Word: tetrodotoxin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Normally people's lives do not flash before their eyes when they eat sashimi. But a meal of Japanese fugu, or puffer fish, is no everyday dining experience. Because the fish's internal organs contain the nerve poison tetrodotoxin, Japanese gourmets rely on expert chefs to remove the toxic entrails before serving. Yet for several Japanese diners each year, usually those who clean the fish themselves, a fugu supper is their last...
...review of the importing venture arranged by Nobuyoshi Kuraoka, the proprietor of New York City's Nippon Restaurant. The puffer fish will be processed only by fugu chefs in the southern Japanese city of Shimonoseki, which has not lost a customer in 50 years. Japanese government officials will verify tetrodotoxin levels before the fugu is flash-frozen and flown to New York. Cost of a full- course fugu meal at Nippon Restaurant...
Davis discovered that the active ingredient in the "zombie potion" was a species of puffer, or blowfish. Many of these fish contain a tetrodotoxin, one of the most powerful non-protein poisons known...
...learn how these poisons might relate to zombiism, Davis turned to an unlikely source: Japanese medical literature. Every year a number of Japanese suffer Botanist Davis tetrodotoxin poisoning as a result of eating incorrectly prepared puffer fish, the great delicacy fugu. Davis found that entire Japanese case histories "read like accounts of zombification." Indeed, nearly every symptom reported by Narcisse and his doctors is described, from the initial difficulty breathing to the final paralysis, glassy-eyed stare and yet the retention of mental faculties. In at least two cases, Japanese victims were declared dead but recovered before they could...
...sent samples of the zombie potion to laboratories in Europe and the U.S., where in one experiment it induced a trancelike state in rats. Such research in the past led to the discovery of curare, an arrow poison from the Amazon now used to paralyze muscles during surgery. Tetrodotoxin may also one day find its place in the medical armamentarium. "People who have lived in the tropics for centuries have learned things about plants and animals that we have not fathomed," says Richard Evan Schultes, head of Harvard's renowned Botanical Museum. "We must not leave any stone unturned...