5min science #1: Dissolving a corpse with Hydrofluoric acid?
WAIT: Only read this article if you are above 18 years old. Don`t read further if you are highly sensitive!
Alright guys, how many of you have watched "Breaking Bad" and were always curious whether Walt and Jesse could really dissolve a human corpse completely by using Hydrofluoric acid? It is a very morbid question but so is the entire series :D
For those of you, who don`t know what I am talking about, I have cut out the particular scene of Season 4, Episode 1 (don`t be confused, it`s in the German version ;)
Again: Don´t watch this if you are highly sensitive:
"Hydrofluoric acid won't eat through plastic. It will, however, dissolve metal, rock, glass, ceramic. So there's that."
Of course, I only reflected on it on a purely intellectual basis and asked myself if this was actually possible. There are many madmen in the world, so I guessed that there should be some criminal cases where murderers have actually tried that out themselves.
So, we should have scientific evidence and studies about the subject outside of amateur discussions in open forums. And really, some people took this scene as an example to commit horrifying crimes after which they tried to dissolve the body of their victim by using hydrofluoric acid. I did some research and found an interesting article which is in German which is why I summarize it for you in English (freely in my own words):
Erwin Vermeij, working for the forensic institute of the Netherlands, is being interviewed and is telling us:
Theoretically you could do that, yes, if you had enough time and acid. A human body weighing 80kg consists of 40kg of water, 24kg of fat, 12 kg of protein and 4kg of bones - which is all dissoluble. However, this is not the case with dental implants, gallstones or other implants made of metal.
12 years ago I remember a case in the Netherlands where a drug dealer, according to a testimony, had killed his business partner and burned him. Yet, the police could not find any signs of an oven. Instead, they found a plastic bag with a 5kg mass which turned out to be plaster.
Obviously, you could argue that this is not a criminal offence by itself. But it contained pink and brown dots that looked weird. I put a piece of the mass into epoxy resin, polished it and placed it under our scanning electron microscope. Strangely enough, we discovered honeycomb-like structures with thin walls. We then increased the electron beam as it let each chemical element in the sample emit characteristic X-ray radiation. We found that these structures consist of calcium, phosphorus and fluorine.
This rang an alarm bell as calcium and phosphorus are the main components of human bones. But fluorine might be in toothpaste, yet you only find traces of it in the body. We had the suspicion that the corpse had been dissolved in hydrofluoric acid, because it consists of fluorine and hydrogen. The suspect was a professional welder and hydrofluoric acid was used in metal processing.
Since I had found in my own experiments that hydrofluoric acid alone is not strong enough to dissolve fat and proteins of the human body completely, this was not sufficient evidence. For the purpose of completely dissolving a corpse, hydrolysis is necessary. The ions in an acidic solution serve as catalysts in order to break up the long molecular chains of the fats and proteins.
Subsequently, these fragments can then be combined with water to form fat or amino acids. However, the fluorine and hydrogen ions of the hydrofluoric acid alone are too weak to break up the chains.The situation is different if a mixture of hydrofluoric acid and nitric acid is used. It is used for the pickling of metals. Thus, our suspect should also be able to get his hands on that.
To establish enough proof of our theory, we burned human bones and then treated them with this solution of hydrofluoric acid and nitric acid. In the electron microscope, the thin wall structures which we had found in the suspect's plaster block were shown. This result actually brought him a sentence of 18 years' imprisonment.
So, always consider the forensic doctor in case you plan to do that with someone you would like to disappear :D Kidding, guys. I hope you just have some morbid joy in reading about those topics as well.
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