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How Regulations Hamper Chemical Hobbyists
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Nov 11, 2008 10:31 AM
from the council-of-wise-men-strikes-again dept.
from the council-of-wise-men-strikes-again dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Chemical & Engineering News just ran this story that relates how government regulations create a terribly restrictive atmosphere for people who do chemistry as a hobby. (A related story was previously posted.)" The article gives some examples of why hamfisted regulations are harmful even to those who aren't doing the chemistry themselves: "Hobby chemists will tell you that home labs have been the source of some of chemistry's greatest contributions. Charles Goodyear figured out how to vulcanize rubber with the same stove that his wife used to bake the family's bread. Charles Martin Hall discovered the economical electrochemical process for refining aluminum from its ore in a woodshed laboratory near his family home. A plaque outside Sir William Henry Perkin's Cable Street residence in London notes that the chemist 'discovered the first aniline dyestuff, March 1856, while working in his home laboratory on this site and went on to found science-based industry.'"
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Home Science Under Attack In Massachusetts 1334 comments
An anonymous reader tips a guest posting up on the MAKE Magazine blog by the author of the Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments. It seems that authorities in Massachusetts have raided a home chemistry lab, apparently without a warrant, and made off with all of its contents. Here's the local article from the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. "Victor Deeb, a retired chemist who lives in Marlboro, has finally been allowed to return to his Fremont Street home, after Massachusetts authorities spent three days ransacking his basement lab and making off with its contents. Deeb is not accused of making methamphetamine or other illegal drugs. He's not accused of aiding terrorists, synthesizing explosives, nor even of making illegal fireworks. Deeb fell afoul of the Massachusetts authorities for... doing experiments... Pamela Wilderman, the code enforcement officer for [the Massachusetts town of] Marlboro stated, 'I think Mr. Deeb has crossed a line somewhere. This is not what we would consider to be a customary home occupation.' Allow me to translate Ms. Wilderman's words into plain English: 'Mr. Deeb hasn't actually violated any law or regulation that I can find, but I don't like what he's doing because I'm ignorant and irrationally afraid of chemicals, so I'll abuse my power to steal his property and shut him down.'"
Submission: How Regulations Hamper Chemical Hobbyists by Anonymous Coward
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bureacratic reactant (Score:5, Funny)
Is but a silly distractant
Try the anionic surfactant:
Burma Shave
Hobby chemist (Score:5, Funny)
Back in college... (Score:5, Funny)
Chemical Hobbyist? Is that like a drug user?
Re:Back in college... (Score:5, Funny)
Does it count as recreation when you're expanding your mind?
Also, where's that music coming from?!
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Re:Back in college... (Score:5, Funny)
Also, where's that music coming from?!
The Cylons
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Doomsday. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Doomsday. (Score:5, Insightful)
Enough said.
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Re:Doomsday. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is kind of like gun laws. All it really does is keep the stuff out of the hands of law abiding citizens. Most criminals aren't going to care if the substances they are using are illegal for them to have if they're going to use them to break the law anyway.
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Fear mongering (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Doomsday. (Score:5, Informative)
The thing to remember about people making drugs, is that chemistry isn't a hobby for them. If they need something, and it'll cost them $50 extra so that they can smuggle it into their state, or set up a fake business to get something shipped to, that isn't a problem for them.
But for the hobbyist, unless they want to become a criminal to do their chemistry a little more safely, there's no way they're going to be able to get what they need.
In a lot of ways it's cyclical. Ban the tools people need to do chemistry safely, someone gets harmed doing chemistry because they can't get what they need, ban more chemistry equipment from hobbyists.
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Re:Doomsday. (Score:5, Insightful)
In defense of the gun people, anytime a really bad government comes along high up on their "todo" list is to take away arms. They realize that there is only so far you can push an armed populace. This makes gun rights a political barrier much more than home chemistry labs. Hats off to them.
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Let's not forget the -good- scientists... (Score:5, Funny)
It's true, you raise an important point about the mad scientists. How is one supposed to perform mad science without the requisite chemicals? I suppose next they'll ban the use of decorative Tesla coils...
But there's another angle: we have to consider how this kind of legislation impacts the upstanding, college-educated, pipe-smoking benevolent scientist. How is Small-Town-Plagued-By-Bizarre-Monsters to be saved if their local College-Educated Scientist can't perform the experiments necessary to find the one chemical which will defeat the evil fiends? How will the comrades of said scientist defeat the monsters if they can't travel to a nearby chemical supply warehouse to get the chemical they need in sufficient quantity?
Now, not all monster scenarios require a chemist, it's true. From time to time a monster will appear whose one weakness is something as simple as Sodium Chloride ("Ordinary table salt!") - but what about the monsters who are vulnerable to sodium in its pure form? Or what if defeating the monsters requires large quantities of hydrochloric acid, or Potassium Iodide, or any one of a number of other sciency-sounding things?
Yep, before you know it we'll be overrun by superintelligent ants or fish-men or mole people or giant lobsters and then we'll just wish we hadn't cracked down on all this science!
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Re:Let's not forget the -good- scientists... (Score:5, Funny)
Yep, before you know it we'll be overrun by superintelligent ants or fish-men or mole people or giant lobsters.
Well, I for one...
...am not quite certain which of those I should welcome.
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Distrust by the masses.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I imagine that any kind of scientific exploration is viewed with distrust and quite a bit of fear. My son has recently discovered the world of electronics, and I feel bad for him since even radio shack doesn't carry what it used to.
I wonder if this shift is endemic in our country, from a nation of strivers to a nation purely of consumers.
--
Keep One Eye Open on Craiglist.com - Search hundreds of communities from one place with one click [bigattichouse.com]
Re:Distrust by the masses.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Distrust by the masses.. (Score:5, Informative)
A trip to Home Depot can net some interesting stuff too. Sulfuric acid, Hydrochloric acid, and Potassium Hydroxide, all sold right next to each other in the plumbing aisle.
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Re:Distrust by the masses.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I managed a Radio Shack store, 01-896*, in Florida.
Radio Shack stopped carrying most things due to liability. They even got sued for a kid coming in, getting a reed switch, and using it to kill his parents (true story).
From that point on, we where TOLD not to answer any questions, since answering a question can lead to legal actions against both you and the store (it's that entire helping the bad guy thing).
There are still some good kits available on the internet. Check out Google, it's your friend.
--Toll_Free
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Re:Distrust by the masses.. (Score:5, Interesting)
A) [citation needed]
B) Radio Shack carries reed switches. I bought one last week.
They don't carry the variety of basic components they used to, because consumer gadgets are more profitable; but they carry some. So I think your liability story is BS.
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Re:Distrust by the masses.. (Score:4, Interesting)
>and I feel bad for him since even radio shack doesn't carry what it used to.
It's the same where I live ( the UK )
Radio shack are no longer interested in supplying components, just crap white goods. I can understand why though; whats the profit margin on a resistor? And have you ever stood in line behind the electronics buff who is buying 20 components, and takes half an hour?
Personally, I think they should install vending machines in Radio Shack for components. I might start using them again if they did!
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Re:Distrust by the masses.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I make soap, partially for fun and partially due to allergies. I had a neighbor say "You're allowed to do that?" with total disbelief. I also make bread (not on the same day), and had the same reaction.
I get the same reaction -- I homebrew my own beer and mead. It's fun, and much cheaper to make yourself if you like specialty or hoppy beers. (If you like Bud Miller Coors, don't bother, you can't compete on those economics).
I've been asked, if everyone brewed their own beer, "wouldn't that hurt American jobs"?
I'm convinced that 90% of America is incapable of critical thinking, and if you could get them to watch movies like Brazil or Dr. Strangelove or The Mist.. they would NOT get the irony. Another 5% would get it but pretend otherwise, knowing it would be dangerous to irritate a mob. I'm also convinced this explains the popularity of Fox News: catering to the lowest denominator... at least until the economic shit hit the fan.
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Re:Distrust by the masses.. (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't bring about a free society by increasing oppression. Criminals are an excuse for oppression, but they are not a _reason_ for it.
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Re:Distrust by the masses.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Please emphasise "enforcement". The police are not there to prevent law breaking, merely to apprehend those who do. THAT is the premise of civilised society, not enforcement before the fact. The mass murderer must have already murdered for the police to chase and charge on those grounds. To expect or allow them to proceed before the crime has been committed is oppression.
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Re:Distrust by the masses.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Chicken or the egg situation. Sure, it is that way now, but that is probably because if you break one law, you will probably break another.
Would the situation be the same if you did not have to break a law to sell drugs in the first place?
I would be willing to bet that during prohibition that 90% of alcohol sellers were "nefarious and commit[ed] other crimes as well". However, now that it is legal to sell alcohol, I'd also be willing to be that most of them are not.
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Re:Distrust by the masses.. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you can thank the drug warriors for our loss of rights. We drug users are simply engaging in our right to pursue happiness. Nobody has a right to decide what does and doesn't go into my body except for me.
The intense violence and total terror you see, is the result not of drugs, but of a black market run rampant. No society in history has ever gotten rid of drug use. We can't even keep drugs out of maximum security prisons, what makes you think we can keep drugs out of a free society? Do you honestly think the society would still be free if we did? Of course not. The solution, as with alcohol, is regulation not prohibition.
Though, I must say, excellent troll. I almost believed you believe that garbage.
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Re:Distrust by the masses.. (Score:5, Insightful)
In a free society, we should be free to make the choice of what we want to put into our bodies. It's hopeless for the government to try to regulate such a frivilous thing. If the war on drugs was gone, and replaced with an honest education campaign (something that goes farther then saying "drugs are bad"), along with the government being able to oversee the production and distribution of these drugs, they would be safer. There wouldn't be the risk of spreading AIDS through needles, or having your substance cut with something else resulting in overdose. Many illegal drugs, such as cannabis, mushrooms, and LSD are relatively safe and I don't think exposing them to our culture would have to much of a negative effect - as long as people are well educated.
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Re:Distrust by the masses.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Distrust by the masses.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The sad thing is people actually believe what you say.
And it's even more depressing how easy it would be to solve all those problems.
If I was currently selling illegal drugs in the US and wanted to continue to rake in giant piles of money I'd be making political donations to whoever was pushing the "tough on drugs" laws with a little note along the lines of "keep up the good work mate".
Why? Well if it was legalised I'd be ruined!
Who was hurt most by the ending of prohibition? The mob of course, they wanted it to never end.
Legal distributors selling safer cheaper drugs would push them out of the market entirely.
The best thing that can happen for them is for a competitor to be busted, they can just expand into their former market overnight. Sure they might be busted themselves but the organisations which survive and grow will be the ones which are best at avoiding getting caught.
I've heard that during prohibition foreign alcohol producers quietly lobbied to keep prohibition since consumption didn't go down, the American producers were pushed out of business and import taxes went the way of the morning mist.
Few people seem to be able to graps this, drug laws just create a situation where there's a group of people distributing drugs with a large financial incentive to expand their market.
Want to get rid of the drug dealers? It only takes a few easy and cheap steps.
Step 1: Provide free high quality drugs to people already addicted with no criminal penalties or consequences to people who come forward and ask for them.
Step 2: You're basicly done, you've knocked the bottom out of the drug buisness, you are now the distributor and you have no reason to try to get more people addicted. Drug dealers can no longer make any profit out of getting kids addicted since they just go to you when it starts costing money.
Much much much much cheaper than the massive failure that the war on drugs is.
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Bad example... (Score:5, Insightful)
Charles Goodyear figured out how to vulcanize rubber with the same stove that his wife used to bake the family's bread.
You should never use the same equipment for your chemistry as for your other household things. If you're going to do chemistry at home, do it safely. This means having a separate (well-ventilated) room for your work, and using separate ovens, microwave, glassware, and other equipment for your work. Chemical contamination is a real threat. You may look at a chemical reaction and deem all the reactants and products to be safe... but if you make a mistake you may contaminate a room/oven/glassware with a more dangerous side-product. And you do not want to be then ingesting these contaminants (worse, you do not want to expose your family and friends).
So, like I said, be safe and use dedicated equipment for your experiments. (And don't brush your teeth with the toothbrush you use to clean your test tubes.)
Re:Bad example... (Score:5, Funny)
You should never use the same equipment for your chemistry as for your other household things.
Too true. With some of the additives they use these days, the risk of your food contaminating your delicate experiments is just too great. If, say, you got some of that melamine-adulterated Chinese milk mixed up with your reactants, it could really screw up the results!
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Re:Bad example... (Score:5, Funny)
You know it is people like you that have created this scarcity of mutant superheroes.
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More of the same sad shit... (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't let people experiment with stuff that they might be able to make a bomb out of, or a meth lab because we law enforcement agents can't tell the difference, and besides, only terrorists and criminals are interested in chemical reactions. right?
That says nothing about the fact that even if it is illegal, terrorists, criminals, and drug czar wannabes will still have their labs. This can only hurt the honest law abiding citizenry.
It's about time we had much less government interference, and more government support of engineering and entrepreneurship in these United States. Do you have any idea what it costs for a safe chem storage locker? If price is not enough, they put regulations out to make it near impossible to do simple things, never mind experiment with any chemicals.
Why would someone want to do that? Hmmm perhaps you might be looking for a heat transfer fluid for a closed system solar power electric generator. Perhaps you are experimenting to find the optimum chemical recipe for heat transfer fluid on a home/earth heating/cooling system for your area. Perhaps you are trying to create a cheap cleaning solution that is environmentally friendly. There are hundreds of reasons that someone might want to set up a chemistry lab at home for hobby use. I mean seriously, if you find a cheap clean easy method to convert old motor oil to some sort of valid fuel... go for it. Perhaps you find the exact chemical soup required for quickly biodegrading rubbish or plastics in a quick ecologically sound manner.
The roomba did not come from government research facilities or even Boeing or Lockheed-Martin. Why should we expect that all chemical discoveries would come from commercial enterprises? That's just fucking stupid.
Not just for home chemists (Score:5, Insightful)
Without wishing to sound like a libertarian, this is true for a great many things that are regulated - from the outside those regulations either a) are totally uninteresting, or b) seem pretty reasonable. But when you're on the inside of whatever activity is being regulated it's often the case that you can see how stupid/harmful regulation is.
It's not unlike watching a news report on TV about something you're familiar with. You see how badly they butcher the subject, and then start wondering what they do to subjects you don't know about...
Get The Golden Book Of Chemistry Experiments PDF (Score:5, Informative)
There are severe problems 'hobby' chemistry... (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was in High School, I set up a full lab, with the full array of chemicals like Sulfuric Acid, Hydrazine, Ethyl Acetoacetate etc etc. I learned a tremendous amount and made some interesting chemicals, but in hindsight I have serious reservations:
1) Most people will have a very hard time coping with hazardous waste in a proper fashion, and the temptation to cut corners will be irresistible.
2) If you look at the current state of chemical research, you'll see that the home hobbyist *HAS NO CHANCE* of keeping pace with a modern research lab. Palladium catalysts? Glove Boxes? Preparative Chromatography? NMR? Organometallic chemistry? Suzuki couplings? If you want to advance the state of the art and make meaningful contributions you need heavy tools nowadays. Yes, you might find something interesting, but most all of the easy chemicals have been made.
3) The risk of fire, explosion and toxic contamination is very real. Someone trying to distill a liter of THF in their garage is asking for trouble, and if my neighbor was doing this I would be very concerned.
If someone wants to spend $600,000 and lease space in an industrial park, more power to 'em, but it doesn't sound like a hobby at that point.
I eventually packed everything up and took it to a 'hazardous material collection day' run by the local fire department. They were quite surprised, and it all went off to a HazMat landfill.
Re:Regulations (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Regulations (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Regulations ... don't work and cannot work. (Score:5, Insightful)
The irresponsible people are allowed to buy incredible amounts of extremely hazardous materials like fireworks, while many chemicals that require qualifications, to even know what to do with them, are heavily restricted.
But then, someone wishing to do harm to others, can cause a lot of damage with just some gasoline and a lighter. The chemical isn't the danger, its the actions and intentions of the people using it.
Therefore the solution isn't to be found in ever more extra controls and banning parts of chemistry, its to be found in psychology. (We have enough controls on chemistry to avoid accidents, but ever more controls can never stop some people causing intentional harm towards others).
The answer to this problem is actually easier, than the relentless government solution of continued prohibition, of anything else they detect that can be used to harm others. There will always be things that can be used to cause harm to others. There will also always be new things found that can cause harm to others. Prohibition will never work. Its always going to be less than required. Plus they cannot block everything. (Even a house brick can cause harm to others, so they cannot ban house bricks). The solution of prohibition of chemicals and even at times, knowledge itself cannot work.
Psychology shows why people cause harm to others, for their own gain. The harm is caused intentional, there is a reason why they choose to cause harm to others. Only when enough people learn how to recognize the psychology of the ones who cause harm towards others, can we finally move towards a world, without fear of people causing intentional harm to others.
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Re:Regulations (Score:5, Insightful)
There are many responsible people who can tinker with chemicals but there are many irresponsible ones who would end up seriously harming themselves or others, accidentally or on purpose.
And yet we let damn near everyone drive.
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Re:Regulations (Score:5, Insightful)
Worse yet, we let them pro-create. Protect them from blowing themselves up and let them create little replicas of themselves. The antitheses of evolution.
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Re:Regulations (Score:5, Insightful)
No! The only way you could have the antithesis of evolution is if the rules of the universe were changed such that the things more likely to survive became less numerous over time.
What you are doing is projecting some kind of value judgment onto a natural process, which should be rejected by the logical mind. If you're so concerned about the unintelligent procreating over the more intellectual people in an overthrow of evolution, perhaps you should consider what larger, smarter species various insects might have driven to destruction over the last 400 million years.
That said, human society is about more than just natural selection; we have the reasoned ability to choose what is better long-term, rather than simply allowing immediate survival to determine everything.
Sorry for the rant, but if you let these ideas stick, they tend to spread.
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Re:Regulations (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you suggesting that these regulations have no effect on the potential for people to discover new things?
I'd argue that irresponsibility can't be fixed by any amount of regulation. Attempts to do so only make it more difficult for the responsible to contribute to society in positive ways.
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Re:Regulations (Score:5, Informative)
There are very few such labs which allow "tinkering". Such labs tend to be run either by for-profit entities which expect you to do profitable work, or research insttitutions which expect you to do work which will get you grants.
In any case, the authorites come down even on non-controlled substances, as the article indicates. What chemists consider "dangerous" isn't the same as what the authorites do. From the article, one Nobel Prize winning chemist talking about his home lab: "I don't have anything that is dangerous in my lab. I have many chemicals in small amounts--salts and buffers" as well as some organic solvents, such as methanol, Shimomura says."
Methanol is both highly toxic and highly flammable. That's what the authorities would call "dangerous" if they raided his lab (though they wouldn't blink at gasoline). I'm guessing many of those salts are at least poisonous.
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Re:Bake on a stove? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Bake on a stove? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:while historical chemical advances (Score:5, Interesting)
Most recently, a man fooling around with a home chemistry set discovered that gold flakes of a certain size heat up in the presence of low energy microwaves. Yes all metals do this, but the gold particles heated up at such a low energy that you could swallow the gold and get your body exposed to microwaves that do no significant damage except to the parts of your body that are touching the gold. As it was already known that tumors tend to accumulate heavy metals, it created a cancer treatment.
The original discovery was done within the last 10 years, no 20, and was done at someone's home, not in a lab.
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Never heard of Zubbles? (Score:5, Insightful)
After an unexplained breakthrough in his kitchen, he was able to produce blue bubbles.
Popular Science named them the "Innovation of the Year" for 2005, and Reader's Digest said they were one of the "Best Innovations" of the year in 2006.[1]
I suspect you are trolling, but the mods giving you +5 Interesting have apparently bought your post whole.
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Re:while historical chemical advances (Score:5, Insightful)
1. The combinatorial space in science (and in the production of chemicals especially) is absolutely massive. There is no practical way for chemists to explore it all, so of course they make educated guesses about what is both (a) reasonably easy to make; and (b) of some practical value. However because the combinatorial space is large, there is still plenty of uncharted territory for others to explore. Random fortuitous discoveries are certainly a part of science.
2. Hobbyists can afford to do research that is risky and has no obvious application (I mean "risky" in the sense of "it might not work or lead anywhere" and not in the sense of "it might be dangerous"). They don't have to satisfy funding agencies or pragmatic concerns. They can just explore. Thus they can sometimes pursue crazy lines of inquiry that established scientists wouldn't touch.
3. There is such a thing as having your creativity inhibited by institutionalized concepts. A hobbyist isn't as restricted by the "well-established-rules" of the field, and thus may make creative discoveries others would have missed. (This is rare, by the way: the vast majority of science comes from pushing along using well-established procedures and concepts... but rare "out of the box" discoveries are also important in science.)
4. Doing chemistry (or science in general) on a budget, using only commonly-available equipment, can actually force specific kinds of discoveries. Specifically, it helps to discover things that are cheap (which industry loves!) since it can be done with commodity chemicals and tools. (Who knows, there may be a cheap way to make a better antifreeze using only what is in your house and back-yard.) So hobbyists actually have a chance to discover things that will actually make an impact on industry (whereas the chance that they discover something fundamentally new, without modern diagnostic tools, is slimmer).
5. Finally, even if the hobbyist doesn't actually discover anything new or interesting (which is, by far, the most likely outcome), it has a positive effect on the participants. The people doing it are doing so for fun (presumably), and that in itself is reason enough. Moreover it may be the catalyst for someone to go into science professionally. The ability to make kids enthusiastic about science should not be overlooked. Like most hobbies, hobby-science is more about the process than the end result.
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Re:while historical chemical advances (Score:5, Insightful)
Another problem is the threat that chemists can pose to themselves and others. For every Goodyear who succeeded, how many unknown chemists ended up with poisoning, burns, cancer, or other damage to the local neighborhood?
Ok, so you had unknown chemists with poisoning, burns and cancer. The fact that they remain unknown means that they didn't really pose a risk. How often do you hear stories of some home chemist doing something that required the evacuation of his neighbor's house, let alone the entire neighborhood?
Now, how often do we hear about car accidents that result in an 80 car pileup and 10-15 people killed?
My hobby of electronics and electrical work is far more likely to kill or maim someone than a chemist.
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Re:I can see the the other side as well. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Have you seen Breaking Bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
I grew up with a heroin lab on one side and a dog owner on the other. The dog owner was a constant irritation from day one, with the dog barking at all hours and crapping on the lawn. The heroin lab were decent neighbors who didn't really affect us until the night the cops came. Make all the meth/heroin/whatever you want, but keep your blasted dogs away, I say!
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