This is what would be called white radiation, this is many wavelengths merging and very much brighter than that we would actually use but it makes the pint that the air is actually glowing with some mooch radiation here. This is a very bright beam of x-rays and we can use it in many ways. It has applications in physical, chemistry, biology, environmental science, geology, material science. You can put any label around this, this is a picture of what a singatron might look like. basically you could put nay label around here, any scientific field and you will find examples where signatory radiation has benefited us as we know a lot more about some aspects of it than we would have done without it . It’s a very important scientific tool but why x-rays? This shows a length <inaudible> going metres along here. I didn’t have the energy to convert it to inches for you but I suppose mist of you know how big a metre is. This is a 10 the of a metre, this is a 100th of a metre, 1000th, 10 000th, 1 000 000th, 1 000 000 000th and so on. The property that makes x-rays useful to us that they have a wave length in the length scale of molecules in the molecular range. There are able to probe things in the distance range that we are interested in.
How do we do this? Let’s contrast it with x conventional analysis. lest say there is a metal in a plan , this plan for example and we think it’s this type of a metal it doesn’t matter what kind of metal it is , this is actually a metal that we subsequently identified in this very plant but let’s say we want to look at it with conventional chemical analysis. Basically this involves chopping up the l plant, you can see there’s supposed to be little bit of the plant reflecting here floating in this clinical flask, chopping it up and usually dissolving it in something like acid. it would vary depending on what you’re analysing and essentially the molecule information can be wholly or partly lost with conventional analysis so you end up not knowing about the molecule but with the x-ray techniques given to us from signatory radiation we have a direct probe. We can look directly in what’s in the plant, in fact you can take the plant away afterwards and let it grow it doesn’t have to be destructive at all.
this is a direct probe, the molecular form is intact , we’ll know what’s in it , we don’t hurt this , we don’t dissolve it , we don’t change the molecular form in any way .it’s what we call an institute probe. It’s a very neat way of understanding there are uncomplicated systems like tissues of plants. Here’s mercury I showed you a picture of someone doing something unwise which was a modern picture and this something even more unwise, this is liquid mercury here. I did have a picture of a girl in bathing suit taking a bath in a bath of mercury , I’ve lost that I couldn’t show you that today and that was from the 1950s when people didn’t really appreciate the dangers .
Mercury is a very toxic elements but not in all its forms. If you remember that point that’s an important point. unfortunately there are many tragic human cause problems that we can find including <inaudible> in Japan where dumping of industrial waste into the bay by Chico corporation caused large scale poising of villages in the nearby village of Minimarra and mercury poisoning is ever since or certain types of mercury poisoning has long been known buy the minimarra disease, this is in the 1950s. later on in the 1970s in Iraq there was an incident ethyl mercury chloride dusted wheat which was meant for seed stick for planting in fields and it was dusted with this stuff to prevent fungi and pest form feeing on the wheat , it was used to bake break instead. to was painted bright orange and it had a skull and cross bones painted on the sack but that didn’t mean anything in this Iraq culture so people used it to make bread and nearly 4000 people died in the 1970s and as you’ll hear later it was a rather unpleasant death.
In the amazon basin right now, gold mining operations giving rise to a lot of industrial effluent plus leeching due to forestation are causing wide spread mercury posing of the Amazonian natives . I could find lots more examples. There are many examples where mercury has been a really big problem and unfortunately we know a lot of its toxic properties.
What about hytrogenic sources. I use this word because it’s the sort of word your doctor night use. Hector means physician in green and generic means induce by so this is induced by your physicians, sources from the health industry. One source many of us including me have plenty of is silver mercury magnum in the teeth. Silver mercury magnum in the teeth I have quite a lot of them, I had them from early in my childhood. They are widely regarded to be very safe and if there are silver fillings they’re silver mercury fillings, three mixture of silver mercury. You can see here someone’s teeth here with a few filings in them. A recent study in sheep using radio labelled mercury showed that the mercury was in fact this radioactive mercury isotope in the fillings. They drilled the sheep’s teeth. they filled them with silver fillings and they showed that mercury was mobilized to the brain kidney and liver . We didn’t know what the molecular form is, we don’t know what it’s doing there but we suspect it’s up to no good. another source that’s been in the paper lately is primerocol in vaccines and it’s the subject of some controversy I’m not going to comment on that directly in my talk . It’s been implicated as a possible cause of some cases of what people have called autism.
Fortunately most childhood vaccines no longer have this mercury compound in them. my three kids, my first kid is 8 he had quite a bit of primorcol, I addict know I wasn’t thinking about it in those days . my second kid I out a stop to it very early but he still had some from an early age , he’s 5 now and my 3 year old has had none whatsoever.
I’m going to be talking about things that are neuron toxic so I better define what that means for those of you who don’t know. When someone is neuro toxic it is a potent nuero toxin or it’s poisonous to our nervous system including our brains and out peripheral nerves depending on how it manifests its poison. We are very worried all us when we think about fish, we are worried about how much mercury and how bad mercury in fish is for you. Fish are the primary source of mercury in our diets and they are the major source of a nuero toxic menthol mercury species. This is well known. If you read the newspaper you’ll read boar methyl mercury and how it’s bad for you.
How much mercy mercury in your diet is safe? For ages and ages the EPA and the FDA disagreed on this. The FDA used to say eat lots of fish it’s very good for you and the EPA used to say f don’t eat fish it’s very bad for you. now since march 2004 they have issues a historic advisory here’s the url if you’re interested , if anyone don’t have time to write that down come and see me and I’ll get it off the laptop and they said ” eat no more than two fish meals per week and don’t eat fish that are high in mercury” . Which fish are high in mercury? There are things like large predatory fish, fish that eat other fish that are at the top of what’s called the food chain. fishes like sharks , sword fish , king mackerel many other kinds of fish that re predatory fish , big tuna not the little ones but the big ones contain a fair amount of mercury .
Where does this information come from? How did they decide this? There were two very large studies involving more than 800 people in each of two island populations that are exposed to mercury in their diets. in one, in the Pair islands , the Phair islands is in the north sea roughly half way between the north of Scotland and Iceland and this is a shot of the phair islands. It’s too far north to have trees on it. It’s a relatively mild climate for something that far north because its right in the middle in the gold stream which keeps warm than it otherwise would be and in the pharaohs they eat a lot of mercury. Basically mercury appears to be a problem. Very many of the pharirsees appears to be suffering from nuero problems or subtle probelem, they are not really bad otherwise they would start noticing it and start doing something about it but they appear to be affected by the mercury they are eating.
there’s a second study , a similar number of people and done in the same way and lots of the same parameters were measured in the say shells . The say shells is in the India Ocean and by comparison it’s a tropical paradise. Mercury appears not to be a problem in the say shells which is quite interesting. They have similar amount of mercury in their diet so they’re different. W what did the EPA and FDA do? They chose the mercury study of the pharoos as a guideline, they chose the safe option.
It’s clear to use from out previous discussion that the molecular form matters and many factors could contribute. maybe there was difference n genetic factors , these are different kinds of people , the pope that live in the pharaohs are all Caucasians whereas dark skinned people live in the say shells . They may be some sort of genetic factor, we don’t know. They could be a difference in their diet and in fact there is. Maybe different molecular forms are actually ingested or maybe there is something else that’s important and we will come back to this in a minute. In the phairos they eat quite a bit of whale meat. there is a very controversial whale call that happens several times per year un the pharaohs where large number of whales are killed and they eat a substantial portion of what they kill, the eat a lot of whale meat where as in the say shells they eat mainly fish.
If that’s important then it has impact for us because we don’t eat much whale meat, most of the work doesn’t eat whale meat these days. This is just a cartoon I found somewhere on the web. It’s well known that metholmecurian fish is a problem but that’s only half the story it turns out. Remember that molecules are important. Metholmecury what is it? This is what you might call methyl mercury and this is an <inaudible> that doesn’t exist. It’s an impossible molecular fragment. It might exist in a gas space with a positive charge on the mercury but it certainly doesn’t exist in our bodies, it doesn’t exist in animals, it doesn’t exist anywhere in our environment or fish for that matter. methyl mercury is half the story and it’s really not know what else is there e because we had to rely on conventional analysis to understand what is in the fish and many possibilities exist and these are just some of the possible molecules that are risible it will be occurring in a biological system and I could draw thousands of them. There are many combinations which mercury could exit or methyl mercury could exist in a molecular form and we simply until recently didn’t know what it was.