Chalk up another casualty to the "mad scientist" stereotype. Network newscasters were chortling merrily earlier this week over the sad spectacle of a distinguished NASA astronaut who became a wee bit unhinged from the severe emotional stress accompanying the dissolution of her marriage, and transferred all that angst onto her rival for the affections of a fellow astronaut. Specifically, Lisa Marie Nowak, 43, donned a trench coat, wig and dark glasses, strapped on a pair of Depends underneath (so as not to have to stop along the way), and drove 950 miles from Houston to Orlando to confront Air Force Captain Colleen Shipman. Then she followed Shipman to her parked car, and when Shipman cracked open her window to answer a question, Nowak sprayed pepper spray into the vehicle -- an act Nowak later admitted "was stupid."
Um, ya think? Nowak clearly needs a better coping mechanism. I'm under an especially intense amount of stress now, too, but you don't see me donning diapers and driving 1000 miles armed with pepper spray. I deal with it by getting a bit shirty with telemarketers and hiding under the bedcovers for an hour or so each day. Regardless, the story certainly didn't warrant the degree of attention it received. Mostly, I feel bad for Nowak, a rare woman in the space sciences who until now has been a perfectly respectable member of the astronautical community. Where were the network newscasters when she was making her own bit of history orbiting the Earth in space? This is not, I'd warrant, how she wants to be remembered, and now it will forever be a footnote to her life's work. (Forty years from now, her obituary could still read, "In 2007, Nowak briefly crumbled under the strain of her failed marriage," etc.)
However it does illustrate that scientists are people too: they fall in love, marry, divorce, and occasionally develop unhealthy romantic obsessions just like everybody else (except for Jen-Luc Piquant, who swears she is the Bride of Science). Cupid's arrow doesn't discriminate. And while love might make the world go 'round, if it gets too intensely focused, love can also make you do the wacky (to loosely paraphrase the incomparable Buffy).
Nowak's unfortunate 15 minutes in the glare of the media spotlight comes on the heels of a cable TV special I watched a couple of weeks ago, detailing the descent into obsessive madness of a chemist named Alan Chmurny over his pretty young (married) co-worker, Marta Bradley. The episode title? "Mad Scientist." The producers were careful to include lots of scary, close-up shots of Chmurny's eyes, accompanied by ominous music, in an attempt to turn him into Charlie Manson. In reality, the unfortunate Chmurny was slightly eccentric, but perfectly pleasant and unremarkable in appearance. He was no Manson; he definitely needed meds. But his love for Bradley did, alas, eventually turn murderous.
It all began so innocently. Chmurny and Bradley worked together at a biotech firm in Maryland called Oceanix. He was a vice president in the company, but took a liking to Bradley. Among other things, she was a talented classical musician, and he was a classical music buff. They forged an unlikely friendship that inexplicably began to sour as Chmurny began exhibiting "wildly changing moods." He began confiding wild tales to Bradley about his foundering marriage, his diagnosis of stomach cancer (from which he miraculously recovered), a supposed girlfriend named Debbie who was mysteriously killed in a car accident -- most of which turned out to be fabrications.
Bradley instinctively began to pull away, but this only caused his behavior to escalate. Bradley's car mysteriously developed a flat tire. There was a break-in at her home; the intruder stole fancy lingerie plus some jewelry given to her by Chmurny. These items were later returned, by Chmurny, who claimed they'd been left in his office by some unknown person. Inside was a note: "I'm not through with you." Eventually Chmurny's behavior became so erratic that Oceanix was forced to fire him, leaving him ample free time to nurse his paranoid obsession and continue stalking Bradley. Stalking is a nasty, terrifying bit of business; it happened to a good friend of mine, who found, like Bradley, that law enforcement officials couldn't do much to help unless there was an overt act of violence.
It was probably just a matter of time before Chmurny became openly violent in his intentions. (Physicists shouldn't assume their field is immune to this sort of thing, by the way; check out my earlier post about the Alabama physics professor alleged to have strangled his wife.) But Bradley couldn't prove definitely that it was him. Chmurny was smart enough to cover his tracks. Then came the morning in April 2000 when Bradley walked out to her car and found it had been broken into. There were strange, small silver specks all over the console, including the heating/air conditioner vents. It turned out to be liquid mercury. And it was a bona fide murder attempt, since mercury is highly toxic, especially in its gaseous state. Had Bradley turned on her heat, the liquid mercury would have quickly evaporated into a toxic gas and poisoned her. Air saturated with mercury vapor at room temperature has a very high concentration -- many times the toxic level -- and becomes increasingly dangerous as temperatures increase.
Mercury, or quicksilver, as it is commonly known, is a transition metal, one of five elements that are liquid at standard room temperatures. Frankly, it's quite lovely as elements go, its beauty belying its deadly nature -- a veritable l'element fatale. It filled decorative pools and fountains in Islamic Spain, a practice revived by Alexander Calder when he built a mercury fountain for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris. That fountain is still on display in Barcelona.
Apart from being decorative, Mercury has historically been used to treat various ailments, before its toxic properties were fully understood. It was certainly known in ancient China; China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang Di, is believed to have been driven insane and killed by mercury pills. Ironically, he took them in hopes of achieving eternal life, and legend holds he was buried in a tomb containing rivers of flowing mercury to represent the rivers of China. The ancient Greeks used mercury in ointments, and it found its way into Roman cosmetics as well.
Among medieval alchemists, mercury was a required element for the transmutation of base metals into gold (something the alchemists never achieved, but hey, they kept hoping). During the 1800s, it was used to treat syphilis, (sometimes killing the intended patient), and to treat constipation, depression, and toothaches. In the early 20th century, children were administered mercury every year as a laxative and dewormer. It was also used to refine gold and silver ores, something still practiced by gold miners in Brazil's Amazon basin. In modern times, it's been used to cool nuclear reactions, as an ingredient in dental amalgams, and before the advent of digital thermometers, the devices were filled with mercury. (I remember my mother panicking when, as a very young child, I accidentally broke such a thermometer. At the time, I didn't understand why she freaked out; and I was mercifully spared any ill effects.)
Marta Bradley was astute enough to call the police when she saw the mysterious silver specks in her car, thereby sparing herself an unpleasant experience with often-fatal mercury poisoning. Many others haven't been so lucky. You know that phrase, "mad as a hatter"? It most likely arose in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the furs used to make beaver felt hats were dipped in mercury compounds to separate the fur from the pelt ad mat it together. The solution produced toxic vapors which adversely affected workers in the felt hat trade. The poisoning caused shaking and splurred speech, symptoms which were lumped under "hatter's disease."
The most potent form of mercury is dimethyl mercury, a neurotoxin that can easily cross the blood/brain barrier and can prove lethal even in minuscule amounts (on the order of a fraction of a milliliter). The compound damages the central nervous system, kidneys, and the endocrine system, and prolonged or heavy exposure results in brain damage and death. Mostly, its effects are cumulative; usually, by the time its effects are noticed, it is too late to save the victim.
Take the unfortunate case of Karen Wetterhahn, a distinguished chemist working at Dartmouth College to study how mercury ions interacted with DNA repair proteins, in hopes of shedding light on the possible role of such heavy metals in causing cancer. In August 1996, she was in the lab, wearing safety goggles and latex gloves for protection. Despite these precautions, a small drop of the compound spilled onto her gloved hand, penetrating the latex in 15 seconds, where it passed through her skin. (It turns out that one must not only wear latex gloves, but also cover them with a pair of neoprene gloves for added protection.) By January 1997, she noted a tingling sensation in her fingers and toes. Her speech began slurring, she struggled with balance, and her vision suffered. She died in June 1997; at the time she had a blood mercury level of 4000 micrograms per liter, 80 times the toxic threshold.
As for Marta Bradley, her ordeal ended in September 2001, when Chmurny poisoned himself with cyanide after a jury found him guilty of assault and reckless endangerment -- which carries a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison. He died the next day. One could hardly say he escaped justice, since death by cyanide poisoning is extremely unpleasant, particularly in the concentrations he must have ingested to fall ill within 15 minutes: high concentrations lead to seizures, apnea and cardiac arrest, often a coma, and death can follow in a matter of minutes.
Actually, not all cyanides are toxic: one of the most potent forms is hydrogen cyanide, a gas that smells faintly of almonds, although 40% of the population can't smell it at all -- a genetic quirk. (In an NCIS episode called "Bloodbath", one of the characters detects that distinct smell minutes before collapsing from the exposure -- clearly one of the lucky 60% able to do so.) Equally toxic are the salts that derive from hydrogen cyanide, such as potassium cyanide and sodium cyanide. The victims of the infamous Jonestown massacre in Guyana back in 1978 drank Kool-Aid laced with potassium cyanide. Being a chemist by trade, Chmurny would have known all too well the type and dosage he'd need to kill himself. He lasted a bit longer than he probably expected, due to the timely intervention of medical personnel -- that, and the fact that he calmly informed his lawyer he'd taken the pills within a few minutes of doing so.
For those would-be poisoners with a particularly strong sadistic streak, there's always polonium, which Wikipedia estimates is around 5 million times more toxic than hydrogen cyanide, weight for weight. Just ask former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko. Oh wait, you can't: he tragically died after being poisoned with polonium 210 late last year. Effect Measure has several terrifically thorough posts about the case here, here, and here. And in a bizarre twist to the tale, detectives investigating Litvinenko's case now believe he was administered the poison via a teapot while staying in the Millennium Hotel in Piccadilly, in central London. Ionizing radiation is a nasty thing, especially if polonium is ingested, as in the Litvinenko murder, especially since death takes several weeks.
He's not the first to die from such exposure. Irene Joliot Curie -- daughter of Pierre and Marie -- was accidentally exposed to polonium when a sealed capsule of the stuff exploded on her laboratory bench. It took 10 years, but she eventually died in Paris from leukemia, in 1956. A physicist at the Weizmann Institute named Dror Sadeh was exposed to a radiation leak of polonium 210 in 1957. Sadeh died of cancer, one of his students succumbed to leukemia, and two more colleagues died a few years later, also from cancer believed to have resulted from the leak.
All this is enough to make me never want to drive a car or drink tea again. But if I had to pick a poison, I think I'd choose arsenic. True, it also results in a horrifying unpleasant death via extreme gastric distress. But it's possible to build up a strong resistance to the substance over time with regular, small-dose ingestions. So there's a greater chance of surviving a poisoning (whether accidental or deliberate) -- if you start preparing now. It makes the skin all clear and pretty, too.