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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.'"
When your bureacratic reactant
Is but a silly distractant
Try the anionic surfactant:
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I am a hobby chemist. I make things like pies, cakes and coconut cookies. Tonight the kitchen, tomorrow the world!
Chemical Hobbyist? Is that like a drug user?
Today the mad scientist can't get hazardous chemicals, tomorrow it's the mad grad student! Where will it end?!
This comment is for entertainment purposes only. Any similarity to real insight or information is purely coincidental.
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
Remember, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate!
P.S. The irresponsible ones will blow themselves up anyway. Good for keeping full fire department employment.
Now all the tinkering is just done in labs that have access to "controlled" substances. It has the same effect. We have regulations to stop people who are a few neurons shy of a full brain (probably from playing with too many chemicals) harming themselves or others. 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.
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 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.
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meh
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.
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.
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.)
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.
I wouldn't be opposed to that. That's just hard to set up in real life. :)
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.
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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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America's culture of the 21st century is a culture of fear. People fear what they don't understand and because of the modern age of fear selling tactics. If people actually learned something in schools instead of public school being a social experiment, then the public might understand intelligent hobbyists such as this.
Instead, the media has labeled every science hobbyist as a mass murderer waiting fora chance to unleash their techno-death on the world!!! Mwuhahahah!!! Then it will be robot apocalypse!! Dogs and cats living together!! Mass hysteria!! YES!!!!
If you are really home on the range, you can cook anything anywhere.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
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...
What kind of search engine kills people when you do a search?
- Raynet --> .
Get your PDF copy here while you still can of the number one classic kids chemical experiment book that's been banned from libraries for decades.
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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I'm sorry, but that's got to be one of the most naive things I've ever heard. Considering all polymers, there are arbitrarily many different permutations of the known elements available in a pure substance and then considering all mixtures thereof we have more different concoctions than can be enumerated. While certainly the properties of many of these have been well-understood or could be inferred from known experiment, there are many that await only someone with imagination to discover and apply.
Case in point: http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2005-11/11-year-quest-create-disappearing-colored-bubbles
Reading your analogy about games, http://www.newgrounds.com/ might also be an eye-opener. Many of those games are whipped up by talented hobbyists but still get a lot of play.
~Ben
Hey, we said it was Beta. -- Google
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.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
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.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zubbles
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.
http://yarchive.net/explosives/nitrates.html
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
You can find methanol - and a bunch of other toxic, flammable solvents - at a good hardware or auto supply store. Most gas-line dryers are methanol. Just keep your methanol in a Heet bottle and you won't get a second look.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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.
As a chemist and practicing scientist, I can attest to the phenomenal costs of doing modern science (much of which comes from safety regulations, and associated "certified" equipment). So I do agree that it is very difficult in the modern age for a hobbyist in their garage to make a groundbreaking discovery... That having been said, i think there are many reasons why hobbyist chemistry (and hobbyist science in general) is a good thing:
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.
"give controlled access to chemicals to irresponsible people in a way that ensures no other people are harmed."
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.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
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!
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
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!
Bow-ties are cool.
I don't care what "dangerous" chemicals terrorists or any other boogeyman can get their hands on in general. Thats because context matters: that's what compound(s), time, location, amount, etc. We can be reasonable about which chemicals are banned for the home hobbyist, which are restricted (by amount, or maybe a background check) without practically banning dihydrogen monoxide like we are now. Besides everyday household products can contain large amounts of dangerous chemicals anyway. If I want to make home-brew napalm without using any illegal chemicals, it'd be pretty easy to do (dangerous, but easy). Freedom is 100% dead long before you can get 100% security...which doesn't exist anyway.
Except it wasn't chemical labs passing these laws, most labs want to decrease the regulations so they don't have to waste their time following them when they don't make sense. Also as a general rule, most chemical companies have an interest in innovators at home. It seems to me that most research that goes on in those labs are things the average home chemist wouldn't be able to do in their garage. How many garages have NMR capabilities?
It seems to me then that competition from home labs is pretty limited. Anything you DID discover in your basement that would compete with a major chemical lab would probably be very interesting to that chemical lab, because they could replicate it themselves for cheaper.
Anyway, your conspiracy theory is a bit ridiculous.
Right- hes a first tier citizen. The rest of down here are the ones that have to worry.
I hate to tell you this, but killing 20 people is already illegal. I know it's a shocker, but it's true.
Now if that same idiot decided to get up to 60 in his car and swerve onto the sidewalk, he could also kill those 20 people. Or if he decided to grab *insert any tool here* and go on a rampage, well, it might not be 20, or it might be more.
In no instance will any new laws keep someone who wishes to cause harm from doing so. Perhaps it may impact the scale, but there is as great a chance that it would result in a creative burst (i.e. thinking out side the box) and result in more harm. With the car example, said idiot may in fact kill 30 by doing something different.
The long and the short of it is this: You can't regulate crazy.
Any attempt at balance is limiting those who never would cause harm in order to *possibly* halt the few who would. As I stated above, murder is already a crime, yet it is not onerous because it does not limit us, rather it punishes those who choose to break from societal bounds. Chemicals, alcohol, drugs, and firearms, while potentially dangerous, do not in and of them selves provide the impetus for causing harm. Any harm that comes from such items is the result of choice, and no law can make people make good decisions.
Won't the bread come out a bit smelly though?
Tom...
My regime proposes that, if elected in to power, the following regulations will be put in to place:
1) All citizens will be reversibly sterilized at puberty.
2) Reproduction will be licensed. The license can be obtained upon successfully passing IQ and parental competency tests. A credit check will also be required to insure that only citizens financially able to care for offspring will be able to reproduce.
3) In the event that parents later prove to be incapable of raising a child, their offspring will be confiscated and raised in a sanitary state-run facility. In this event the parents' breeding license will be permanently revoked.
My regime feels that these policies are reasonable, will end all issues with teen pregnancy and abortion and should be viewed favorably by the population at large.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It's a Dutch oven, not a French one.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You're quite right. You're forgetting one thing, however. Governments excel at banning things. They tend to do poorly at critical thinking tasks, such as "evaluate where the real problem is".
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci