Slashdot Mirror
How Regulations Hamper Chemical Hobbyists
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.'"
Solution: give controlled access to chemicals to irresponsible people in a way that ensures no other people are harmed. No more irresponsible people => problem solved.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
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.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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.