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ACESS Joint Societies Event – Sponsored by 3 ACS Sections
November 2, 2023 @ 6:00 pm - 10:30 pm
Cleveland Poison Symposia – The Dark Side of Chemistry
Nickname: Arsenic Bar Crawl
Location 1: “Spirits of Willoughby” 6:00 PM (Spirits has a huge parking lot)
Speaker 1: Mike Fricke, Akron ACS “Introduction to Arsenic”
Speaker 2: Mike Kenney Contact, Cleveland ACS “Arsenic Poisoning”
Location 2: “Nora’s Public House” 7:30 PM (0.2 mile walk from Spirits)
Speaker 3: Kevin Kubachka, US FDA “Arsenic in Foods”
Speaker 4: Abe Gutierrez, Agilent “Arsenic Analysis by ICP-MS”
Location 3: “The Wild Goose” 9:00 PM (0.1 mile walk from Nora’s)
(Invited) Speaker 5: Reid Kirby, Z-Day Center “Before Manhattan: The Dew of Death”
(Invited) Speaker 6, Melissa Tedone, U of Delaware “The Poison Book Project”
http://wiki.winterthur.org/wiki/Poison_Book_Project
Notes from Mike Fricke: A little more about Reid Kirby, who’s abstract is in this chain. I gave a presentation to the Cleveland ACS Section in Jan 2020 about the Cleveland Mousetrap (just before the pandemic started). This is America’s 1918 chemical weapons facility that was built in Willoughby and likely the first WMD factory in the world. Here’s a good primer on the site:
https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/01/17/conants-war-inside-mouse-trap/.
Our current bar crawl event will roughly follow the route that the Mousetrap soldiers took three times a day as they walked into Willoughby for their meals. For this event, I wanted to find an authority to speak about the Mousetrap. This proved difficult as local historians: John Grabowski and Alan Rocke were unfamiliar with the story. I contacted authors who have written about the Mousetrap and came up empty. Finally, I contacted the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) which won the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize. Eventually, I made contact with Alastair Hay with Physicians for Human Rights (2105 Hague Award and Order of the British Empire). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alastair_Hay. Alastair Hay put me in touch with Reid Kirby who is very familiar with our Willoughby site and has even held in his hands the infamous black book of notes that Jim Conant kept while building the site.
More details to be announced