HC241H - Pick Your Poison (Spring/2024)

Professor: Lindsay Hinkle

4.00 credits

CRN 32042: Monday & Wednesday, 10:00-11:20am @ CHA 202

When you imagine a person preparing a poison, does an image of the Evil Queen from the film Snow White, disguised as an old witch, dunking an apple in a cauldron filled with green liquid come to mind?  Or do you picture a well-meaning pharmacist, wearing a lab coat, adding raspberry flavoring to a medicinal elixir to make it more appetizing to ingest?  Both of these events occurred in the 1930s.  Both characters could be considered infamous.  But only one event caused the death of 100 people and resulted in the passage of new FDA regulations. In this course we will calculate and interpret the dose at which a substance becomes harmful, work together to discover the societal impacts of different poisons, and discuss if poisons could be used for good instead of evil.  As a term long project, students will pick their own poison to research and then present their findings.