Dihydrogen Monoxide

[johnofgwent]

<t>The Cautionary Tale of Dihydrogen Monoxide...



The following is an excerpt from an article in Natural History 5/98 by Neil de Grasse Tyson:



Nathan Zohner, a student at Eagle Rock Junior High School in Idaho, conducted a clever science-fair experiment that tested anti-technology sentiments and associated chemical phobias in 1997. He invited people to sign a petition that demanded either strict control of, or a total ban on, dihydrogen monoxide. He listed some of the odious properties of this

colourless and odourless substance:



1. It is a major component of acid rain.



2. It eventually dissolves nearly anything it comes into contact with.



3. It is lethal if accidentally inhaled.



4. It can cause severe burns in its gaseous state.



5. It has been found in tumors of terminal cancer patients.



Forty-three out of fifty people approached by Zohner signed the petition, six were undecided, and one was a strong supporter of dihydrogen monoxide and refused to sign.



Yes, 86% of the passersby voted to ban water (H2O) from the environment.</t>

Chatting to my (Ph.D in Organic Chem holding) cousin the other day over Skype, the topic of a recent Smithsonian Channel Documentary and two separate "great train journey" programmes came up.

It seems both Tony Robinson and either Chris Tarrant or Bill Nighy (can't recall which of the last two it was) did a train ride through Norway and Denmark and neither mentioned the Heavy water Plant near it that a Smithsonian documentary described. The latter programme telling the tale of how a year's output of  heavy water apparently critical to the german wartime nuclear research efforts went to the bottom of the deepest lake in Norway courtesy of the resistance movement, at a cost of several civilian lives.

Wreck Scavengers (ok, ok HISTORIANS) sent roving vehicles to the wreck, and actually retrieved some of the barrels, opened one and alalysed the contents and sure enough it was Deuterium Monoxide.

Which set me and my cousin thinking just how safe is it to have a train wreck (literally, they took a train on a ferry !!) full of heavy water sitting in a lake no matter how big.

We started looking it up.

Apparently unlike the three-proton isotope tritium in tritiated water, which both my cousin and i have used as a radioactive marker in research, Deuterium is not radioactive (so how the hell they make bombs out of it I shall have to look up) but it is toxic in a very singular way. The extra proton makes it difficult for the proton pumps that lie at the heart of your nervous system and digestive system to work.

If you were to drink enough of it to replace more than 25% of your body fluids you would start to notice irregularities in key electrical transmissions - and thereafter as you increase the fraction replaced you would be risking death by convulsions in the exact same way a diver stupid enough to try diving below 50 metres on air risks sudden death when the partial pressure of oxygen in body fluids contact with the myelin sheath of the nerves causes a breakdown in electrical transmisison.

But once the amount of heavy water in your body fluids reached 30% it would cause a complete failure in the pumps that suck water out of the colon leading to death through dehydration thanks to the most amazing bout of the shits you could possibly imagine.

There is a research paper in a journal of medical physiology that describes these symptoms being observed.

I had fully expected the date to be 1942 and the original language german. I was quite stunned to find it was an american publocation dated 1967.

[Barry]

The Cautionary Tale of Dihydrogen Monoxide...



The following is an excerpt from an article in Natural History 5/98 by Neil de Grasse Tyson:



Nathan Zohner, a student at Eagle Rock Junior High School in Idaho, conducted a clever science-fair experiment that tested anti-technology sentiments and associated chemical phobias in 1997. He invited people to sign a petition that demanded either strict control of, or a total ban on, dihydrogen monoxide. He listed some of the odious properties of this

colourless and odourless substance:



1. It is a major component of acid rain.



2. It eventually dissolves nearly anything it comes into contact with.



3. It is lethal if accidentally inhaled.



4. It can cause severe burns in its gaseous state.



5. It has been found in tumors of terminal cancer patients.



Forty-three out of fifty people approached by Zohner signed the petition, six were undecided, and one was a strong supporter of dihydrogen monoxide and refused to sign.



Yes, 86% of the passersby voted to ban water (H2O) from the environment.