From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Tue Mar 12 2002 - 01:30:28 MST
On 3/10/02 11:48 PM, "Michael M. Butler" <butler@comp-lib.org> wrote:
> AFAIK, work done in the early to mid 1960s suggested that toxic effects in
> animals showed up when approximately 1/5 of the H in the organism had been
> replaced with D. Drinking _deionized_ plain H20 would probably hurt you
> faster.
Back when I was a chemistry goober, we had a discussion with the professor
about this very thing. The problem with D2O as it relates to living
organisms is that it has slightly different reaction energies in the various
processes that water is normally a part of. For many of these chemical
processes the difference in reaction energies is below the noise floor, but
for some processes it actually inhibits the normal process pathways. Too
much D2O in the body and these process failures add up.
I suppose one could look at it as a very unusual form of clinical
dehydration.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:12:56 MST