I did a search through the forums and all I found was specific references to LD50, so I decided to post a thread, sorry if it's been discussed before. I looked up LD50 on dictionary.com and it explained it was the dose that a median of the population of the animals (usually rats) being tested will die at. Now how does this relate to when the human being will die? Is it before? Right on or what? I'm going to be doing a little googling, but if anyone has any ideas to further explain the correlation and if it varies depending on substances or not. And do doctors use an animal that reacts similarly to a substance the way a human reacts? And if anyone knows the offhand LD50's for APAP and Dextromorthophan I'd appreciate it. I'll be googling in the meantime.
rats are used cause they're 'expendible' and they model human metabolism and reactions closely enough to get an idea of how a drug works. how does this relate to when a human will die? well, if an ld50 of say, 5mg/kg is found in a rat study, then that means that in a human, 50% of test subjects will die when taking 5mg/kg. of course, this dose can be slightly off because rats and humans are not exactly the same, this just gives us an idea. i don't think that anyone wants to study ld50's on humans. ld50's vary greatly from drug to drug...20x threshold to 2000x threshold. some are really bad, mdma, has a pretty low ld50. psilocybin has a very high ld50. i don't know the ld50's offhand, but i'm sure you can find them pretty easily. erowid. hope this helped
it's an analogy, if you know how much it takes 50% of rats you know how much it'll take to kill an average human based upon equations (and experiments that are swept under the rug as war crimes) that are well established
never ever use the ld50 for rats as a measure for humans. theyre completely differnet almost all teh time. a small animal's ld50 is going to be higher than a large animal, from observation. they are just measures to show rough amounts to kill an animal, theyre not meant to be used as guidelines unless its the 'ld50 for humans'
The estimation for humans is really quite low, on the order of maybe 100x less than for rats, etc. Just for safety sake of course. However, it is wise to keep the animal LD50 in mind if you f* around with stuff.
As others have said, there is no direct correlation between human and animal LD50. While animal LD50 tests can give a general indication of toxicity, rats and humans have such differences in biochemistry, metabolic pathways, enzymes, etc. that a substance that humans can metabolize quite efficiently could prove very toxic to a population of rats. Or the reverse could be true, where humans could be missing an enzyme that is present in rats, that allows a rat to deal with a certain compound that would be very toxic to humans.
vell, i am chure that herr doktor mengele hass done some LD50 experiments on humans (vell, if the inmates of the death camps could even be considered human, nicht war?) well, that was in 1943, i guess... ~ as for MSDS info & LD50 info, usually they use rats or mice, but some chemicals will have LD50 info for rabbits, dogs, cats, even chimpanzees ... heck, just glom on to a copy of _the merck index of chemicals and drugs_ for a very informative read, hehheh...
Lol... yeah.... I've heard about this rumor that Hitler was into coke and amphetamines, and as a friend of a former Nazi, I can tell you that it's true. My elderly friend, Ms. Lilo, was forced into the Nazi party when the German fraternity that spawned the "Skulls" at Yale ended up "offering" her father a high-ranking position as one of Hitler's council, or a bullet to the head. It was an offer he couldn't refuse so to say. Lilo was placed as an officer in the Nazi Youth, but instead of getting into the thick of it all, she was given a position as a horse trainer because she liked horses like all the young girls back then. One day she had a rather unruly horse trample over her kneecap and by order of Hitler's own private surgeon, she was able to receive reconstructive surgery instead of having the leg amputated. You see... I sat with Lilo in church because my father is a minister and my mother was in the choir... I sat with her from the 3rd grade until I moved away. To this very day, surgeons marvel at the meticulous care that was taken in reconstructing her knee because by all means, her knee and a good portion of her leg were completely pulverized! I even had a surgeon in the church who told me that her knee would last longer than she would... and to this day nothing has been done further than x-rays to see how the hell these German engineers fixed her up. Anyways, it's true that Hitler did all of these terrible experiments just to see how much people could take, but they taught us a lot about what we can and cannot take as a species. I'm not saying it was good by any means, and in no way am I nor my friend, sympathetic towards Hitler or the Nazi cause, but I will say that we learned a lot from the tragic and sadistic experiments conducted during that era. I can tell you second hand from someone with firsthand experience anything you might wanna know... well.... close to anything.... unfortunately...
oh yah... oh yah... i can hear it now: "death - the ultimate plateau" (heh--- and i suppose the penultimate plateau would be a persistant vegetative state, eh?)
Hey, here's an idea... once the Catholic Church pulls a new Pope out of it's ass, someone else can go into a persistent vegetative state and as soon as the new Pope starts to shut-down, the rest of us can all place bets on who's gonna kick the bucket first! I mean, come on now! Fuck all this Nascar bullshit that everyone's getting into, I wanna see another race to the death like the Pope vs. Terri! It was like a less extreme rock 'm sock 'em robots, but robots nonetheless!!!
i dont believe hitler would have done any of his thigns for teh torture of people. everything was for social order and for gaining knowlege and power/efficiency over human resources. i dont think hitler's personal fettishes got in teh way of his campaigns. h had very stong ideas, he was a very smart man. he just viewed humans as so inequal that some are worth killing for the sake of other people. this was his basic flaw. to him it was really the smartest and most logical thing. and in fact, he was largely -correct- and sound in a great deal of his theories. however human society is not about logic, its about humanity. hitler was inhumane. the ****
Dude, I was writing about that last night for some reason... I was really stoned, hadn't slept in 36 hours, and I figured out that logic is futile when we're concerned with the survival of our species. It's our ability to reason that supposedly separates us from other creatures, but what has reason done for us concerning the continuation of our species??? Reason tells us that some people need to die, and that we cannot survive if we allow others to walk all over us. Reason also tells us that we should live in sterile environments, get a job and be productive, and by doing these things we will increase our chances of individual survival. Now then, if we're concerned with the survival of the species, and not merely ourselves, then tell me why we fight wars, build nukes, and segregate ourselves according to physical features and cultural similarities. Reason is the source of all of our greatness, but it comes at a cost. We are not granted the serenity that ignorance provides, and therefore our perception of the world and our quality of life decreases as we grow older. Reason is that cold steel wall that we keep slamming into everytime we fall in love, lose a close friend, or experience traumatic situations. Reason has no room for creativity, spirituality, or phenomena of any variety. So are we cursed with reason, or are we gifted with a key that will unlock secrets left untold? Do we really want to know the secrets, and can we even comprehend them at our particular stage of development? In essence, do we really want the "magic" of the world to be replaced by the solidarity of reason? It's an interesting question, I think, but all in all I believe that reason will ultimately lead to our end as a species if we all start taking things literally. Genocide, gender and ethnic discrimination, and so on would all be justified if we simply rely on reason, therefore reason is inhumane at it's core. Don't let the Babylon scientists take your souls people... stand up and celebrate your spirit and your unique spiritual worth! Be illogical, crazy, insane... irrational... whatever you want to call it, but follow your soul's direction and you will see the truth that is beyond reason. Whatever your truth might be may be entirely different from anyone else's, but don't try too hard to make sense of it... Some things are simply unreasonable, and those things are beautiful to someone somewhere...
