Jihadists admit they did Chemical attack in Syria

[The2ndAmendment]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5kda1KhqlU]SYRIA Jihadist Admits To Having & Using Toxic Gas, Justifies Killing Women & Children - YouTube[/ame]

 

[waltky]

What happens in a nerve gas attack...

Scientist studied agonizing death by nerve gas
September 5, 2013 - Within seconds, your muscles become paralyzed, so you cannot breathe. Then come intense vomiting and likely seizures. The heart stops beating.

As the world debates its response to the alleged nerve gas attacks in Syria, one thing is clear: It is an awful way to go. One person who knows this better than most is Paul H. Axelsen, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine. In 1993, while on sabbatical at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, Axelsen helped figure out how a key enzyme plays a role in communication between certain kinds of nerve cells - the very process that sarin gas interferes with so catastrophically.

Among the nerve cells affected by sarin are those that control our muscles. Inhaling the gas causes the nerve pathway to be switched on permanently, flooding the system with noise so that communication between nerve cells is impossible. "It's almost a total-body malfunction," Axelsen said. He studied how the enzyme works, in collaboration with Weizmann scholars who had previously determined the enzyme's structure. These researchers included Israel Silman and Joel L. Sussman. The scholars did not specifically study sarin gas, developed by a German chemical company in the mid-1930s. Instead, theirs was a more fundamental study of how the enzyme, called acetylcholinesterase, worked in healthy people.

In 2003, Army Sgt. Christopher Burns, then of the 13th Armored Regiment, takes shelter in an armored personnel carrier during a simulated Scud missile attack at the National Training Center at Ft. Irwin, Calif. For a person exposed to sarin, the situation is bleak.

Still, the connection to nerve gas was on their minds, Sussman recalled in an interview Tuesday. His and Silman's original work on the enzyme's structure was published in 1991, soon after the end of the first Gulf War. Some of the research funding came from the U.S. Department of Defense, which sought information on how it could better protect soldiers in a gas attack, Sussman said. The research also helped explain the potential for a class of drugs called cholinesterase inhibitors, which were then in development. These medicines, such as Aricept, can help ease the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, though their impact is modest.

In a 1994 interview with The New York Times, Sussman recalled the moment that he and colleagues made their initial discovery, using a technique called protein crystallography. It was 3 a.m., and on a computer screen, they had successfully pieced together the 4,000 or so atoms that make up one molecule of the enzyme. "I can only compare it to first seeing a new continent," Sussman said at the time. Then Sussman, who had met Axelsen while visiting the Mayo Clinic, invited him to come to Israel to help determine how the enzyme did its job. They knew the key to healthy communication between the nerve cells was a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine.

MORE