re: #88 LudwigVanQuixote

Yeah… pretty much. IF he had more than a few micrograms on him he would have lit up Geiger counters like Christmas trees, and if he had less, there are a good 18 half decays between now and then. And a few micrograms divided by 262,000 is a very difficult to believe sufficient sample.

Lead-206 (the final decay product) isn’t a very typical isotope, as far as I know. I have little doubt that, with a sufficiently high-grade lab, that such could be detected if Arafat had been so poisoned. Where the chain of plausibility breaks down, IMHO, is subjecting his remains to such careful labwork in the first place. Why bother? He’s not the Higgs Boson ferchrissakes.