroid tumours? Put them in an isolation room, have a senior tech pass them a 3 GBq pill and leave to stew for a couple of days. It'll hunt them down pretty effectively, and blast them from inside with plenty of deadly beta particles and hard gamma. FOR SCIENCE! Er... sorry, I mean, FOR MEDICINE!
Plus handling the Mb99 "generators" that were delivered fresh (& taken away drained) once a week and provided the Tc99m on an ongoing basis (I-131 being a separate supply... whose lead delivery pots gradually built up in a cupboard and were removed twice a year by a truck). They were far higher activity and somewhat more dangerous. Hence a biiiig lead canister and lots of checks and careful handling, and specialist delivery to and removal from site (though we dealt with them once they were there) - as even the stuff that came out of it had to go riiight in the back of a licensed station wagon, and the tech up front with the driver, if having to go to a different site for any reason.
And a few other ones that I can't even remember now. Various gamma or beta emitters specialised for various work, from therapy to imaging to machine-counted blood tests. Always had to be careful of it, but not too scared, as it's all fairly low level and well controlled.
Well apart from that one time the Mb generator malfunctioned and contaminated the Tc supply and it wasn't caught until a particular machine started giving haywire readings... tweak the gamma energy filter band to find out wtf... oh dear. Slightly scary. But after clean up and rigorous testing, no lasting contamination and the patients didn't seem to actually be affected. Just had to make them wait a couple weeks for the Mb to be definitively gone before we could have a second go.
(and this is why I don't give any more detailed histories or clues to myself than I can possibly manage, because I could probably still get sued if I said where/when it happened and who was affected)
Before that, a lot of the stuff used in the university labs was really rather pernicious. Cyclohexamine I think was one... guaranteed to kill anything dipped in it stone dead. Though I think it's now used (at much, MUCH lower concentrations) in mouthwash? All manner of organic compounds with latin names that were impenetrable even at the time, and horrific smells (...probably should have handled them in a fume cupboard, who knows what lasting effects they've had). For genetically modifying plants, preparing bacteria to infect them with, doing the infection work, then the long tedious weeks of collecting a bunch of samples at particular time points, doing a series of processing steps on them (kill, reveal stain, bleach the rest, wash, fix, bla bla bla) so the results of the mods could be seen and photographed.
Though luckily we never had to prat around with photo developing solution. That project was the reason I bought my first digital camera, after I figured out that - as the output was to all be word processed anyway - a 2mpx fuji, 64mb smartmedia (wow! futuristic!) and a stack of CDRs to save the images was going to be FAR cheaper for the amount of pictures I was going to have to take than even a freebie 35mm plus buying all the film and paying for processing (or far less trouble than processing the film in the university labs, and then scanning it into the PC). Plus it had macro zoom built in (no pratting around with a viewfinderless microscope camera) and I could immediately review and see if a second shot had to be taken before chucking the subject in the incinerator if the first one hadn't come out right.
And the learning to identify things by smell was fun, even though I can't remember it. Was it the alkane one that smelt sort of like white wine mixed with nail polish remover and got you almost instantly high off the fumes, or the alkene?
(... I'm stuck at work waiting for an inexplicably slow video conversion to finish, can you tell?)
Oh snaaaap!Tibs said:
Also, probably something arsenic I guess.
Haven't payed much attention to it.
I don't know what exactly is in it, but at work we have this friendly happy stuff called Bloc-Aid, which is used to unclog drains, obviously. The dangerous part is that the substance must be handled while wearing gloves and if any touches your skin you have very little time to wash the stuff off, as it will begin to eat your skin (even if you to wash it off it will burn like the dickens).
A log 5 bacteriacide is at number one spot as it is use almost daily you do not want to ingest this stuff. Occasionally potential exposure to Amosite [sic] Chrysotile, or whatever the name of 'blue' asbestos is. pretty meh really