On Caffeine
So our last Japanese lecture of the quarter has just ended, and I’m waiting to ask the prof a question. I’m wearing my always-stylish caffeine molecule shirt. One of my classmates, a biochem major, sees it, and in passing says
I’ve got a quarter kilo of that, if you ever need any.
That set me to thinking. What could you possibly do with that much caffeine? A quarter kilo is… kind of a lot. It’s 25 times the LD50, and a thousand times more than the DSM considers to be an overdose.
And then again, perhaps caffeine is more psychoactive than we let ourselves think.
Boy, I feel like a good cup of tea now.
March 16th, 2006 at 3:01 pm
What a coincidence.
March 16th, 2006 at 7:43 pm
Good question…why does he have that stuff? Perhaps he’s speaking of lab stock, but if that’s his personal property, it’s quite dangerous. Someone is likely to grab too much of it—7.5 grams is very little.
March 19th, 2006 at 6:38 pm
Apparently a chem company near by went out of business. Instead of paying a disposal company to clean up the extra chemical stock they had, they foisted them on UCSD and call it a tax writeoff. This guy (biochem grad student) got to catalog a lot of the stuff they received, including the caffeine.