poisoning with heavy water was re too many mris in article apr informix com proberts informix com paul roberts writes in article apr kestrel edu king reasoning com dick king writes i recall reading somewhere during my youth in some science popularization book that whyle isotope changes don t normally affect chemistry a consumption of only heavy water would be fatal and that seeds watered only with heavy water do not sprout does anyone know about this i also heard this i always thought it might make a good eposide of columbo for someone to be poisoned with heavy water it wouldn t show up in any chemical test no one else seems to know so i ll post this this topic came up on sci physics fusion shortly after the cold fusion flap started as i recall its been done to some experimental mice they showed various ill effects and eventually died the reason is that deuterium does not have exactly the same reaction rates as hydrogen due to its extra mass which causes lower velocity boltzman constant mumble this throws various bits of body biochemistry out of kilter and you get sick and die i ve never heard of anyone being poisened this way in or out of real life the process takes quite a while if anyone wants to write this book i would imagine you would have to replace a significant fraction of the water in the body with heavy water wait while normal breakdown and repair processes cause other molecules in the body to be synthesised using the deuterium during this process the victim would gradually deteriorate and eventually die but i imagine it would take weeks during which the poisoner would have to ensure that a significant proportion of the water the victim ingested was heavy you would get such a mess of symptoms that the doctors would be both alarmed and confused why should every organ in the body suddenly begin to deteriorate if you can figure out how the poisoner gets the heavy water into the victim in a hospital then you could have a real story here come to think of it would continue even after the heavy water was no longer being ingested so hospitalisation might be too late the most detectable effect would be that the victim s body fluids would literally be heavy water has a molecular weight of and heavy water has a mw of thus the victim s weight will increase by about for every of body water replaced by heavy water maybe the detection occurs because some pathologist in the lab notices that the victim s urine is strangely dense is there any medical test involving the specific gravity of a body fluid paul paul johnson paj gec mrc co uk tel ext these ideas and others like them can be had gec marconi research is not for each from any reputable idealist responsible for my opinions
