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Read other letters about this article
I found the interview fairly interesting, but not as well fact-checked as I would have liked.
When the famous expert in Science declares Polonium to have a short half life, apparently everyone agrees, including the editorial staff at Salon.
Polonium 210 has a half-life of 138 days, or a bit over 4 months. Yes, you would want to get a fresh batch if you were counting on the radiological effect to do the damage, it's true. However, you could get twice as much as you thought you needed, and have the better part of a year to wait for an opportunity to arise. "Very short" in the context of the article is misleading.
By contrast, Iodine-125 is a commonly used lab reagent, a strong gamma emitter, and you typically do want to do your experiments with it quickly. Still, I've used 125-I that had arrived more than a month before I was ready to use it.
The physical half-life of 125-I is 62 days, so it's twice as fast to decay as is 210-Po; a little-known thing about 125-I is that separate from the physical half-life is the biological half-life, and the biological half-life is substantially longer than the physical half-life, at 138 days. (nope, not a typo!) j
Is there a biological half-life as distinct from a physical half-life of 210-Po? I don't know. If there is, it might further impact the claim of the gentleman in the piece about precision timing.
How was the dosage administered?
How many lethal inhalants really work well without the subject knowing about them? Hell's bells, even if the subject *knows* about them, the inhalation method is dodgy. This is one of the reason it took so very much longer for anesthesia to be introduced than poisoning.
The issues around the gut are interesting, however. I'm not sure one needs to invoke nanotechnology, though; many metal salts are easily complexed to protein, and protein will, following digestion, be passed quickly into the bloodstream.
A misspent youtb fails yet again to pay for itself, but contact me via email if your shady underworld organization has an interest in tapping into my now long disused store of toxicological trivia.
