A 26-year-old graduate student, who until late January was working as a researcher in Queen’s University’s chemistry department, admitted Thursday to dosing a fellow researcher with a dangerous chemical.

Ziejie Wang pleaded guilty in Kingston ‘s Ontario Court of Justice to administering a noxious substance to a post-doctoral fellow with intent to endanger his life or cause bodily harm and to committing an aggravated assault on the same man by endangering his life between Jan. 8 and 29, with N-Nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA).

There was a brief glitch in proceedings when defence lawyer Brian Greenspan told Justice Allan Letourneau his client admitted intent to cause bodily harm but not intent to endanger his peer’s life.

Assistant Crown attorney Janet O’Brien objected that bodily harm alone couldn’t sustain a charge of aggravated assault. And after a brief private discussion between the two lawyers, Greenspan told the judge they’d agreed the charge was satisfied by “objective foresight of the risk of endangering life.”

Wang was arrested Jan. 29, according to O’Brien, after Kingston Police were called to Queen’s campus to investigate a complaint of intentional poisoning in the lab.

Wang’s former roommate and fellow researcher, she told the judge, had come to believe that Wang was tampering with his food and water.

The first incident, she said, was on Jan. 8 when the victim bought an apple pie at Metro and brought it back to the chemistry lab, where he works with 17 other research students.

He didn’t eat it immediately, according to O’Brien, and later when he took his first bite, he found it strangely bitter. A second bite, she said, and he decided the pastry was inedible.

She told Justice Letourneau that those two bites were enough to make him very ill, however. Four hours later, he developed diarrhea and spent the hours between 2 and 4 p.m. with his head on his desk feeling like he was going to vomit.

Then he did vomit.

O’Brien said he initially attributed his sickness to food contamination, and one week later, on Monday, Jan. 15, he brought in another pie.

When he got around to sampling the new pastry, O’Brien said, it at first tasted fine. But by the time he reached the middle, she said, he detected that same bitter flavour.

The following week, she said, the victim bought a loaf of cinnamon raisin bread at Loblaws. He put half in his fridge at home, she told the judge, and took the other half with him on Monday, Jan. 22, to eat at his desk in the chemistry department.

Yet again when he tasted it, O’Brien said, he realized something was wrong: The bread had a chemical rather than an organic smell, and when the victim asked a fellow researcher to taste it, the other man agreed it tasted bad and spit the bread out.

And it wasn’t just in the lab he was being dosed. O’Brien said it was the victim’s practice to drive home to Mississauga on Fridays to see his family, and on Jan. 19 and again on Jan. 26 he detected a chemical smell in the water flask he takes on those trips.

She told the judge he saved a sample of that water, and on Jan. 29, another Monday, he took the advice of a friend and set up a hidden camera at his desk.

That morning, she told the judge, the victim had brought in a loaf of Italian bread, which he left in his backpack, tucked inside a desk drawer.

At 8:56 a.m., he was called to a group meeting and, O’Brien said, some time after it started Wang left.

Fifty-seven minutes later, she told the judge, the victim received a notification on his cellphone and learned his camera had captured video of Wang at his desk, wearing gloves and using a pipette to dispense something in the area where the victim’s lunch was kept.

Afterward, when he returned to his desk, O’Brien said, it was also evident to the targeted researcher that someone had rummaged through his backpack.

She told Justice Letourneau that Wang, when he was later interviewed by Kingston Police officers and shown the video of him holding the pipette at his fellow researcher’s desk, admitted putting something in his food. But she said he told them he’d only done it once and that it was ethanol, a readily available solvent with many commercial applications, including as a starter fluid in gasoline and diesel engines.

The victim provided investigators with samples he’d retained of his doctored water and food, however, and, O’Brien said, they were submitted to the Centre of Forensic Sciences, which forwarded the results in early April.

What they found, she told the judge, was that water in the victim’s metal water bottle had been dosed with NDMA, while his food contained NDMA and ethanol and water from a plastic tube he used contained NDMA and diethyl ether, once used as an anesthetic, but primarily used now as a solvent.

The NDMA, she suggested to the judge, was the most concerning adulterant, however. It’s part of a family of chemicals with strong carcinogenic tendencies and no commercial applications in North America.

O’Brien said it’s most commonly used to induce tumours in lab animals and, based on extrapolations of those animal studies, scientists believe as little as three grams of it could kill an adult human.

Queen’s doesn’t stock NDMA in its laboratories but does have the precursor chemicals to make it.

It wasn’t revealed in open court why Wang tampered with his fellow researcher’s food and drink.

Submissions on sentencing, which were expected to be made by the lawyers on Thursday, have been postponed until early November, in part because of translation problems.

Both Wang and his victim require the assistance of Chinese language interpreters. But the attorney general’s court services would only pay for one interpreter, who was able to accommodate both men, speaking in Mandarin during the hearing, although Wang’s first preference was for Cantonese.

The victim’s impact statement, however, is also written in Chinese, and the Kingston Crown attorney’s office was unable to obtain permission to have it translated and transcribed in English prior to Wang entering his pleas.

Greenspan told Justice Letourneau his client has offered to pay for translating and transcribing the document. He observed that “it’s rather unprecedented that an accused would pay for the translation of a victim impact statement,” but he said Wang wants to move the matter forward and is willing to do it.

syanagisawa@postmedia.com