Blog Your Blessings Sunday: Caffeine

It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning. It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.

Actually I'm not sure if this should really be a ode to Morning Thunder tea, No-doze or coffee. Whatever you call and however you take it, it boils down to one thing: the toxic substance called caffeine.

Yes, toxic. Plants use caffeine as a natural pesticide to keep bugs and the like off of them. In human beings the oral (as in drinking) LD50 (dosage at which 50% of the recipients would die) is somewhere between 10 and 40g. For the sake of comparison, strychnine, a "very toxic" substance, has an LD50 somewhere between 50 to 160mg – about 1/1000^th of the LD50 for caffeine.

Without this marvelous substance I would not be the jittery, twitching person I am today. I would not have passed as many exams, written required papers, given presentations, performed emergency cleaning, completed projects and generally achieved all that I have.

Yes I owe it all to caffeine, the wonder drug :-)

Tags: Caffeine, coffee, toxicity, Morning Thunder, Nodoze, LD50.

Sources:

• The bit about "It is by caffeine alone…" is attributed to many sources but most agree that it is a parody of the mentat "mantra" used in "Dune" by Frank Herbert.
• http://www.bio.hw.ac.uk/edintox/dose.htm - general toxicology info.
• http://coffeefaq.com/site/node/12 - general info, especially about toxic effects.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine - general info about caffeine.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strychnine - for the sake of comparison, here's an article on strychnine, a substance considered to be "very toxic."
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:A_small_cup_of_coffee.JPG – the picture of the small cup of coffee by Julius Schorzman