Sarin--500 times more toxic than cyanide--was named in honor of the people who first discovered it: Schrader, Otto Ambros, Rüdiger and Hermann Van der Linde. Gerhard Schrader was the lead scientist who discovered Sarin while trying to develop an insecticide. His first creation was Tabun (which was accidentally spilled in the lab and almost killed him). The Nazis preempted his research and directed it from insects to humans, the "G-series" of nerve agents. Sarin developed from that program. Schrader became known as "the father of nerve gas." The Nazis developed and stored over 12,000 tons of Tabun (which, after the war, the Russians dumped in the Oder River!)
After the war Schrader returned to Bayer. Ambros, who was Hitler's chief chemical weapons engineer and one of the main driving forces behind the Nazi chemical weapons program, was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity at Nuremberg and sentenced to 8 years in prison, but after three years he was removed to advise the American Army on its own Sarin weapons program.
Ricin, the popular poison used by the Bulgarian secret police to murder the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov (with a modified umbrella using compressed gas to fire a tiny pellet contaminated with ricin into his leg), is not of this class or program. It is from the castor bean plant and is widely available.
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