Path: utzoo!attcan!sobmips!uunet!uvm-gen!banzai!jay From: jay@banzai.PCC.COM (Jay Schuster) Newsgroups: sci.bio Subject: Re: Ethidium Br Message-ID: <1989Nov16.180945.21982@banzai.PCC.COM> Date: 16 Nov 89 18:09:45 GMT References: <60608@tiger.oxy.edu> <1030@uwm.edu> <13854@boulder.Colorado.EDU> <2594@aecom.yu.edu> Organization: The People's Computer Company, Williston, VT Lines: 25 werner@aecom.yu.edu (Craig Werner) writes: >In article <13854@boulder.Colorado.EDU>, eesnyder@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Eric E. Snyder) writes: >> In article <1030@uwm.edu> stevelee@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (The Anti-Theist Named Steve) writes: >> >> Ok, net people, just how dangerous is ethidium bromide? I get shit in the >> lab constantly for slopping my gel buffers all over the place.... > > Yes, it's carcinogenic. Yes, it makes you glow in the dark. Yes, >it breaks down over a period of time in the environment. I had a lover who was a graduate student in toxicology once. His advisor (to him) was the embodiment of evil (as Theodore Strelesky's was to him, I imagine). He always had plans to exact his revenge by putting Ethidium Br in his advisor's coffee. It would be a while before he got cancer, and it would be the perfect cover up, since no one is going to investigate the cause of the cancer, and anyone in a biolab/chemlab is exposed to enough nasties. I was told by another grad student (as an undergrad) that the ability of Ethidium Br to intercalate between base pairs of DNA was not enough to explain how potent a carcinogen it was. This was in 1983. -- Jay Schuster uunet!uvm-gen!banzai!jay, attmail!banzai!jay The People's Computer Company `Revolutionary Programming'