For 60 years, doctors have had only one pill to prevent clotting: warfarin, a drug originally derived from rat poison and sold under the brand name Coumadin by Bristol-Myers Squibb (nyse: BMY - news - people ).

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But it would also be much different if city workers hadn't spotted a suspicious backpack left on the route of a Martin Luther King Jr. parade in Spokane, Washington, in January 2011, in which white supremacist Kevin Harpham had hidden a bomb packed with fishing weights coated in rat poison.

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The substance was flown to a Berlin hospital for tests that confirmed it was rat or mouse poison.

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