I just found it so wild that our bodies are full of carbon and nitrogen (even if as part of other chemicals. We breath, what I assume, to be molecular nitrogen. But then slap a carbon atom to a nitrogen atom and you’re screwed. Why?
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The danger of the CN- ion is that it is water soluble. Many potentially poisonous chemicals are oily and do not easily spread through the body. But even a few specks of potassium cyanide contain enough CN ions to get into every cell of the body. And the CN ion unfortunately looks very much like an oxygen molecules, electrically speaking.
Which brings up an interesting point- the reason we breathe oxygen in the first place. This is hard to make ELI5 but in a simple terms, Oxygen is greedy for electrons. It’s like a drain – the electrons trickle through the mitochondria in every cell , slowly doing work like a stream moving past a water wheel, and they end their journey by joining with the oxygen molecule. But every water wheel must have a place for the water to go. If the water could not flow away , it would pile up and the wheel would stop turning.
This is precisely what CN does. It sits where oxygen belongs and plugs up the channel. The electrons can no longer flow. This is equivalent to suffocation. Without oxygen there to accept the electrons, the mitochondria can no longer produce energy for the cell and the cell dies.
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