March 19, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
14:59
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| I ran across something today about the chemistry of glyphosate that will absolutely blow your mind. | |
| This is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger. | |
| I'm the lab science director at the Natural News Forensic Food Laboratory. | |
| I run ICP-MS, mass spectrometry, ion chromatography, liquid chromatography, and other instrumentation in the search for food contaminants. | |
| and over the last two years I've become Very rapidly up to speed on organic chemistry and inorganic chemistry and the molecular configuration of toxic substances, including glyphosate. | |
| And so something I ran across today that I've never heard anyone say anywhere. | |
| It just blows my mind. | |
| So glyphosate... | |
| Glyphosate has much in common with the world's most toxic nerve gas agent called VX gas or VX nerve agent, the most deadly in the world. | |
| And if you go to chemspider.com, you can look up the molecular pattern or structure of any molecule. | |
| And I use this a lot because of a lot of my research in the ionization of pesticides and the polarity of molecules and so on and so forth. | |
| The molecular formula of glyphosate is three carbon atoms, eight hydrogen, a nitrogen, five oxygen, and a phosphorus. | |
| Now, this phosphorus, this is what it has in common with VX gas, a nerve agent, which has 11 carbons, 26 hydrogens, a nitrogen, two oxygens, a phosphate, and a sulfur. | |
| They actually are very, very similar molecules in terms of their polarity, which means that the opposite ends of the molecules carry opposite charges, highly polar. | |
| One end is very positive, the other end is very negative, which affects the solubility of molecules in solvents such as water, methanol, ethanol, acetonitrile, you name it, different kinds of solvents. | |
| So, These two molecules, I mean, I just stumbled across this today. | |
| It just blew my mind. | |
| I'm like, holy crap, glyphosate is very similar to the most toxic nerve agent ever invented by mankind. | |
| You know, no wonder glyphosate is so toxic to the ecosystem and the soils and humans. | |
| No wonder it gives people cancer tumors. | |
| So I want to give you a couple of resources so you can look at what I'm looking at because this is going to blow your mind. | |
| Also, let me read from you. | |
| I want you to search for this. | |
| This is on Agilent.com. | |
| A-G-I-L-E-N-T. They're the manufacturer of some of the instruments I use in the laboratory, and they have a huge library of application notes. | |
| One of the notes is numbered 5989-5346. | |
| And it is co-authored by Joseph Caruso, C-A-R-U-S-O. It's entitled, Ultra Trace Analysis of Organophosphorous Chemical Warfare Agent Degradation Products by HPLC, ICP, MS. Let me decode that title for you if you're not used to reading these. | |
| The ultratrace analysis means we're looking at very, very small concentrations, sometimes sub-parts per billion concentrations, so picograms, in other words, often parts per trillion. | |
| Organophosphorus, this is the chemical structure, and this is an organic molecule with a phosphorous hub, if you will, at the molecular level. | |
| This is what it has in common with glyphosate. | |
| Glyphosate, if you look at the word or sound it out, it starts to say phosphate or phosphorus. | |
| That's because it's based on phosphorus. | |
| So glyphosate is a phosphorus-based chemical weapon used against plants, whereas VX nerve gas is a phosphate chemical weapon used against humankind. | |
| Alright? | |
| So, if you read this paper by Joseph Caruso... | |
| Oh, let me finish decoding the title for you. | |
| The analysis is by HPLC ICP-MS. So, they're using a liquid chromatography instrument, maybe the Agilent, I don't know, 1290 would be my choice, on the front end. | |
| That's high-pressure liquid chromatography. | |
| I think that instrument goes up to like 1200, what is that? | |
| 1200 pascals of pressure? | |
| Anyway, never mind that, but use that as a front-end interface and then after you elute the chemicals, you're separating them in the column of the LC. Then they're going into the ICP-MS, which stands for inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. | |
| And by the way, if I sound tired, I'm sorry, I've been in the lab all day. | |
| I'm actually a little bit phased by all of this research. | |
| The ICP-MS does an elemental analysis. | |
| Of the eluded liquid coming out of the LC. I'm not going to bore you with the details, just to tell you that what the ICP-MS is doing in this scenario is it's counting the phosphorus atoms and then using that to have a quantitative measurement of the glyphosate concentration in the original sample. | |
| So they're using the LC to separate out glyphosate, which is very tricky by itself. | |
| Or, I'm sorry, the organophosphorus chemical warfare agent, not glyphosate. | |
| This is for VX nerve gas, but it's practically the same chemistry. | |
| That's what's so fascinating about this. | |
| Let me read you a little bit from this introduction. | |
| Let's see. | |
| As a result of the chemical weapons conventions, hold on. | |
| These chemicals, which include nerve and vesicant agents, pose a deadly threat, not only to the human population, but also to vital aquatic and agricultural resources. | |
| That's table one in this paper. | |
| Based on these facts, the development of sensitive and selective analytical techniques for the analysis of CWA, that's the nerve agent, and their degradation products is of high importance to ensure homeland security. | |
| And that's the subject of this paper, homeland security. | |
| And it's from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cincinnati. | |
| And just to read you the abstract or explain it, let's see. | |
| So, the high-performance liquid chromatography system is used with the ICP-MS for analysis of three organophosphorous chemical warfare degradation products. | |
| Ethyl methylphosphonic acid, EMPA, which is the hydrolysis product of VX nerve gas. | |
| And IMPA and MPA, another hydrolysis product, were separated by reverse phase ion pairing HPLC. That's using a special introduction technique to the LC instrument. | |
| The separated organophosphorus hydrolysates were directly introduced into the ICP-MS and detected at a mass-to-charge ratio of 31. | |
| So 31. | |
| What is that going to be close to? | |
| Let's see. | |
| Calcium is 40. | |
| I don't have a table of elements in front of me. | |
| Let me bring one up. | |
| What would 31 even look like in terms of another element? | |
| You see ICP-MS detects mass-to-charge ratios, not actual atomic mass. | |
| So 31... | |
| Oh, phosphorus. | |
| There we go. | |
| Well, that makes total sense. | |
| Okay, so mass to charge ratio of the atomic mass of phosphorus is what they're looking at in the ICP-MS. Let me get back to the method here. | |
| The separated, I'm sorry, detection limits for the chemical degradation products were found to be 263, 183, and 139 picograms per milliliter. | |
| Holy crap! | |
| Do you... | |
| Wow! | |
| I don't know if you even realize what that is. | |
| So a microgram per milliliter is a part per million. | |
| That's a microgram. | |
| And a lot of the external standards that I use come in micrograms per milliliters, parts per million concentrations. | |
| Now, if you go down to... | |
| Well, a picogram. | |
| Well, hold on. | |
| First, then we've got to go to nanograms underneath micrograms. | |
| So a nanogram per milliliter is a part per billion. | |
| And if we go way down to picograms per milliliter, that's a part per trillion. | |
| So these detection limits for EMPA, for example, a derivative of nerve gas, being at 263 picograms per milliliter, that's 0.263 parts per billion. | |
| That is freaking unbelievably sensitive. | |
| That's just astonishing. | |
| Wow. | |
| By the way, that shows you how impressive the Agilent instrumentation really is. | |
| It's just astonishing. | |
| So anyway, this paper talks about the chemical byproducts of the degradation of of sarin gas and VX nerve gas and how you can use the ICP-MS to detect the mass to charge ratio of phosphorus. | |
| I should have known that was 31, but that's not something that I look for commonly in my own work. | |
| Like I can tell you, oh yeah, mercury, you know, 200, 201, 202, lead, 206, 207, 208, whatever, you know, these other elements that I'm used to looking at but not phosphorus so much. | |
| Okay, so what's the bottom line from this? | |
| I'm sorry if I'm geeking out on you on this paper. | |
| This just blows my mind. | |
| Reverse phase ion pairing chromatography. | |
| Yep. | |
| Let's see. | |
| Helium optimization experiments for the removal of polyatomic interferences. | |
| Of course, that's what we always do in the ICP-MS, in the collision reaction chamber. | |
| Just going through here to see what else. | |
| Let's see. | |
| Where do they even get nerve gas to do this, by the way? | |
| This is... | |
| You have this question? | |
| Like, is the University of Cincinnati, do they have a closet with VX nerve gas? | |
| This is dangerous stuff to be working with. | |
| I wouldn't even want to deal with anything more than picograms of this. | |
| Anyway, they use an Agilent 7500 CE with a collision reaction cell. | |
| Of course... | |
| An octopole ion guide, yep, that's what I've got too. | |
| Electronic coupling with the HPLC, remote cable, simultaneous starter for synchronization. | |
| Let's see, they use a buffer system, acetic acid and ammonium acetate at pH 4.85. | |
| That's interesting. | |
| So that's how they separated out the nerve gas agent and got it into solution in order to introduce it into the LC. So, this is some interesting stuff. | |
| What I find fascinating is that a lot of this might be useful for detecting glyphosate. | |
| So, let's see. | |
| It says the phosphorus response versus helium flow rate was plotted and the flow rate corresponded to the optimal signal. | |
| And lowest background, so they're boosting signal-to-noise ratio using helium to eliminate the polyatomic interferences, leaving the degradation products. | |
| Oh, I see. | |
| I'm looking at a spectra chart of the LC, and we have, wow, very clear peaks on the chromatography, even though it looks like this is heavy. | |
| It's heavily heavily magnified with background noise at I mean, these signals are not that much higher than background noise. | |
| And you can imagine trying to get background noise down to picograms per milliliter means you've got to have an ultra-clean laboratory, like super, super clean, like clean room type of laboratory. | |
| So, I don't even think I can do this kind of run in my lab. | |
| We don't have, we're not a NASA grade clean room in terms of, you know, picogram detection. | |
| That's just incredible. | |
| Okay, so let's see. | |
| Considering the lethal doses reported in Table 1, what are the lethal doses of this stuff? | |
| Holy crap. | |
| Lethal doses of VX nerve gas are.09 to 2 milligrams per cubic meter? | |
| I don't know what that comes out to, parts per billion, but we can do the math. | |
| It's pretty small. | |
| This stuff's very, very toxic. | |
| If it touches your skin, you're dead. | |
| Which is kind of how glyphosate works on plants. | |
| If it touches their roots, you know, they're dead. | |
| So I think it's just really interesting to me. | |
| I'm going to wrap this up. | |
| But, you know, glyphosate is a chemical weapon against plants. | |
| And VX nerve gas is a chemical weapon against people. | |
| And so these are both very similar molecules. | |
| If you look at them on ChemSpider, they have this phosphorous group. | |
| And that is key to their polarity, solubility, and interaction with biological systems. | |
| So there you go. | |
| I'm on the trail. | |
| We're going to find out more about glyphosate this year. | |
| Stay tuned. | |
| Hear all of my podcasts at healthrangerreport.com. | |
| This little demonic molecule will not evade us. | |
| We're going to nail it. |
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