Decline of Amateur Chemists (a.k.a citizen chemists)

mrjeffy321

There are numerous examples of people who experiment at home on their own and discover something significant (like in the Charles Hall case and refining aluminum), or whose experimentation gave them an early start in science and who later went onto become someone important in the science/tech industry.

Wired magazine has a very good article a few year ago about the decline of amateur science,
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/chemistry.html

vanesch

I started my home chemistry lab at the age of 10. By the time I was 18, I didn't do much with it anymore. I had a room in the basement of my parent's home, had quite a lot of glassware but didn't have anything like fume extraction or whatever. I didn't do anything special there, I just did experiments as they were described in simple lab manuals, and then did some variants on them, just for the fun of it. I had a few minor explosions with no harm. In fact, chemistry got me interested in science.

vanesch

huh ?

I did this several times as a kid. You could find it in kid's laboratory books!

DrDu

The problem is that Iodine is used in the reduction process in the preparation of extacy (MDMA). Hence iodine is a controlled substance. Therefore in most "free" nations there exist some McCarthyist laws which prosecute web pages where you can either buy this stuff without registration or which only provide help in obtaining it. Whether this really would include discussions of some kids about the synthesis of some grams of iodine may be doubted, but I understand that the physicsforums try to avoid to get sued. Strangely enough, as far as I understand it is perfectly legal at least in USA to discuss the synthesis of MDMA at length in a book.
What I wonder is why I am still allowed to buy gallons of gasoline without registering, given the immense potential damage by the Molotov cocktails you can prepare from it.

Borek

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/EHS/pro...ppendix_B.html

Unfortunately I can't access the original page (http://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/21...10/1310_02.htm)

Edit: it opened from the Google cache and iodine is not List II but List I.

Char. Limit

@DrDu:

Well, there's gasoline lobbyists, but there aren't any iodine lobbyists. Get the connection?