Which Common Chemical is the Most Toxic?
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- čas přidán 6. 07. 2022
- In this video, I rank several common reagents that are so toxic, they could kill you. This video is a reupload.
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I love how you put a lot of consideration into the rankings, but then also justify the rankings with “let’s put it in c tier, for Chlorine”
I do as I do
@@That_Chemist period pooh
This actually pisses me off to no end haha. Like whats the point of doing a ranking when things are being so arbitrarily assigned. Amyl nitrate, common chemical that people willing ingest all the time.... 'A' level. DMAP can be fatal if you get it on your skin in low levels.... also 'A' level... wtf is this guy even basing this off of. He did the same thing in the cursed organics video, .... super uncommon molecule that breaks all the rules of organic chemistry, Ill put it in F tier for fluorine.... huh?
@@chriskelly4299 It’s his tier list. Make your own if you’re so upset.
@@bigguy5195 I'm not that knowledgeable on chemistry, that why I watched the video, to learn a thing or two. If I made a list I would probably end up assigning molecules based off of the letters in their name or something.
"Can cause psychosis, which is kinda insane." I see what you did there.
So, yeah, my sodium cresoxide accident. Fairly long, but gold.
First thing you should know, I got into chemistry, because I used to collect chemical warfare gear like gas masks, CBRN suits ect. One day I got a Polish communist Army IPP51M chemical decontamination kit. It contains 4 ampoules.
1.30% sodium cresoxide in ethanol, used for getting rid of nerve gas (VX, sarin etc.) from the chemical suit and guns by soaking a cotton ball and wiping shit off
2.2 isopentyl nitrite ampoules, used as an antidote for cyanide and phosgene, you break off the end and sniff the vapor
3.Zinc chloride solution, with another ampoule inside, containing chloramine B. Used for neutralising mustard gas and lewisite, so called blister gasses.
The ampoule 3 came already broken, luckily only the outer zinc chloride. Washed it, cleaned and done. A few months later, when I checked it, the plastic sodium cresoxide ampoule was leaking through the piece where two plastic parts were heated shut, so for safety, I decided to just pour it down the drain (stupid me). I decided to put on theese big, chemical warfare rated gloves, and only my prescription glasses (stupid me pt.2). I decided to squeeze it out of that crack it was leaking from (stupid me pt.3). Well, squeezed too hard, the ampoule popped and splashed sodium cresoxide all over me and my kitchen. Frienly reminder, this was around 50ml of a 30% sodium cresoxide solution in ethanol. I got it on my shirt, legs, it even got behind my glasses (luckily didn't hit my eyes, only near my right eye). I quickly ran to the bathroom washed myself thoroughly, changed clothes, grabbed my MSA gas mask and began the decon. I got to tell you, sodium cresoxide is the total definition of a chemical smell. It looks and smells like total cancer and death. It isn't unpleasant, but it hits you with that "I'm very toxic" Vibe. The smell was so strong, it literally covered the solvent smell, I wasn't able to smell any EtOH. In terms of looks, it is an extrmely dark liquid. You see it, you smell it, you know you have to get rid of it ASAP. I washed down the entire kitchen with water (even tho it is a base, treating it with an acid like vinegar, would be a terrible idea, as cresol which would form, is even more toxic). The smell lasted 5 months. I don't know if I'm gonna get lung cancer or what, but I know i have a small burn in the place near my eye where I got hit with the cresoxide. Moral? Always wear goggles! And don't squeeze old leaking toxic and corrosive chemicals ampoules. Peace.
PS.Another, more popular name for cresoxide is cresolate
Lewisite and Phosgene were only used in WW1. "Antidotes" listed don't match current MSDS procedures. Example, Cyanide kills by destroying cell electron transport. Injecting Sodium Nitrate solution oxidizes some hemoglobin to methemhemoglobin which permanently binds cyanide. Sniffing IsoAmylNitrite; bloodstream enzymes split into NO which dilates blood vessels, getting cyanide to cells faster.
@@stephenjacks8196 remember, theese were patents from a communist country from the 50s, so yeah, they are a bit off
what is so toxic about sodium cresolate? isn't it just a salt of some cresol?
@@PepekBezlepek its "industrial version" (note brown opaque "solution") from dissolving tar from distilling wood. Used for preserving wood by killing every living thing that touches the wood. Cresote tar causes cancer. Sensitizes tissue to UV and other damage. "Cresolate" is an ultra cheap substitute for Phenoxide.
Ah yes, the mitochondria is the stock exchange of the cell
Pharm student here. We had to make isopentyl nitrite in class. We were very smart and decided to do a filtration outside the fume hood. Worst headache of my life, although I don't think it belongs in B tier.
Ah ye olde instant migraine!
Hi, video suggestion here. Can you please do a video about common compounds that many people don't know are toxic?
The fact that DMAP was that toxic was completely new to me and I think many chemists would benefit from such a video. Most of us don't really look into the MSDS of every compound we work with.
6:35 NO! The mitochondria are the POWERHOUSE of the cell! No other metaphors are allowed.
I didn't realize tin compounds were usually toxic. I always thought of tin as being rather mundane
Rather ironic considering they use tin cans for long term storage of food.
Apparently organotin compounds are pretty bad.
Now do a tier list of the most *Emotionally Damaging* Chemicals
Stephen He fan? 😂
Oxytocin
Lithium
CH5+ ion count?
Tfw no Serotonin
Dang, no dimethylcadmium because of the rules. I always liked that one, from Derek Lowe's brilliant blog ""It has acute toxic effects, chronic toxic effects, and if there are any effects in between those it probably has them, too."
Though the title should be "Ranking the Most Toxic Common Chemicals"
Ah yes, isopentyl nitrite. Rightfully placed in B tier. Nothing I would ever inhale regularly for fun ever, because I’m a responsible adult.
Lmfaooooooo "B" tier went right over my head until you mentioned it, woooooooow. 😂🤣
this guy KNOWS
I actually have 2 ampoules of isopentyl nitrite. I got it from the Polish IPP51M chemical weapon decontamination kit, as a cyanide antidote. Never opened theese ampoules, because I'm basically quite scared of it. I had a huuge accident with sodium cresolate/sodium cresoxide from that kit, so I'm really scared of theese contents. I can tell the story of the sodium cresoxide accident if you want
Go for it. What is the story?
Please share - but tell the story as a new comment or else I won’t see it
@@That_Chemist because CZcams loves you that much ;))
It is not that bad but if you pour it in a paper towel and really breath it in well, it can cause blood pressure issues and make you feel very bad and quite dizzy. Way back when it was used as a cyanide antidote I used it. It was way worse than the slight dizzyness from low amount of cyanide or perhaps the symptoms cumulated. Hard to say what was due to what other than from estimating from the time of exposure.
It can be very bad as an antidote because it couses dizzyness like cyaniden and you have no way to regulate it based on symptoms. Antidote not working makes the dizzyness not going away but at the same time it makes you feel more dizzyness.
@@hoggif holy shit XD but better as dying right ? XD
Even though nobody's nuts enough to use it for anything anymore, I'm a bit disappointed you didn't mention dimethylmercury. The S-tier of the S-tier! 🥳
I remember the alarm raised years ago when F-1 teams got caught adding hydrazine to their fuel.
Even these toxic chemicals pales in comparison to the toxicity of the league of legends community
Dota 2 players would like to say a word
@@danspector740 dota 2 flame is easier to deal with bc even queueing on US servers gives you four screeching siberian hunter-gatherers telling each other to do graphic things to their dogs in a language you can’t understand. it’s more funny compared to league’s sad/genuinely irritating.
Is my ex on this list?
Idk but mine are all on the list XD
@@knoetzel8818 poppers??
Damn u beat me to it
Mine isn't, but she can hurt you in other ways 😔
Your ex is not a chemical compound.
Some other wonderfully toxic compounds, if you want to do a part 2:
Dimethyl mercury, Dimethyl cadmium, Nickel tetracarbonyl, Iron pentacarbonyl, Acetone cyanohydrin, Dimethyl sulfate, Iodomethane, Osmium tetroxide, Hydrogen fluoride, Phosphorus trichloride, Phosgene, Thiophosgene, Chromyl chloride, Chlorophenols, Thiophenol, Tetraethyl lead, 1,3-propanesultone, Nitroglycerin, N-Lost (Nitrogen mustard).
PS: I forgot dimethyl sulfate was already in there, but fk it it's so cursed it has to be mentioned twice. Or take its (slightly less) evil brother, diethyl sulfate
Nitroglycerin is definitely an explosion hazard, but it's not toxic. Yes, it can cause a sudden loss of blood pressure if you get a large exposure and haven't developed a tolerance. But there were legions of men who worked with it for decades with no long term ill effects. It does not belong on a list with propane or butane sultone or osmium tetroxide.
Dimethyl cadmium is absurdly toxic stuff. Also explosive, a fire hazard, and a pretty serious carcinogen.
Dimethylmercury was exactly what I was missing most from this video. Many things are more toxic per se (botulinum toxin probably takes the cake), but dimethylmercury is the most _evil_ IMO. Every time chemists come up with updated safety protocols for it (e.g. new types of gloves), sooner or later it proves able to cause poisoning despite new protocols. It's the SCP-682 of chemistry.
Maleic acid which is the cis version of fumaric acid is highly toxic, and I have a concern that it might sometimes be an impurity in fumaric acid since the newest and cheapest way to make it is to isomerize it from maleic acid. Testing for it might not be easy.
In a biology lab, we rarely use very dangerous stuff besides biological hazards, mostly just common solvents. However, we do use sodium azide and I worry my coworkers don't realize how awful it is because it's just with very safe stuff like sodium carbonate, sodium chloride, tris, tween, sodium phosphate and other stuff for buffers and detergents. Having a big bottle of sodium azide around people not used to working with bad chemicals seems like a recipe for disaster. Really hope at least it's only being opened in the fume hood
My high school chemistry teacher was old when I had her 12 years ago, and she would tell us stories about her lab cleaning glassware in carbon tet and just reaching in with their hands to pull things out!
:(
I'm just sitting here trying to puzzle out why someone would want to smoke popcorn when they could smoke something normal, like weed
I know this is for organic compounds but the scariest chemical I have learned about is nickel tetracarbonyl. It's a very volatile, autoigniting, reactive metal complex that has a LC-30 at 3 ppm, and essentially instantaneously lethal at 30 ppm. On top of that, it's also fiendish innocuous in its smell, so it's hard to tell if you're exposed.
Probably bc to get enough to smell would render you dead. Are humans able to commonly detect odors at 3ppm? (I don't know much about that)
Might have overestimated isopentyl nitrite's toxicity. It's safe enough to be used as a medication to *treat* heart attacks.
Dimethyl sulfate belonged to the rare chemicals I really felt awe for.... as it is difficult to get rid of as well due to its SLOW hydrolysis. Even NaOH-solution does not speed it up much.
Correct!
I worked with NaN3 in undergrad and it is terrifying to work with. In addition to the precautions to avoid the explosivity and toxicity, we had to take special cautions to avoid having acid come into contact with the azide waste to avoid producing hydrazoic acid. Definitely an S tier toxic chemical
When I was a child, around 60-odd years ago, carbon tetrachloride was available across the counter in UK shops under the name Thawpit and was sold as a dry cleaner. I remember the smell quite distinctly.
Sketchy
@@That_Chemist Oddly, there was also a chain of dry-cleaning shops called Sketchley.
The most environmentally damaging organic chemical
I wonder how much our perception of the carcinogenicity of benzene is influenced by the absurd dosages people used to experience. Oil field workers would practically shower with the stuff.
It’s got linear toxicity according to another comment
BTW you meant hydrogen sulfide not cyanide in Lawson's reagent. At 4:58 I think.
I mean where did the nitrogen could came from, if it just reacts with water?
But in the end they are both equally as toxic, so it would still kill you, if you don‘t work with it…
You're right - I'm sure he just misspoke.
One of my buddies is bald because he had hydrazine dumped on his head while working as a jet mechanic in the US Airforce. Nearly two decades later he's starting to grow some hair on his head again. Thankfully other than baldness he's had no long term effects (as of yet)
I'm surprised you don't have phosgene on this list. Also, no one uses it anymore, but even seeing the words dimethylmercury gives me shudders.
After what happened to Karen Wetterhahn, I doubt if it is used much at all anymore....As for phosgene, he was mostly doing lab reagents. If you need some phosgene in a lab, one might use some diphosgene(liquid) or triphosgene(solid) instead - easier (and safer) to handle.
Other things that would go in S tier:
- Dimethylcadmium
- Hydrogen sulfide
- Dimethylmercury
yes - absolutely
RIP Wetterhahn. Enough said
Dimethyl cadmium as well as dimethyl mercury deserve their own tier above S.
havnt worked with many toxic reagents have you LMFAOO
With the first one you were talking about, your risk of heart attack is not as high as you think. You'll feel the effects of it, the kind of drunk feeling it gives you, way before your heart starts racing or you have a heart attack, so as soon as you feel woozy you can just leave the lab and it'll wear off in about a minute
I’ve used it for… recreational purposes, and the heart racing doesn’t happen unless you use a lot of it. It isn’t pleasant if you overdo it though. Wouldn’t recommend unless you give 0 Fs about your health
Biology labs mostly avoid the spicier chemicals, still we have a few.
Acrylamide, osmium tetroxide, sodium azide, and debatably ethidium bromide (or any intercalating agent for that matter; If you're using a compound to interact with DNA that at least raises a question about toxicity)
But a lot of the time I wear gloves to protect the sample from me rather than the other way around. Humans are constantly shedding RNase and it doesn't take much to mess up a tube with mere nanograms of RNA.
Cool tier list!
When you got to carbon tetrachloride it piqued my interest. Way (way) back when I was in high school, we were using it during a lab. We were all smelling it and talking about how awesome it was. I can't remember what we were actually trying to accomplish in the experiment but we had some sticky substances that got on our hands and arms. The teacher said we could use the carbon tet to clean it off... but did warn us that there was a possibility that it could be harmful but there wasn't enough evidence.... so we basically washed our hands and arms with the stuff. It worked well (as a solvent). Probably not the best idea and we went through a ton of that stuff.
I also know that my dad used copious amounts of it when working at a tire factory for over three decades. Said it was the only thing that would reliably get raw rubber off of the equipment or himself. Now that man had tons of health issues before he passed though oddly enough, he didn't have a lot much with liver or kidneys (can't say the same for just about everything else).
Yikes!!
Methyl isocyanate and diphosgene are pretty scary also, imo
But putting Benzene way down is injustice. Being a pharmacist and chemist myself I want to put Benzene way up. Carcinogenic property is more critical toxicity than any other.Bone marrow depression is a major defect
I used DMAP as catalyst years ago for acetylation of tertiary alcohol. It works very well.
It sure does!
I’m going through our lab and disposing of many many chemicals. As I was doing so, I found some previous researcher had just…..filled a small glass vial with a colorless liquid and poorly parafilmed it. I wondered what it was and when I turned the vial around I saw that they had written what it was with marker on the side….
It was tributyltin chloride. I was just like….WHY do we have this??? I tripple bagged it and scheduled it for disposal immediately
Last semster in my OC lecture our prof told us, that some people worked at the organic chemistry institute with Phosgene at out university. This must be a little terrifying...
Probably not common in organic labs, and I see other commenters have beat me to it, but I would add a vote for Ni(CO)4. One good whiff and you have nickel plated lungs and CO plated hemoglobin. Also, I'd add beta-propiolactone for consideration - makes Me2SO4 look like mother's milk: from lab animal oncology studies, one drop on skin = melanoma, similar amount intramuscular = sarcoma, intravenous = liver and kidney cancer, inhalation = nasal tumors, etc.
Any references for your beta-propiolactone claims? I had a quick search, and couldn't find anything about it being overly toxic or carcinogenic. It is listed as a category 2A carcinogen (confirmed carcinogens e.g. benzene, asbestos, cured meat etc. are category 1). I sincerely doubt it is even in the same league as dimethyl sulfate, which is considered a borderline chemical weapon.
10:10 "it can also cause psychosis, which is kinda insane". 🤣 yup
Amyl nitrite has some noteworthy roles. For one, it was used to relieve angina in olden days, so in Hercule Poirot's last case 'Curtain' the medicine played its part as a plot device, i.e. Christie let her detective seemingly succumb to heart disease.
Second, the nitrite oxidizes Fe2+ in hemoglobulin into Fe3+, causing so-called methemoglobinemia, where one's blood turns so dark that it's often said the patient **turned blue** (cyanosis). There was one university poisoning case in Damstadt, Germany last year. The news caught my eyes by the title 'Police suspect poisoning at German university as students turn blue' (The Guardian, Aug 24, 2021). Well, that screams nitrite poisoning all over, and probably was 'popper'-related considering availability. However the police chose to keep the substance a secret for investigation's sake, even if this year they had a suspect.
Lastly, hemoglobin carrying Fe3+ binds strongly with cyanide ions, so amyl nitrite was once opted for *an antidote to cyanide*. So if better stuff like hydroxycobalamin isn't at hand, one could (out of desperation) deliberately induce methemoglobinemia with some nitrites, just to scrub the cyanide out of their system, and hope they don't instead die of a heart attack.
You missed the most toxic compound ever: Figueroane
Im not a chemist but a mariner carrying sometimes chemistry.
The worst for me are:
-Ammonia
-Hydrogen Sulphide
-VCM (Vinyl Chloride - TLV -> 1ppm which is crazy)
-Nitrogen and Sulfuric Acids
and the last one (not toxic, but also very dangerous especially in enclosed spaces):
-Nitrogen. Why? Due to asphyxiation - Nitrogen, because is in 78% component of air, does not show any symptoms if there is not enough oxygen in air (for example in inerted atmosphere).
Tonight I dreamed about your deoxofluoride video and woke up thinking I killed my chemistry class
Oh no :(
I felt that.
I nearly worked with DMS once, but happened across alternative conditions using a reagent that wasn't so bad on the msds and decided to use that one instead. I knew it was scary but I had no idea that it was so dangerous that it would top sodium azide and KCN, feels like I dodged a bullet there.
"Your supervisor don't want you to work with that"
Meanwhile, literally first day of my masters project I am weighing out sodium azide by the grams on the bench.
I asked if I should probably at least move a scale inside my fume hood for weighing it out, to which I got the reply;
"don't worry it isn't lead azide ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
I used to work at a dentist office and I had to handle and work with metaacrylate monomer and polymers. When you open the container it starts to smell sweet like the ester it is: fruity, bubblegummy, tutti fruti kinda smell. But when its concentration in the room increases, it starts to smell nastier and nastier but in a guilty pleasure way. Same thing happens with eugenol. It smells like cloves, but as soon it fills the room with its vapours it's dentist's smell (there's other compounds like Iodoform and cresols or so that contributes to that dentist's office smell). Imagine how all my clothes smelled when I came home from work. Those compounds impregnate everything you wear when you work with them.😮💨
Thanks for the content. I'm a bit surprised not to have seen organomercuries and arsenic compounds, but I guess they're too niche to be here.
Great video! Would have loved to see more info on mechanism of actions for compounds and dose responses but that's probably just because I'm a toxicologist 😅
I would too, but it’s hard to do that in a tierlist
As an undergrad doing Organic synthesis research, I made some diaryl sulfur compounds with a Friedel Crafts reaction using thionyl chloride and an aluminum chloride catalyst. That stuff smells awful and as a result, I decided to do Biomolecular NMR in graduate school.
I made Diethyl Sulfide before, just a few ml; and the neighbors were suddenly concerned because they thought they smelled a gas leak, and was concerned that the whole neighborhood was going to explode into a fireball. Apparently, the Diethyl Sulfide oxidized in air to form what they smelled as a gas leak.
When they asked me about it, i got a sample of what i made and asked them to smell it, and it didn't smell anything like the gas leak they were smelling. Seems like the neighbors blamed the smell from a polluted river nearby, and that it's possible some factory upriver was dumping chemicals into the river again.
“Again”
BROOO you are just spitting great content!
Chemistry is niche but I still think you deserve more subscribers
Love every video since I discovered you!
You are brave enough to do videos about radioactivity and poisons.
If you want to catch more of the normal users attention maybe make a video about "Substances that do not want to exist" (explosives)
Or even substances that you have to work "fast" with (before they degrade) like benzaldehyde or other instable compounds
Just a thought...also looking forward to your next tier list!
Danke Freund
@@That_Chemist Aber gerne
Ich habe dir zu danken!
You caught me off guard with your German xD
Shouldn't osmium tetroxide have made the list?
It sure it toxic, really good for blinding people and nice and volatile despite being a metal oxide as well as diffusing through plastics.
Also it common, isn't it? I was told for the oxidation of cis-diols it is very useful, as it is much more reliable than permanganate etc. and as a stain for TEM it is handled by biologists as well.
Not very common.
I completely agree. OsO4 should be on the list, it is extremely toxic but also it is out to get you! Joeylawn is wrong, even today it is still a common reagent, you will still see it used in top-tier total synthesis papers and it has been in the chemical libraries of every lab I’ve worked in over the last 10 years. S tier for sure
@@joeylawn36111 I would say every organic synthesis lab has OsO4 or has had OsO4 in storage at one point or another. It's just really good at what it does.
@@goldenchilderpocklurt8143 D'OH! Not the first time I've been wrong. 😂
It's common in EM-fixes, usually with glutaricdialdeyhyde. We were told not to take it out of the fume-hood. We were also told if we smelled it, it would be the last thing we smelled!! (6
Dichlorophenol might not be something used in the lab much, but skin contact with molten DCP is essentially a death sentence.
From my readings back in grad school evidently organotin reagents are not /as/ toxic as people usually think they are. But it's definitely a good thing that people have great respect for the danger they do pose.
BTW if you were trying to do italics with ''/', you have to use '_' instead
I don't want to use permethrin as I hate the smell of it. Inhaling Permethrin can irritate the nose, throat and lungs. ► Exposure to Permethrin can cause headache, dizziness, fatigue, excessive salivation, muscle weakness, nausea and vomiting. ► Permethrin may affect the liver.
8:19 Thanks for explaining about methyl acrylate.
I was wondering what was that strong smelling chemical used by dentists
In the history of liquid rocket propellant development, at one point hydrogen cyanide was investigated as a freezing point depressant for hydrazine. Technically it worked ok but more stakeholders were aware of the toxicity of the cyanide than of the hydrazine, so all of a sudden there was Concern.
In the very early days there was interest in liquid propellant for military rockets, which had to be storable at ambient rather than cryogenic. That was almost exclusively the driver of all the weird stuff. But military applications either go for solid rocket propellant, which is much safer by virtue of sitting there unenterprisingly, or a turbojet burning a hydrocarbon. Most liquid rockets today generally just burn whichever hydrocarbon or hydrogen itself with oxygen.
With a few exceptions for monopropellants and storables, but less toxic versions exist today even for those.
I'm an undergrad researcher and one of my synthetic pathway reaction includes pure hydrazine monohydrate. I definitely agree it's scary. The MSDS states it's fatal even if inhaled.
tbf SDS says fatal if inhaled for a lot of things... things they gave us y2 undergrads to work with at the beginning of y2 when we shouldn't be trusted with something *that* bad. But i know nothing about hydrazine so you're right probably
If you plan to have kids later on, you just shouldn't be working in direct contact with hydrazine. It is a powerful mutagen and teratogen, in addition to just being a dangerous fire and explosion hazard. Few things are anywhere near as nasty as hydrazine...maybe only diazomethane comes close.
Gonna be honest. Hydrazine mono hydrate is really not that dangerous to work with. I was doing wolff Kishinev reactions at 180c and I had no problems. Gaseous hydrazine is terrifying but in liquid form it really doesnet fume out and it’s very soluble in water. You will need a separate hydrazine waste comprised of water + hydrazine since it can explode when it touches strong oxidizers
@@shinehuang198 thanks for the info! I'll keep that in mind in regards to waste.
Like i said I'm an undergrad so i don't know much. I'd just follow what my mentor would say and I guess she made it seem worse that it really is, so I'd use it with extra caution compared to like normal solvents typically used in the lab.
@@vladys5238 yeah.. i guess your right SDS does state that for a lot of things. I know a thing of two about it since i work on it for my project that I've been doing my whole undergrad. But i wouldn't say I'm an expert on it.
"It causes psychosis, which is kind of insane." Yeah, funny how that works.
Your channel is growing fast.
Can you make a video on how to make a hypothesis and research proposal for PhD.
That feel when you realise that you already worked with 95% of the chemicals on that list…
that's when you are officially allowed to graduate
Missed opportunity to put tin in S tier, for Stannous
F
One of my very first projects as an undergraduate was to perform a Diels-Alder cyclization with CPD and acrolein. The product was a precursor for an experimental photoresist. Acrolein is just a so-so dieneophile so the reaction had to be done in a heated bomb reactor vessel. I still can’t believe they let me do this. Also, that norbornene product smelled like rotting popcorn. Truly foul.
Wow that’s crazy
My favorite toxin is Mirex, just because of its satisfyingly cursed structure formula and the fact it is one of the dirty dozen, cause it is basically a for chemical, the synthesis of which is most highly restricted.
wtf that is so cursed
@@That_Chemist tbh thedirty dozen probably are worth a video on their own. ^^
I'd say H2O, because overabundance (drowning) or deprivation (starving) of it kills A LOT of people annually.
plus its also in soda
In the chemical plant where i worked for a time. We had what we called "die Giftschiene" or Poisonsection in english. The Chemicals involved in the reaction where Methoxyacetylchlorid and Thionylchlorid both in Dichloroethan.tbh i liked working there
I love chemistry and your channel is super interesting!
Thank you :)
On 1:35 a correction: Inorganic tin compounds mostly are mildly toxic, with some exceptions (tin (IV) chloride, which is corrosive and whose fumes are very dangerous to respiratory system, tin cyanides, which are extremely toxic and the gaseous stannane (tin (IV) hydride) and can be simply handled with standard precautions. On the other hand, most organotin compounds are extremely toxic, with toxicity compared to hydrogen cyanide or phosphine, both of whom have been used as a chemical warfare agents, and have seen uses as pesticides, water-resistant paint components and require special precautions while handling and using them.
Several of my co-workers and I have had the misfortune of being exposed to acrolein on more than one occasion in our laboratory, all of which were accidental, but from the same source: extraction of fats from dried samples via soxhelt. The worst was when a the flask boiled dry, either due to a loss of water pressure running through the condenser or not enough solvent, petroleum ether, being added before the extraction was started. Though while this very hot flask containing burnt fat and acrolein was devoid of solvent, the soxhelt chamber was not and it emptied into the flask... The rapid boiling resulted in enough of a pressure build-up to pop the joint between the soxhelt and the flask in a rather violent fashion thus exposing the whole lab and everyone in it, to the acrid smoke. Thankfully there was no fire.
Oh no!
I feel like isopentyl nitrite should be in like… D or E tier. Also it’s an antidote to cyanide poisoning, funnily enough.
Am studying biochemistry and I love how my knowledge starts to relate to some of your points
DAMN I LOVE ORGANIC CHEMISTRY MAN
Glad to hear it :)
I remember when Carbon tet was everywhere from fire extinguishers to gas stations to machine shops to dry cleaners.
Machine shops and gas service stations had open buckets of it for degreasing parts and you could buy it by the gallon at paint and hardware stores.
Wow
@@That_Chemist That was the 1960s
You could also buy Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane by the ton.
Even more fun than acrolein (in my opinion) is acryloyl chloride, the acid chloride equivalent to acrolein. I work with it a lot in my research to make acrylamide type monomers etc and it is very nasty. It has a very particularly bad smell (which I'm pretty sure you can become nose blind to which is scary) that you can't possibly forget and after reading SDSs and toxicity reports a couple of times it always gets a lot of respect when I'm working with it. I also have fun stories about vacuum distillations to improve purity. It's always a chore to neutralize/clean up glassware.
I have a good story about purifying methacryloyl chloride that I am planning to make into an illustrated chemistry video
@@That_Chemist I look forward to that! I have purified both acryloyl chloride for myself and methacrylol chloride for a labmate a couple of times. It is possible to do, but at least the vacuum distillations seem to bump a lot and storage can be fun as well. I haven't known many people who have had the displeasure of working with it, so it'll be interesting to hear your story.
Akshually, one might think of mitochondria as the powerhouse of the cell, scientifically speaking
Have you done an inorganic series too? I'm working with a lot of metals lately.
I almost bought an old fire extinguisher full of carbon tet at the flea market, but decided against it because it was just collectable hazmat exotica to me.
FWIW, alkyl nitrites even as “poppers” are… relatively safe as long as you don’t ingest them. the vapors can give you a real mean headache though. amyl nitrite in particular leaves your head spinning for about five minutes after the tiniest sniff.
What about acetonitrile, phenol, formaldehyde?? they are quite commonly used, aren't they?
"Let's put it in C for Chlorine"
Carbon: bruh
I wish the description contained a list of the chemicals
This video made me sleepy, I’m surprised tryptophan didn’t make the list. 🗿
I once poured like half a liter of CS2 on my bare hands
it was a cool feeling
Yeah.
Dimethyl sulphate just looks evil. It looks like a good methylating agent, and all methylating agents are carcinogenic.
Methylation of DNA happens all the time in our cells, but is kept under strict control. IIUC, it plays a role in the regulation of gene expression, but that's of lesser importance here.
During DNA replication, it's common for errors to crop up every now and then. Our cells have systems in place to fix errors. Typically, an error is detected because of a base-pair mismatch (e.g. if you have two purines paired up or two pyrimidines paired up, it distorts the structure of the molecule). But for this to work it needs a way to determine which DNA strand is correct, and which contains the error. That's where DNA methylation comes in. When a strand of DNA is freshly synthesised, it has no methyl groups attached. This means that a newly-replicated double-helix will contain one strand that is methylated to some extent, and one strand that is not methylated. You can probably see where this is going.
The DNA repair systems often use the methylation state of the DNA to tell which strand is correct and which contains the error. Having determined this, the appropriate enzymes can snip out the erroneous nucleotide and replace it with the correct one.
If, however, there is a methylating agent in the cell during DNA replication, methylation occurs indiscriminately, rendering our DNA-repair systems powerless to do their job correctly.
inhalted for a few seconds at 12.5 % solution ammonia solution accidently.. dont have any pain or symptoms but my chest is a little bit burning.. but I had this symptom too when I poisened myself with phosphorylchloride many years ago and the doctor said that everything is fine.. do i have to worry at ammonia?
Did you know some people can't smell tin compounds? Apparently that's a real thing. I smell them very strongly. A labmate did a Stille coupling and rotavapped the solvent off AFTER workup with KF and the outside of the dry ice trap smelled like tin for a month afterwards.
I'm sure that liking this video immediately puts me on a list... Great video though :)
haha
I love the smell of hydrazine and morpholine lol. We used them as oxygen scavengers in naval nuclear plants.
Which one of these will kill tiny baby flies? Alcohol and acetone just immobilize them for a good couple of minutes then they just come alive and fly away again.
Finally someone with healthy respect for sodium azide. Hydrazoic acid is scary.
Acrylate is like E tier toxicity and A tier for awful smell.
Is dmsulfate that awful because it's basically the evil version of dmso (that makes your skin absorb everything)?
What about a video for toxic chemicals typically only when used at high industry concentrations. I work with some guanadine thiocyanate that's pretty nasty at 4M for RNA/DNA extraction at scale. I've also worked in water quality with concentrated hypochlorite solutions, 20%+ that like to eat things.
What about lead? I have no idea how careful I have to be when handling it so I take every precaution.
I used thionyl chloride in high school in my science fair project. The school got a call from the government inquiring why it was ordered, but I was allowed to use it under supervision.
Ya I worked a few times with dimethyl sulfate. My PI was so paranoid, he only let me work with it under supervision. (And he let me work with t-butyl lithium unsupervised) I had to wear regular gloves, thick butyl gloves, glasses and a face shield, it was pretty crazy. No issues though! I was synthesizing formamidines
What's the relation between Me2SO4 and the formamidines?
Maybe making a leaving group via methylation
@@That_Chemist ya you got it! Making N-formamidines from N-formyl compounds. After alkylating the formyl group, t-butylamine would add and kick off the alkylated oxygen as a leaving group, making the t-butyl formamidine. (We think that is what happened?) We tried dimethyl sulfate, and it actually didn't work very well. Went on to use meerweins reagent (triethyloxonium tetrafluoroborate) which worked amazingly well, up to 80% yield.
I could work with tBuLi unsupervised, but I was restricted in the use of Norbornene which is just smelly. I can handle the smell, but some colleagues go on a puking spree...
30 seconds in, telling people to google poppers. S tier start to this.
Lawsons reagent, how does it generate hydrogen cyanide (HCN) without nitrogen present? Or does it just rip nitrogen from the air? Perhaps meant phosphene?
The biggest problem with the hazard sheets is they don't really mention how they're toxic or common risks. It's tough to distinguish what's really dangerous. Is there a good resource for chemical hazards and possible mistakes that can be made with them?
We're watching it right now LOL.
Chemist with no sense of smell here. Pretty happy to work in a lubricating grease lab, the most dangerous thing we have is TDI. I usually work with LiOH