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From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 1/8/2007 7:09 AM
Polonium-210 perfect poison for assassins
Publication time: Today at 12:26 Djokhar time

The first signs of contamination were the traces of radiation on the laboratory desk of Israeli physicist Dror Sadeh, who was experimenting with an exotic radioisotope called polonium-210.

Sadeh, part of Israel's nuclear program in the 1950s, had taken what he thought were adequate precautions against the hyperactive element. But it wasn't enough: Radiation was discovered "in my private home, and on my hands too and on everything that I touched," he wrote in his diary.

Within a month, one student who worked in Sadeh's lab at the Weizmann Institute of Science was dead from leukemia. When the lab's supervisor died a few years later, Sadeh suspected he, too, had been contaminated by the leaky polonium-210.

In the century since its discovery by famed French scientists Marie and Pierre Curie, polonium-210 has left a distinctive trail of death. The Curies' daughter, Irene Joliot-Curie, succumbed to leukemia in 1956, 10 years after a sealed capsule of polonium-210 accidentally was broken in her laboratory in Paris.

Its latest victim is retired KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, who consumed a fatal dose in London and died of radioactive poisoning in November.

For most of its history, death has been a consequence of ignorance. Scientists suspected its radioactivity presented a health risk, but they failed to understand its intricacies.

Engineers have struggled to find a use for the isotope, incorporating it for a time in spark plugs, nuclear warhead triggers and spacecraft power supplies. It plays a small role today is as an anti-static agent for printing presses.

Assassins finally may have hit upon its most effective use.

"The scientific community is intrigued (by Litvinenko's murder)," said radiation biologist David A. Dooley, who studied exposure levels in workers who produced polonium for the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. "It's pretty clever they came up with this."

In many ways, polonium-210 is an ideal poison for espionage - deadly and undetectable. A dose of the white powder smaller than a grain of salt could have been dropped into Litvinenko's drink at the Millennium Hotel's Pine Bar without altering the taste, according to chemist John Emsley of Cambridge University.

Within minutes of ingestion, the energetic particles shooting off the polonium-210 molecules began killing the cells lining Litvinenko's gastrointestinal tract. As the cells sloughed off, they caused nausea, severe internal bleeding and enormous pain.

"It was as if his internal organs received a severe sunburn and peeled," said Peter D. Zimmerman, a physicist at King's College London.

Pound for pound, polonium-210 is at least 1 million times more toxic than hydrogen cyanide, the poison used to execute prisoners in gas chambers, according to medical toxicology books. Radiation safety experts calculate that a single gram of polonium could sicken 100 million people, killing half.

But it is extremely hard to get. Only about 100 grams - or 3 1/2 ounces - are produced each year, primarily by Russia.

While most radioactive elements emit gamma rays, which register on radiation detectors, polonium-210 instead emits an alpha particle - composed of two protons and two neutrons - as it decays.

"There was no way that forensic scientists could detect it (until it was too late)," Emsley said.

To kill, polonium must be inhaled or ingested so that it is in direct contact with healthy tissue.

"I could put it in a tiny Ziploc bag, and I would be fine," said Dooley, president and chief executive officer of MJW Corporation Inc. in Amherst, N.Y.

By Karen Kaplan and Thomas H. Maugh II
Los Angeles Times
http://www.kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2007/01/08/7102.shtml