… yesterday took extremely dangerous amounts of cyanide out of a lab there.
She brought them to her house and used some of the cyanide to kill herself.
She had just lost her job. She wrote various farewell entries on Facebook, including this moving one: “Today… my heart shattered, and I left my soul behind somewhere.”
Beyond the sadness of this story lies a good deal of worry from security agencies about how easy it was for Emily Staupe to lift so much deadly material from the lab.
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September 13th, 2010 at 8:59AM
Thoughts of a chemist:
The lethal dose of potassium or sodium cyanide is 200 to 300 mg.
Let’s assume that “cynanide” mentioned in story is the solid form… Let me know otherwise if this is incorrect.
As bad shit goes, this material, on a weight basis is a helluva lot less toxic than, say, ricin. If you wet your finger and put it in your mouth after touching a little mound of cyanice, you would survive. Not so with ricin. Still, a kilo of this – and that is a lot of material – could still kill three to five thousand people.
Really not particularly controlled substance. Someone could walk out of a lab with a small bottle a day – say 250 g – and not even be noticed.
One of the great tragedies in science is the death of Carothers who invented nylon at DuPont. He committed suicide by drinking a glass of orange juice to which he had added cyanide, at least that’s what I’ve heard…
This stuff needs to be better controlled. I used to work with it every day for many years and did not feel endangered. But with this publicity, the whackos will be out looking for cyanide.
September 13th, 2010 at 7:02PM
A friend of mine at college committed suicide with arsenic over 30 years ago. I still miss her. She was a chemistry major and ate the arsenic over a period of time. She then checked herself into the infirmary and told them she had the flu. They did not catch on until too late. She had recently started treatment for depression. There were investigations but the only thing that happened was the arsenic was locked up.
September 13th, 2010 at 9:29PM
Nora: Even in your brief rendition, what a sad and moving story.