Jerry Lucas

Even with his successes today, Lucas remains one of the greatest legends in the history of basketball. The book explains that ricin is a poison. He has written over 30 books on memory and image-based education, many of them best-sellers, and briefly even had his own television show. One of these is a sticker reading "With all-natural ricin!". Moving on from his fame in basketball, Lucas has found success in other areas; he is now a world-renowned educator and memory expert, an achievement which now dwarfs even his basketball successes. The Penn and Teller book How To Play With Your Food (ISBN 0679743111) includes a "gimmicks envelope" of small objects related to the tricks inside the book. Lucas, along with Oscar Robertson and Jerry West, was enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1979. Ricin was mentioned in the "call me the prankster" comic at toothpaste for dinner.

He would retire after the 1974 season, which he spent largely as an unhappy 34-year-old backup seeking the minutes he felt his still-present ability deserved. Ricin was used as the poison of choice of the murderer in the 1962 comedy film Kill or Cure. Lucas became the first American basketball player to win championships at all four levels: high school, college, Olympic, and pro. Ricin was the poison used in the Agatha Christie Tommy and Tuppence whodunnit The House of Lurking Death in a 1929 collection of short stories called Partners in Crime. With Reed returning the following season, New York easily returned and won the NBA Championship in 1973. Several Senate office buildings were closed as a precaution. With Reed injured, Lucas starred at his natural center spot along with guard Walt Frazier and forward DeBusschere to lead New York to the NBA Finals in 1972. There were no signs that anyone who was near the contaminated area developed any medical problems.

Expected to back up Willis Reed and Dave DeBusschere at the two positions, Lucas fit in and became a team leader. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's office. Having spent years on the courts since Middletown, Lucas began to have real knee and back problems, and his career appeared to be ending when San Fransisco traded the All-Star center/forward to the New York Knicks before the 1971-72 season. This information was not made public until February 3, 2004, when preliminary tests showed the presence of ricin in an office mailroom of U.S. Traded to the San Francisco Warriors in 1970, the uninspired Lucas had his first 'down' season ever before roaring back to All-Star form the following season. Investigators said it was low potency and was not considered a health risk. 1969, though, would see the chain go bankrupt, and the unsatisfied Lucas would also consider retirement from the NBA without the championship he coveted. The letter contained a fine powdery substance that later tested positive for ricin.

He would also briefly have his own chain of fast-food restaurants, Jerry's Beef-N-Shakes. The letter containing it was intercepted at a mail handling facility off the grounds of the White House, and it never reached its intended destination. Lucas would have to be satisfied with his personal fame and one of the league's best paychecks. in November of 2003. With the star-laden Boston Celtics as clearly the league's best team, and the 7'2" (2.18 m) Wilt Chamberlain as the dominant player, the Royals and Lucas would have to take a backseat during the 1960s. Ricin was detected in the mail at the White House in Washington, D.C. He also earned the reputation of being arguably the most intelligent man ever to play in the NBA. All others accused in connection with the Wood Green flat were acquitted on all counts.

His intelligence also made him an effective defender, cleanly forcing opponents to take difficult shots or using his sense of timing and technique to be an underrated shot blocker. He was also jailed for life following a conviction for murdering the Special Branch policeman who went to arrest him. As a shooter/scorer, rebounder and passer, Lucas showed himself to be one of the greatest players ever. In April 2005 31-year-old Kamel Bourgass was jailed for 17 years after being convicted of conspiracy to commit a public nuisance "by the use of poisons and explosives to cause disruption, fear or injury". As disappointing as that was, Lucas did post his usual amazing individual achievements, becoming a seven-time All-Pro and nine-time All-Star, and being named Rookie of the Year in 1964 and All-Star Game MVP in 1966. Secretary of State Colin Powell presented those arrested as the "UK Poison Cell" of a global terrorist network in making the case for military intervention in Iraq to the UN Security Council [7]. Despite that, the two All-Pros were often at odds, and they failed to win a championship during their years together in the 1960s. On February 5, 2003, U.S.

Robertson was jealous of Lucas' publicity and was adamant about being the star of the team, something Jerry did not actually want for himself. A number of men who were apparently living at the mosque were arrested. He would be reteamed with Oscar Robertson, a schoolyard and college rival as well as Olympic teammate. On January 20, 2003 Finsbury Park mosque was raided by police, apparently as part of the investigation into the alleged discovery of ricin in Wood Green. In 1963 Lucas agreed to join the NBA's Cincinnati Royals, who had actually drafted him as a high-school junior in 1957. A Special Branch policeman, DC Stephen Oake, was fatally stabbed during the arrests, and three other officers were also injured, one seriously. But the ABL went bankrupt, and Lucas had to sit out the season. Three more suspects were arrested in Manchester in England in connection with the investigation of the alleged ricin found in London, following a raid carried out pursuant to an investigation into immigration issues.

Lucas agreed to a combination player-management contract with George Steinbrenner's Cleveland Pipers of the ABL in 1962 so he could use his education. They were not convicted of any poisons related crime. He already had his bachelor's degree by the end of his junior year of eligibility, had married, and was pursuing a post-graduate degree in business marketing when his senior year concluded. Six more suspects were arrested in Bournemouth in England in connection with the investigation into the alleged ricin incident in London. Arguably the greatest amateur player of all time, Lucas had no motivation for professional basketball. The analytic confusion was caused by the similarity of many plant proteins to one of the ricin components, which suggests that higher quality (better specificity and sensitivity) analytic tests for ricin are needed. coach Pete Newell called Lucas "the greatest player I ever coached.". Further analysis identified the material as ground wheat germ.

U.S. A little later several arrests were made in France and a bottle of something that tested positive for ricin was found. Lucas also was noteworthy as he had memorized paragraphs of Japanese, Italian and Russian, and would briefly converse with players speaking those languages during the Games. It appears that an individual conducting amateur research on poisons was found in this raid. team roared through the international tournament to easily win the gold medal. Some acetone, 22 castor beans, and poor recipes for ricin and other poisons copied from the Internet were found. The U.S. However at the trial of Kamel Bourgass in 2005 it became apparent that within a few days of the raid the leader of the Biological Weapon Identification Group at the Porton Down Defence Science and Technology Laboratory had concluded that ricin was not present at Wood Green [5] [6].

The team's youngest player at age 20, Lucas was its leader and star at center. Media reports stated that a group was suspected of intending to use the poison in an attack on the London Underground. The team, which also listed Oscar Robertson, Jerry West, Walt Bellamy, and Terry Dischinger among its members, is generally considered the greatest amateur team of all time. It was widely reported in the media that traces of ricin were detected by British police in a flat in Wood Green, North London after a raid on a suspected ring of terrorists on 5 January 2003. Olympic team for the Rome Games that year. An aerosol powder may be prepared by spray drying or air grinding the purified ricin using cold air. In 1960, Lucas was also named to the U.S. The final ricin precipitate is dried and then purified by floatation in carbon tetrachloride.

He was considered the greatest college player ever upon graduation, and remains the only player ever to record 30 points and 30 rebounds in the same NCAA Tournament game. The precipitated ricin may be reextracted once to further purify it. The 6-9, 240-pound (2.06 m, 109 kg) Lucas was All-American all three years, Big Ten Player of the Year all three years, and was named ahead of all college and pro athletes to be Sports Illustrated "Sportsman of the Year" in 1961. After precipitation, the crude ricin cake is washed with a 16.7% solution of sodium sulfate to remove extranious nitrogenous substances. (Future coaching legend Bobby Knight was a reserve player.) They were national champions in 1960, and had just one loss in 1961. The leachate is filtered to remove insoluble matter and the crude ricin then precipitated by the addition of a 12% solution of sodium sulfate with a pH of 7.0-8.0. Lucas was the team's clear star, leading the nation in shooting accuracy and rebounding all three years, and leading Ohio State to three straight NCAA Finals. Ricin is initially extracted from defatted castor beans by aquous extraction at pH 3.8 to yield a leachate containing solubilized ricin.

When the three became sophomores in 1959 (freshman were then ineligible for varsity college sports), they teamed with junior Larry Siegfried to form a basketball juggernaut that would go 78-6 over three NCAA seasons. Modern extraction plants might use membrane filtration to make highly purified ricin isolates. Ohio State had also recruited three-sport star John Havlicek and Columbus-area star Mel Nowell that year. The extraction of ricin from castor beans is very similar to the prepartion of soy protein isolates. Lucas insisted on an academic scholarship also, as he was nearly a straight-A student and already well-known for his memory. The patent was removed from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) database sometime in 2004, but is still available online through international patent databases. Offered more than 200 athletic scholarships, it appeared Lucas might choose Adolph Rupp's legendary Kentucky program, but he instead chose more-local Ohio State - which was not well-known for basketball at the time. Dieke, and Charlotte Karel.

Lucas' team suffered its only loss in 1958 in the state playoffs. Corwin, Sally H. He, Wilt Chamberlain, and Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) are generally considered the greatest high school basketball players of all time. Alderks, Alsoph H. Lucas was so popular that a radio network was set up to broadcast his games across Ohio, drawing more listeners than several Division I colleges. Craig, O.H. Coaches and scouts often traveled hundreds of miles to see Lucas play, swelling Middletown's gym to nearly three times its usual capacity. Secretary of the Army, are Harry L.

Even while passing up shots, Lucas broke Wilt Chamberlain's national high school scoring record as a senior by making more than 60% of his shot attempts and 85% of his free throws, another standard for his career. The inventors named in US Patent 3,060,165 (granted October 23, 1962) "Preparation of Toxic Ricin", assigned to the U.S. Shying from the limelight, Lucas decided to pass more so that his scoring would not make him appear selfish; it would become his standard for the rest of his playing career. The process for creating ricin is well-known, in part because a patent was granted for it in 1952. Lucas usually scored more than two points per minute, and his best performances were in closer games against better teams because he was allowed to play more. Ricin is actually several orders of magnitude less toxic than botulinum or tetanus toxins, but those are more difficult to obtain. Lucas strained somewhat under the media glare, and his minutes in blowout games were usually limited. The major reason it is dangerous is that there is no specific antidote, and that it is very easy to obtain (the castor bean plant is a common ornamental, and can be grown at home without any special care).

Crowds of as many as 10,000 were common for games in which he played. Presumably it could be sealed inside some sort of dust particle that would dissolve in water, but this would be difficult. With his advanced gameplay, Lucas broke nearly every existing high school record during these two seasons, and became arguably the first high school basketball player to be known coast-to-coast at a time when television was in its infancy. Since it acts as an enzyme, catalyzing destruction of ribosomes, even a single oxidation is likely to render the ricin molecule harmless. In 1956 and 1957, Lucas led Middletown High to undefeated seasons and back-to-back Ohio state high school championships. Pure ricin could be dispersed through the air, however it would tend to be oxidized and rendered harmless by ozone, nitrogen oxides, and other pollutants in a matter of hours. Lucas was gifted with great hands, which he could use to dazzle onlookers in an array of magic card tricks, as well as with 20-10 eyesight. (Jan van Aken, an expert on biological weapons explained in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel that he judges it rather reassuring that Al Qaeda experimented with ricin as it suggests their inability to produce botulin or anthrax.).

He had developed shooting accuracy as far out as 25 feet, and had trained his leaping ability and timing to become an amazing rebounder. Ricin denatures (ie, the protein changes structure and becomes less dangerous) much more readily than anthrax spores, which may remain lethal for decades. Lucas was already a playground legend by age 15, as he was already at almost his full-grown height of 6 ft 9 in (2.06 m). Ricin is easy to produce, but is not as practical nor likely to cause as high casualities as other agents. Lucas was born in Middletown, Ohio, a town of 20,000 halfway between Dayton and Cincinnati which in the 1940s and 1950s boasted one of the most respected high school basketball programs in the United States. Hence, a military willing to use biological weapons and having advanced resources would rather use either of the latter instead. He was named to Sports Illustrated's five-man College All-Century Team in 1999. To put ricin used as weapon into perspective, it is worth noting that as a biological weapon or chemical weapon, ricin may be considered as not very powerful, if only in comparison with other poisons such as botulinum or anthrax.

In 1996, the NBA's 50th anniversary, he was named one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History. In August of 2002, US officials asserted that the Islamic militant group Ansar al-Islam tested ricin, along with other chemical and biological agents, in northern Iraq. Jerry Ray Lucas (born March 30, 1940) was a legendary basketball star from the 1950s to the 1970s, and is now a world-renowned memory education expert. Despite this, more than 1 million metric tonnes of castor beans are processed each year, and approximately 5% of the total is rendered into a waste containing high concentrations of ricin toxin [4]. Under both the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention and the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, ricin is listed as a schedule 1 controlled substance. Despite ricin's extreme toxicity and utility as an agent of chemical/biological warfare, it is extremely difficult to limit the production of the toxin.

Thomas, Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life, 368-378). Earlier, Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn also suffered (but survived) ricin-like symptoms after a 1971 encounter with KGB agents (D.M. He died in hospital a few days later; the pellet was discovered by chance during an autopsy and the poison linked back to the KGB. In 1978, the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was assassinated by Bulgarian secret police who surreptitiously 'shot' him on a London street with a modified umbrella using compressed gas to fire a tiny pellet contaminated with ricin into his leg.

The best-known documented use of ricin as an agent of biological warfare was by the Soviet Union's KGB during the Cold War. Ricin was given the military symbol W. This conclusion was based on comparison of the final weapons rather than ricin's toxicity (LD50 <30 mg.min.m^–3). Though there were plans for mass production and several field trials with different bomblet concepts, the end conclusion was that it was no more economical than using phosgene.

During the Second World War the United States and Canada undertook studying ricin in cluster bombs. The War ended before it was weaponized. The dust cloud concept could not be adequately developed, and researchers believed the coated bullet/shrapnel concept was unethical. At that time it was being considered for use either as a toxic dust or coated bullets and shrapnel.

The United States investigated ricin for its military potential during the First World War. Use of ricin as an adjuvant has potential implications for developing mucosal vaccines. A promising approach is also to use the non-toxic B subunit as a vehicle for delivering antigens into cells thus greatly increasing their immunogenicity. Genetic modification of ricin is believed to be possible to lessen its toxicity to humans, but not to the cancer cells.

Ricin could be linked to a monoclonal antibody to target malignant cells recognized by the antibody. Ricin may have therapeutic use in the treatment of cancer. In the United states, a person caught manufacturing or possessing ricin may be sentenced up to 30 years in prison. As little as one castor bean, about 0.5 grams, may be fatal in a child.

Since 0.2 mg of purified Ricin constitutes a fatal dose, this is a considerable amount of ricin. The seed-pulp left over from pressing for castor oil contains on average about 5% by weight of ricin. Ricin is easily purified from castor-oil manufacturing waste. Since people do not get sick from eating large amounts of such products, ricin A is of extremely low toxicity if and only if the B chain is not present..

Many plants such as barley have the A chain but not the B chain. Ricin consists of two distinct protein chains (almost 30kDa each) that are linked to each other by disulfide bond:. Typically 2.5–20 raw seeds can kill an adult human; 4 a rabbit, 5 a sheep, 6 an ox, 6 a horse, 7 a pig, 11 a dog, but 80 for cocks and ducks.[3]. [2].

Although one seed contains enough ricin to kill an adult human, they may pass harmlessly through the digestive system if swallowed whole. Modern feed-making techniques break down the ricin in castor beans by heating at 140 degrees Celsius for 20 minutes, although some studies suggest that residual toxic effects may linger. Although the castor bean plant has long been noted for its toxicity, ricin was first isolated and named in 1888 by Hermann Stillmark. (See abrin).

Ingested in larger doses, ricin causes severe diarrhea and victims can die of shock. In small doses, such as the typical dose contained in a measure of castor oil, ricin causes digestive tract cramps. Long term organ damage is likely in survivors. There is no known antidote; only symptomatic and supportive treatment is available.

Ricin is poisonous if inhaled, injected, or ingested, acting as a toxin by the inhibition of protein synthesis. . It is considered to be twice as deadly as cobra venom. Ricin can be extracted from castor beans and is known to have an average lethal dose in humans of 0.2 milligrams (1/5,000th of a gram), though some sources give higher figures [1].

Its name comes from the seed's resemblance to the tick. The protein ricin (pronounced rye-sin) is a poison manufactured from the castor bean (Ricinus communis). Ricin B is important in assisting ricin A's entry into a cell by binding with a cell surface component. Ricin A is toxic to the cell by interfering with Ribosomes, responsible for protein synthesis.