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Since alcohol is a subject near and dear to a vast majority of college students, we felt it would be highly relevant to expose alcohol’s potential as a chemical poison.  Alcohol is actually classified as a psychoactive drug that is capable of changing your brain chemistry and can be lethal in high doses.
            Alcohol can cause death directly by acting on those brain areas that control consciousness, respiration and heart rate. A “lethal dose” of alcohol is referred to as the LD50. This stands for the amount of alcohol that would kill 50% of the population and is generally considered to be around ~0.40% alcohol in the blood.
            In order to demonstrate the effect that alcohol can have on the tissues of the human body, we are going to “cook” an egg just using alcohol and no heat.  Alcohol denatures the egg white and thus “cooks” it.  Although the mechanism by which the egg becomes denatured is different from the mechanism by which alcohol injures brain cells, the experiment will allow you to observe how increased doses of alcohol can severely affect how much damage alcohol can do. We will be “cooking” the eggs in alcohol solutions that are half Florida’s legal limit (0.04%), Florida’s legal limit (0.08%), twice Florida’s legal limit (0.16%) and Florida’s LD50 (0.32%).