Re: legalitty of making listed chemicals to be used in legal

...We are killing off a lot of talent this way."

And there's a quote from Kerry Mullis' (Chem Nobel Prize
for PCR) about tinkering in his home chem lab as a kid
and teenager.

I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. I've told my grandchildren
not to go into science. It's not the same as it was 40 years
ago. There are no jobs, regulators have a proctoscope up your
*** whenever you're at work, and the definition of success
is to be condemned to an eternity of grant-writing.

From that limited perspective, you may be right. But what about
the idea of 'building a better mousetrap' or 'fulfilling an unmet
need' or 'solving an unsolved problem'?

Ed Land had an idea to use polarizing filters to cut down on
glare, etc., but he had to do a lot of tinkering before he
made his breakthrough discovery. (I've read that he did this
work in his NYC apartment; Wikipedia says he snuck into labs
at Columbia).

Baekeland came up with Velox paper as an independent consultant
(working at home, I would guess). With the royalty money he
built a house that included a place to do more experiments (at
HOME). He was looking to find a replacement for shellac and
discovered / invented Bakelite in his home / kitchen.

Rubber goods used to degrade, soften and fall apart. Charles
Goodyear wanted to solve the problem, which he did, working
at home.

Etc., etc., etc..

There are plenty of people with wide ranges of scientific
training (ignorant amateurs to unemployed PhDs [Douglas
Prasher!] that just want to tinker with ideas and maybe
come up with the next big breakthrough. Let them do it in
the US and then start a company that will create jobs
overseas :-) . But first we need to unleash the creative
juices without the fear that possession of a test tube will
send you to prison.

Even if they don't end up in scientific careers, kids need
to be able to have real fun with real science as kids.

.

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