Understanding Ricin

Ricin is back in the headlines. Several vials of the deadly toxin turned up last week in a Las Vegas hotel room, along with firearms, a text book about anarchy, and castor seeds, which are used to make the poison. The room's occupant, Roger Von Bergendorff, was found in a coma in which he remains—the possible victim of the ricin found in his room.

Bergendorff was hospitalized on Feb. 14, but the ricin wasn't found until Feb. 27, when a relative retrieved his luggage because the hotel had not been paid in two weeks. Bergendorff reportedly also stayed at another hotel several miles away for a year before moving to the one where the ricin was discovered, and the FBI continues to investigate the case. Bergendorff's motives for possessing the ricin remain unclear.

The Las Vegas incident is the latest in a line of ricin-related episodes stretching back decades. The toxin first made news in 1978, when Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov died after assassins injected ricin into his leg on a London street. Ricin returned to the front pages in the 1990s, when several militia groups in the United States were found to be plotting to use it as a weapon. Ricin again made news after 9/11, when traces of it were mailed to then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and others in Washington (no one was harmed in those still-unsolved cases) and when former secretary of state Colin Powell claimed in his now infamous speech to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003 that Saddam Hussein was using ricin as one of his weapons of mass destruction. Ricin, which is poisonous if inhaled, injected, or ingested, is in its purest form about 500 times more powerful than cyanide—and about 1,000 times less powerful than botulinum, the most lethal toxin known to man.

Jonathan Tucker, a senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, specializes in chemical and biological weapons issues and is an expert on ricin. He previously directed the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Program and served with the Department of State, the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He was a United Nations biological weapons inspector in Iraq in the 1990s and is the author of "Toxic Terror: Assessing Terrorist Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons" and "The War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to al-Qaeda."
Tucker spoke to NEWSWEEK's Jamie Reno about the latest ricin scare in Las Vegas and shared some background and history of the toxin both in the United States and around the world. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Do we have any idea how this man obtained and made the ricin that was discovered in his Las Vegas hotel room?
Jonathan Tucker: We don't yet know, but castor beans, from which ricin is made, are widely available throughout the world. In developing countries such as China, Brazil and India, large quantities are still processed to extract castor oil as an industrial lubricant. Approximately 1 million tons are processed per year worldwide. What is left over during the cold-pressing process that is used to extract the castor oil from beans is a mash, which contains about 5 percent ricin. The toxins are then deactivated by heating them with steam. Then it's used to feed animals. But of course if you didn't deactivate the toxin and gave it to the animals, they would die.

Are these castor beans easy to acquire?
There is no longer production of castor beans as an agriculture crop in this country, but I believe the plants are still sold at nurseries as an ornamental; it's an attractive-looking plant. People who buy the plants would simply remove the seeds (beans) from the plant and process them. There are actually recipes available in books and on the Internet for extracting the toxin from the beans.

Does it surprise you that the plant is still available to purchase?
I am somewhat surprised, though you would have to take deliberate steps to go from owning the plant to extracting the toxin, and that is a felony. To produce a crude preparation of ricin is quite easy. But that's when you would find yourself in serious legal jeopardy.