For example, I read that 5g of cyanide is enough to kill 35 people. What does that even mean? If I could somehow split 5g of solid cyanide (is that a thing?) into 35 parts and put it in 35 peoples’ Dr. Pepper they would all die? And how could you possibly test that?
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Take a bunch of mice and weigh them.
Administer various doses of the target poison.
See which dose will kill half of the mice it’s administered to.
Scale up the weight of the mice to 1 kg. Scale up the weight of the dosage by an identical factor. This gives you the LD50, which is usually measured in mg/kg body weight. This means that for every kilogram of body weight in the target, you need that many mg of the poison for a 50% chance of it being lethal.
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