6 ms·

At the risk of putting myself on a watchlist, They already know that, so They have an eye on certain kinds of labware, different precursors, and such. And They

At the risk of putting myself on a watchlist, They already know that, so They have an eye on certain kinds of labware, different precursors, and such. And They already have antidotes to some of these poisons. One could optimize for compounds with hard-to-monitor precursors. Compounds that can be transported with low vapor pressure and volatility, so they cannot be easily sniffed out. Or imagine a lethal compound with a high delay factor. Or something with specifically panic-inducing effects, perhaps hemorrhagic with a side effect of your skin sliding off in great slick sheets. Another interesting high delay factor compound might induce psychosis: have fun tracking where these gibbering maniacs were a week ago. With a sufficiently dark imagination, "needs" could be identified for all sorts of compounds. Remember, the goal is to throw a monkey wrench into the gearwork of an opposing civilization, not necessarily to kill. Fear of the unknown is very effective for this.

logifail 5y ago
> At the risk of putting myself on a watchlist, They already know that, so They have an eye on certain kinds of labware, different precursors, and such. And They already have antidotes to some of these poisons. Errm, maybe They Do. On the other hand, I used to work in an organic chemistry research lab, and at least within my ex university's context, we could basically order anything we wanted from the standard chemical suppliers without anyone batting an eyelid. Pre-signed but otherwise blank order forms were freely handed out, you just filled in what compounds you wanted and handed it over, two days later it arrived and you collected it from Stores. I personally ordered a compound for a reaction I was planning and it was only after it arrived - when I read the safety data sheet - that I realised just quite how toxic it was. I backed carefully away from that particular bottle, and left it in the fridge, still sealed. Then found another - safer - way to do the reaction instead...
- dekhn 5y ago
  Is that toxic bottle still sealed, in the fridge, after you've left the institution? I've had to deal with a few EHS situations like that.
  - danuker 5y ago
    How did you deal with it? I would expect they don't take returns.
    - dekhn 5y ago
      You call your university's EHS department and tell them as much about what you know about the contents of the bottle (which may not be what is on the label). They seal off the lab, remove it, and using what they can determine about the contents, destroy it safely.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      The same thing that happens when someone quits. The people finding these things have the same skill sets and access to the same handling/disposal facilities as the people leaving these things so it's very much a "oh my former coworker forgot to/didn't have an opportunity to dispose of X before departing, I'll just do it myself in the same manner he would have". Furthermore, these people have lives, they go on vacation and cover each other. The institutional knowledge of how to handles dangerous organic things necessarily exists in the institutions that do so.
      - dekhn 5y ago
        No bench chemist should attempt to cleanup this stuff. Go to your university or company EHS, and if you don;'t have that, your city does. The history of chemistry is filled with responsible and intelligent organic chemists who nonetheless died terrible deaths. EHS has strategies to avoid this.
        throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        Humor us all and think another few steps ahead. And what's EHS gonna do? They're gonna CC the guy who's office is right beside yours because (surprise surprise) the departments and teams who's work results in them having weird nasty stuff buried in the back of the walk in fridge are the same people who know how to handle it. EHS is just a coordinator. They don't have subject matter in everything. So they contact the experts. If your biology department fridge with Space AIDS(TM) in it it's because your department is the experts so you'll be getting the call.
- emaginniss 5y ago
  Right, and if you had ordered 3 barrels of the stuff, you'd get a visit from the feds.
  - logifail 5y ago
    > 3 barrels of the stuff Barrels? Based on what the LD50 was / what the data sheet said, the bottle I briefly had in my hands - and yes, they did start shaking - would have done for a good proportion of the residents of a small city had it managed to be spread around in a form that would have been ingested. Chemistry labs are typically well-stocked with quite a lot of fairly unpleasant things. They're also the places where a lot of genuinely amazing and potentially live-saving work gets done!
    - tetsusaiga 5y ago
      You can't just tease us like this! If not the actual chemical... maybe an analogue or something? Chemistry is one of my great fascinations lol.
      - hoseja 5y ago
        Maybe azides.
      - kortex 5y ago
        Not GP but one time we did a cyanation reaction (attaches a -CN group) in the pilot plant involving trimethylsilyl cyanide (TMS-CN). We had what looked honest to god like an 8lb propane tank of the stuff ("cyanide and cyanide accessories" lol), with an air-free delivery siphon, typical for air-free, pyrophoric, and toxic reagents. Normally we'd do this in the high potency suite but the reaction scale was too big so we did it in the conventional GMP pilot plant. Bunny suits and cyanide meters for all three chemists. I calculated that dose-wise, it was enough to kill tens of thousands, were it directly delivered, however if it were merely vaporized, it would only kill those in the immediate area, and would hydrolyze quickly. There's a great article linked elsewhere in thread about the ineffectiveness of chemical weapons, I've added it for convenience because it's a great read. Air is big, the distance-cubed law really dilutes any toxic agent beyond dangerous limits quite fast (comparing pound for pound lethality of conventional explosives). https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/ https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
- david422 5y ago
  > I backed carefully away from that particular bottle, and left it in the fridge, still sealed. Then found another - safer - way to do the reaction instead... I've wondered how manufacturing plants handle this. You back away because you're afraid of touching the stuff - how does a giant factory that produces and ships the stuff handle it?
  - 323 5y ago
    The same way other dangerous stuff is made? There is plenty of dangerous chemicals made on a huge scale - sulfuric acid, cyanide, explosives, ...
  - detaro 5y ago
    It clearly can be handled, the question is what's the procedure to handle it correctly and do you trust your procedure? Manufacturer or someone regularly working with this kind of thing does know and trust, if you suddenly realize it wasn't quite what you signed up for backing off is clearly the better choice than trusting your guess at procedure. But risk can be managed a lot. Although certainly over-confidence can also happen on the other end, e.g. if something that's quite similar to other dangerous things you work with suddenly has an additional trap. And Safety Datasheets are notorious for not necessarily representing actual in-use risks well.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  "They" are not proactive, because they know people hiding bad things need time and coordination. So, only taking notice (and notes) and investigating strange patterns is enough. But also a lot of what the GP says doesn't apply, because on the case of terrorism, "They" is either the police or random people, so "They" definitively do not have antidotes or training on how to handle known poisons.
- Enginerrrd 5y ago
  Flourine compound? Organic heavy metal? I'm curious.
- jhart99 5y ago
  I've also worked in chemistry research labs and there are certain compounds (in the US) at least that will need approval. Anything on the DEA precursor list will do it. There are certain chemicals that are dual use for chemical weapons and chemotherapy synthesis (things to make melphalan for example). Those required some extra forms to order.
VLM 5y ago
> Or imagine a lethal compound You'll get nuked (or similar WMD) for that. Imagine a somewhat more realistic set of applications for hot new research chemicals. How about aircraft or shells or covert actors spray some "thing" that shorts out electrical insulators 1000x more often than normal. Or makes the vegetation underneath power lines 1000x more flammable than normal vegetation. Our power is unreliable causing a major economic hit both directly and via higher electrical bills. If "they" want to invade now the civilians won't have power and be more likely to get out of the way long before the front line troops arrive. I mean you could probably put nano-particles of graphite in a spray can right now, then stand upwind of a power station or substation, but I bet extensive research would do better. A lot of high power electrical "Stuff" relies on plain old varnish being inert for a long time ... what happens if it wasn't? Again you shut down a country they gonna nuke you, but what if electrical power transformers and switching power supplies only last one year on average instead of ten? Thats a huge economic and maybe military strategic advantage but would you get nuked back because some nation's TVs burn out in one year instead of the carefully value engineered ten years? How about a spray or microbe or whatever that screws up air filters. Who cares, right? Well most troops (and cops) in most countries have gas masks. Zap their masks via whatever new magical method, then drop simple plain old tear gas the next day or until logistics catches up, which will take awhile assuming they even know they're damaged. Normally when hit with CS, they'd mask up and the CS would have no effect on mask wearers other than reduced vision, but now the side that didn't get their masks ruined has a HUGE tactical advantage. If you make a bioweapon and kill half the population, they gonna be PISSED and you're gonna get nuked. So try something a little more chill. If your vitamin A reserves are gone, your night vision is temporarily essentially gone. Yeah for long term vit A deficiency you'll get long term skin, general growth, and infection risk problems, but if someone sprayed you with some weird compound that made you pee out all your bodies stores of Vit A before tomorrow morning, the only real short term effect would be night blindness, and that would go away in a couple days with a normal-ish diet or by taking a few days of multivitamin pill or a couple supplement vit A pills. So spray the enemy (and/or the civilians) and they can't see in the dark so magical automatic curfew for the civvies and attack the night blind military and absolutely pound them because they're night blind and can't see your guys. If they have NVGs then hit them at dawn/dusk when the NVGs won't work completely correctly but they can't see without them because of night blindness. Its temporary and never hurt no one other than the opfor "owning the night" until the victims figure it out or naturally recover, so at a strategic / diplomatic level would a country nuke another country because they couldn't see at night for a couple days? Naw probably not. And you can imagine the terror attack / psych warfare potential of leaflets explaining, "we turned off your night vision for a couple days, now obey or we shut off cardiac function next time" Either for the government to use against civilians (think Canada vs truckers) or governments to use against each other (China vs Taiwan invasion or similar). Or give them temporary weird fever sweats or turn their pee robins-egg blue or all kinds of fun. Now the above is all sci fi stuff I made up and AFAIK I'm not violating any secrets act, unless this post magically disappears in a couple hours LOL. Think of the new non-lethal battlespace like computer virus attacks. Yeah, we could "EMP" Russia to shut off most of their computers and they'd be really pissed off and nuke us right back so thats a non-starter. But release "windoze annoyance virus number 31597902733" and that could have real world effects. Especially if you release 20,30,4000 new zero-days on the same day.
Enginerrrd 5y ago
>Another interesting high delay factor compound might induce psychosis This kind of exists already. BZ gas is the well-known delirium-inducing compound with a delay of several hours: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-Quinuclidinyl_benzilate#Effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-Quinuclidinyl_benzilate#Effe...) The effects are probably mostly temporary though.

logifail 5y ago

> At the risk of putting myself on a watchlist, They already know that, so They have an eye on certain kinds of labware, different precursors, and such. And They already have antidotes to some of these poisons. Errm, maybe They Do. On the other hand, I used to work in an organic chemistry research lab, and at least within my ex university's context, we could basically order anything we wanted from the standard chemical suppliers without anyone batting an eyelid. Pre-signed but otherwise blank order forms were freely handed out, you just filled in what compounds you wanted and handed it over, two days later it arrived and you collected it from Stores. I personally ordered a compound for a reaction I was planning and it was only after it arrived - when I read the safety data sheet - that I realised just quite how toxic it was. I backed carefully away from that particular bottle, and left it in the fridge, still sealed. Then found another - safer - way to do the reaction instead...

dekhn 5y ago
Is that toxic bottle still sealed, in the fridge, after you've left the institution? I've had to deal with a few EHS situations like that.
- danuker 5y ago
  How did you deal with it? I would expect they don't take returns.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    You call your university's EHS department and tell them as much about what you know about the contents of the bottle (which may not be what is on the label). They seal off the lab, remove it, and using what they can determine about the contents, destroy it safely.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    The same thing that happens when someone quits. The people finding these things have the same skill sets and access to the same handling/disposal facilities as the people leaving these things so it's very much a "oh my former coworker forgot to/didn't have an opportunity to dispose of X before departing, I'll just do it myself in the same manner he would have". Furthermore, these people have lives, they go on vacation and cover each other. The institutional knowledge of how to handles dangerous organic things necessarily exists in the institutions that do so.
    - dekhn 5y ago
      No bench chemist should attempt to cleanup this stuff. Go to your university or company EHS, and if you don;'t have that, your city does. The history of chemistry is filled with responsible and intelligent organic chemists who nonetheless died terrible deaths. EHS has strategies to avoid this.
      - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        Humor us all and think another few steps ahead. And what's EHS gonna do? They're gonna CC the guy who's office is right beside yours because (surprise surprise) the departments and teams who's work results in them having weird nasty stuff buried in the back of the walk in fridge are the same people who know how to handle it. EHS is just a coordinator. They don't have subject matter in everything. So they contact the experts. If your biology department fridge with Space AIDS(TM) in it it's because your department is the experts so you'll be getting the call.
emaginniss 5y ago
Right, and if you had ordered 3 barrels of the stuff, you'd get a visit from the feds.
- logifail 5y ago
  > 3 barrels of the stuff Barrels? Based on what the LD50 was / what the data sheet said, the bottle I briefly had in my hands - and yes, they did start shaking - would have done for a good proportion of the residents of a small city had it managed to be spread around in a form that would have been ingested. Chemistry labs are typically well-stocked with quite a lot of fairly unpleasant things. They're also the places where a lot of genuinely amazing and potentially live-saving work gets done!
  - tetsusaiga 5y ago
    You can't just tease us like this! If not the actual chemical... maybe an analogue or something? Chemistry is one of my great fascinations lol.
    - hoseja 5y ago
      Maybe azides.
    - kortex 5y ago
      Not GP but one time we did a cyanation reaction (attaches a -CN group) in the pilot plant involving trimethylsilyl cyanide (TMS-CN). We had what looked honest to god like an 8lb propane tank of the stuff ("cyanide and cyanide accessories" lol), with an air-free delivery siphon, typical for air-free, pyrophoric, and toxic reagents. Normally we'd do this in the high potency suite but the reaction scale was too big so we did it in the conventional GMP pilot plant. Bunny suits and cyanide meters for all three chemists. I calculated that dose-wise, it was enough to kill tens of thousands, were it directly delivered, however if it were merely vaporized, it would only kill those in the immediate area, and would hydrolyze quickly. There's a great article linked elsewhere in thread about the ineffectiveness of chemical weapons, I've added it for convenience because it's a great read. Air is big, the distance-cubed law really dilutes any toxic agent beyond dangerous limits quite fast (comparing pound for pound lethality of conventional explosives). https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/ https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
david422 5y ago
> I backed carefully away from that particular bottle, and left it in the fridge, still sealed. Then found another - safer - way to do the reaction instead... I've wondered how manufacturing plants handle this. You back away because you're afraid of touching the stuff - how does a giant factory that produces and ships the stuff handle it?
- 323 5y ago
  The same way other dangerous stuff is made? There is plenty of dangerous chemicals made on a huge scale - sulfuric acid, cyanide, explosives, ...
- detaro 5y ago
  It clearly can be handled, the question is what's the procedure to handle it correctly and do you trust your procedure? Manufacturer or someone regularly working with this kind of thing does know and trust, if you suddenly realize it wasn't quite what you signed up for backing off is clearly the better choice than trusting your guess at procedure. But risk can be managed a lot. Although certainly over-confidence can also happen on the other end, e.g. if something that's quite similar to other dangerous things you work with suddenly has an additional trap. And Safety Datasheets are notorious for not necessarily representing actual in-use risks well.
marcosdumay 5y ago
"They" are not proactive, because they know people hiding bad things need time and coordination. So, only taking notice (and notes) and investigating strange patterns is enough. But also a lot of what the GP says doesn't apply, because on the case of terrorism, "They" is either the police or random people, so "They" definitively do not have antidotes or training on how to handle known poisons.
Enginerrrd 5y ago
Flourine compound? Organic heavy metal? I'm curious.
jhart99 5y ago
I've also worked in chemistry research labs and there are certain compounds (in the US) at least that will need approval. Anything on the DEA precursor list will do it. There are certain chemicals that are dual use for chemical weapons and chemotherapy synthesis (things to make melphalan for example). Those required some extra forms to order.

VLM 5y ago

> Or imagine a lethal compound You'll get nuked (or similar WMD) for that. Imagine a somewhat more realistic set of applications for hot new research chemicals. How about aircraft or shells or covert actors spray some "thing" that shorts out electrical insulators 1000x more often than normal. Or makes the vegetation underneath power lines 1000x more flammable than normal vegetation. Our power is unreliable causing a major economic hit both directly and via higher electrical bills. If "they" want to invade now the civilians won't have power and be more likely to get out of the way long before the front line troops arrive. I mean you could probably put nano-particles of graphite in a spray can right now, then stand upwind of a power station or substation, but I bet extensive research would do better. A lot of high power electrical "Stuff" relies on plain old varnish being inert for a long time ... what happens if it wasn't? Again you shut down a country they gonna nuke you, but what if electrical power transformers and switching power supplies only last one year on average instead of ten? Thats a huge economic and maybe military strategic advantage but would you get nuked back because some nation's TVs burn out in one year instead of the carefully value engineered ten years? How about a spray or microbe or whatever that screws up air filters. Who cares, right? Well most troops (and cops) in most countries have gas masks. Zap their masks via whatever new magical method, then drop simple plain old tear gas the next day or until logistics catches up, which will take awhile assuming they even know they're damaged. Normally when hit with CS, they'd mask up and the CS would have no effect on mask wearers other than reduced vision, but now the side that didn't get their masks ruined has a HUGE tactical advantage. If you make a bioweapon and kill half the population, they gonna be PISSED and you're gonna get nuked. So try something a little more chill. If your vitamin A reserves are gone, your night vision is temporarily essentially gone. Yeah for long term vit A deficiency you'll get long term skin, general growth, and infection risk problems, but if someone sprayed you with some weird compound that made you pee out all your bodies stores of Vit A before tomorrow morning, the only real short term effect would be night blindness, and that would go away in a couple days with a normal-ish diet or by taking a few days of multivitamin pill or a couple supplement vit A pills. So spray the enemy (and/or the civilians) and they can't see in the dark so magical automatic curfew for the civvies and attack the night blind military and absolutely pound them because they're night blind and can't see your guys. If they have NVGs then hit them at dawn/dusk when the NVGs won't work completely correctly but they can't see without them because of night blindness. Its temporary and never hurt no one other than the opfor "owning the night" until the victims figure it out or naturally recover, so at a strategic / diplomatic level would a country nuke another country because they couldn't see at night for a couple days? Naw probably not. And you can imagine the terror attack / psych warfare potential of leaflets explaining, "we turned off your night vision for a couple days, now obey or we shut off cardiac function next time" Either for the government to use against civilians (think Canada vs truckers) or governments to use against each other (China vs Taiwan invasion or similar). Or give them temporary weird fever sweats or turn their pee robins-egg blue or all kinds of fun. Now the above is all sci fi stuff I made up and AFAIK I'm not violating any secrets act, unless this post magically disappears in a couple hours LOL. Think of the new non-lethal battlespace like computer virus attacks. Yeah, we could "EMP" Russia to shut off most of their computers and they'd be really pissed off and nuke us right back so thats a non-starter. But release "windoze annoyance virus number 31597902733" and that could have real world effects. Especially if you release 20,30,4000 new zero-days on the same day.

Enginerrrd 5y ago

>Another interesting high delay factor compound might induce psychosis This kind of exists already. BZ gas is the well-known delirium-inducing compound with a delay of several hours: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-Quinuclidinyl_benzilate#Effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-Quinuclidinyl_benzilate#Effe...) The effects are probably mostly temporary though.