> People used to play around with Mercury and even ingest it since it's not supposed to be reactive. Turns out it's stupidly toxic but nobody figured that out u

> People used to play around with Mercury and even ingest it since it's not supposed to be reactive. Turns out it's stupidly toxic but nobody figured that out until recently. Well that's only partially true. The toxicity of mercury was speculated as early as the late 1600s [0]. Then in the 1920s Alfred Stock was doing "modern" research on its effects [1]. So sure, people played around with it, but it's toxicity was figured out a long time ago. Hopefully we've also advanced as a society since then in that we wouldn't handle something so carelessly - however it would be a little naive to actually believe that, I'm sure 100 years from now our descendants will look back and judge us just as we do. > Qian and co are optimistic. They point out that gallium is chemically inert and believed to be non-toxic in humans. And they say a small amount of the metal can be injected into the target vessels and sucked out afterwards without leaving a residue. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Jakob_Wepfer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Jakob_Wepfer [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Stock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Stock