Ricin doesn't emulate a heart attack. You die from a lack of fluids as your body flushes out your system in every way feasable. Nice try, though. You get the tin foil of the day award!
Ricin doesn't emulate a heart attack. You die from a lack of fluids as your body flushes out your system in every way feasable. Nice try, though. You get the tin foil of the day award!
This is a popular urban legend and factually incorrect.
Ricin is a cytotoxin that inhibits protein synthesis in mammalian cells by (permanently) inactivating the ribosomes, shutting them down. It causes wholesale cell death and tissue/organ failure as a result. The direct cause of death can vary widely and depends on where the ricin is in the body and the method by which you came in contact with it. Because of the very fine-grained nature of its toxic effect, it usually takes anywhere from hours to days before symptoms of poisoning are noticeable, usually requiring a critical mass of cells in a region of your body to die before you notice since cell death is a normally occurring phenomenon in the body. Of course, if you notice any symptoms at all, you are usually toast. This has made it a popular assassins weapon, since a lethal poisoning may take a day or more to manifest symptoms.
Among the reasons ricin is interesting is that it is not very specific to any particular kind of cell and will happily deactivate eukaryotic ribosomes most places it finds them. Most cytotoxins show a great deal more specificity.