AI Summary
5 min readOn February 19, 1994, a 31-year-old mother of two named Gloria Ramirez arrived at an ER in Riverside, California, delirious and crashing from metastatic cancer. As staff worked to save her, a nurse drew blood, passed the tube to a resident—and collapsed. Within minutes, 23 of the 37 people in the ER experienced nausea, burning skin, tingling, and fainting. Six were hospitalized. The ER was evacuated. Hazmat teams found no gas leak. The state of California eventually ruled it mass hysteria, pointing to stress and skipped lunch breaks. But something else lingered: everyone who entered that room reported smelling garlic.
A chemical weapon in the ER
The garlic smell was sulfur. At the Livermore Labs, a second autopsy using gas chromatography found unusually high levels of DMSO2 in Gloria’s tissues. DMSO2 is a sulfur compound that can come from food like asparagus, but the amount was far too high. The investigators theorized Gloria had been rubbing DMSO—an industrial degreaser used off-label as a pain rub—on her skin for cancer pain. In the ER, she was bagged with pure oxygen, which could have converted DMSO into DMSO2. Then the defibrillator, turned up to 360 joules, might have supplied enough energy to transform DMSO2 into DMSO4—a toxic gas once studied as a chemical weapon. Its symptoms match what the ER staff experienced: nausea, burning skin, fainting. A single drop of bl
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What you'll learn
- 1 The Smell of Hell — Radiolab
- 2 (03:16) **Introducing the Maligned Element** - Hosts Molly Webster and Matt Kilty set up a live show about sulfur, the overlooked element most people associate with disgusting smells
- 3 (04:10) **The Gloria Ramirez Mystery** - A young woman arrives at an ER in Riverside, California on February 19, 1994, and medical staff begin collapsing around her
- 4 (06:52) **The Autopsy and Initial Theories** - Gloria dies, and investigators struggle to explain what happened
- 5 (08:26) **The Second Autopsy and Chemical Discovery** - A fancy lab at Livermore Labs uses gas chromatography on Gloria's tissues
- 6 (10:30) **The Chemical Weapon Theory** - Researchers theorize Gloria transformed into a toxic gas source
- 7 (13:12) **The Smell of Sulfur** - The audience smells a garlicky sulfur compound, the same odor reported in the ER that night
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
Throughout human history, there’s been one element we’ve always associated with death. Just the smell of it is an alarm bell that says, “something here is dangerous.” But what if our noses have been wrong all along?
In this episode of our series Viscera: Gripping Tales of the Human Body, we take you to a live performance in Boston where we reveal how this much-maligned element might be better understood as the smell of life.
LATERAL CUTS:
Want to see a Viscera show? Join us for Radiolab Presents: Viscera, live in New York City on Thursday, November 5th. All about the sometimes freaky world of organ transplants, with special guest Mary Roach discussing her upcoming book, Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy. Get your tickets at wnyc.org/events.
EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by - Avir Mitra and Matt Kielty
with help from - Mona Madgavkar
Produced by - Mona Madgavkar and Matt Kielty
with mixing help from - Jeremy Bloom
Fact-checking by - Rachel Gross
and Edited by - Pat Walters
Liveshow production support - Natalia Ramirez, Sarah Sandbach, Maia Appleby Melamed, and Jeremy Bloom.
EPISODE CITATIONS:
Videos -
- Watch the video of Radiolab Presents: Viscera live at WBUR CitySpace (https://zpr.io/PZF3BqnbKKJD)
Articles -
- A possible chemical explanation for the events associated with the death of Gloria Ramirez at Riverside General Hospital (https://zpr.io/sbjXYcPenGSH), the paper explaining Livermore Lab’s hypothesis.
Books -
- The Great Secret (https://zpr.io/PGCmihSFBHj4), by Jennet Conant about the birth of chemotherapy in the laboratory of war.
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