Toxic Dreams
Okay, I had a pretty strange dream last night. I was attending a conference where I was going to present an invention I was working on. It would analyze a blood sample from a person who had been poisoned, identify the toxin, and synthesize an appropriate antidote.
I was talking to a group, including a few current and former students, at the opening mixer. Another guy overheard our conversation and bragged that he had been working on a new toxin that would kill a person slowly, but with absolutely no physical discomfort. And then, to demonstrate it, he pulled a syringe out of his jacket, grabbed a random woman in the crowd, and injected her.
The police subdued the guy immediately, of course, and I was sent to a lab with several other scientists to see if I could get my prototype working. It took us about two hours, but we finally got it to work. We rushed back to the mixer, but by the time we got there, the paramedics had just stopped administering CPR, saying there was nothing more they could do.
So we gave it a shot. One of my students gave the woman a shot of adrenaline, and her heart started beating again. I took a blood sample and fed it into the machine. After a moment, the machine gave us a printout of the poison and produced a small vial of a proposed antidote. We gave it to her and waited to see what happened. After an hour or so, her condition stabilized and she was talking to everyone about what she had experienced. The invention worked, although in light of what had happened, the organizers cancelled the rest of the conference.
The epilogue was kind of weird, too. The man was brought to trial, of course, and I was asked to attend as a witness. The prosecutor argued that since the man had clearly intended to kill the woman--he had bragged about it, after all--and had succeeded in stopping her heart for several minutes, that he had in fact committed murder, and that subsequent actions taken to revive the victim didn't change that fact. The defense argued that that was ridiculous--the guy clearly couldn't be guilty of murder if the victim were still alive. But the judge allowed it, and the jury eventually found him guilty of first degree homicide.
And since murder by poison was a capital offense in that jurisdiction, the guy was sentenced to death by lethal injection.
Maybe I shouldn't eat pot pies right before going to bed....
I was talking to a group, including a few current and former students, at the opening mixer. Another guy overheard our conversation and bragged that he had been working on a new toxin that would kill a person slowly, but with absolutely no physical discomfort. And then, to demonstrate it, he pulled a syringe out of his jacket, grabbed a random woman in the crowd, and injected her.
The police subdued the guy immediately, of course, and I was sent to a lab with several other scientists to see if I could get my prototype working. It took us about two hours, but we finally got it to work. We rushed back to the mixer, but by the time we got there, the paramedics had just stopped administering CPR, saying there was nothing more they could do.
So we gave it a shot. One of my students gave the woman a shot of adrenaline, and her heart started beating again. I took a blood sample and fed it into the machine. After a moment, the machine gave us a printout of the poison and produced a small vial of a proposed antidote. We gave it to her and waited to see what happened. After an hour or so, her condition stabilized and she was talking to everyone about what she had experienced. The invention worked, although in light of what had happened, the organizers cancelled the rest of the conference.
The epilogue was kind of weird, too. The man was brought to trial, of course, and I was asked to attend as a witness. The prosecutor argued that since the man had clearly intended to kill the woman--he had bragged about it, after all--and had succeeded in stopping her heart for several minutes, that he had in fact committed murder, and that subsequent actions taken to revive the victim didn't change that fact. The defense argued that that was ridiculous--the guy clearly couldn't be guilty of murder if the victim were still alive. But the judge allowed it, and the jury eventually found him guilty of first degree homicide.
And since murder by poison was a capital offense in that jurisdiction, the guy was sentenced to death by lethal injection.
Maybe I shouldn't eat pot pies right before going to bed....
posted by Michael at
8:26 AM
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1 Comments
