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A look at
Chemophobia
by Christian Thorsten
For the article "Chemical Safety", please click here.
There
was a time when it was common for every budding scientist
to go to the drugstore and buy
chemicals. The pharmacist would size his customer up pretty quickly--
if he
thought the person was an idiot or a klutz, then no chemicals.
Otherwise one could come home with a big bottle of formaldehyde
solution, a jar of potassium dichromate, or a host of
other things to help explore the wonders of science.There was a time when parents raised children, instead of letting
television do it for them. Gradually, however, the notion appeared that people had to
be protected from their own carelessness and ignorance. This
fostered an incredibly toxic idea: if anything bad at all
happened to a person, it must be someone else's fault. Right on
its heels was another, equally toxic idea: if a few people did
something bad, everyone should be punished. Pharmacists slowly quit selling "the good stuff" to junior
chemists. This writer remembers an increasingly-common type of
encounter: "Do you carry _______?" The whole place would
grow silent. A nearby lady-- complete with fur coat, two or three
pearl necklaces, and too much makeup--
would emit a sound of shocked disgust. In the most
haughtily-condescending voice she could muster, she warned, "Chemicals
are dangerous, young
man." Though her
sparkling gems of chemical knowledge had been gleaned almost entirely
from the New York Times, her
authoritative tone gave her credibility in the eyes of other store
patrons.Difficulty building a chemistry set may seem to certain
readers a small price to pay, but it's a symptom of a much greater
damage done to science in general. It's easy to be cavalier
with someone else's pastime, but consider it this way: attempting
to ban golf clubs because they're sometimes used in murders
and assaults would make little sense, and it would upset a great many
legitimate golfers. Statistically, there are dozens of common and
not-so-common things that far overshadow chemistry for the number of
injuries or deaths they produce-- but those things are not subject to
the level of irrational fear related to all things chemical.The high importance one might assign to golf doesn't make
for a good argument, either.
On the scale of importance, chemistry wins every time. While the
writer may be going out on a limb here, he's pretty sure there are
many, many
more hobby chemists who go on to become professionals than there are
hobby golfers who turn pro. Golf and bicycling are sports. Chemistry is the central science
on which nearly everything in our modern society depends. As a
matter of fact, a great many of the discoveries which underpin our
modern society came from amateur experimenters working on their own
time, not from an elite priesthood sequestered away in some ivory
tower. Despite increasing public prejudice against individual
chemists, society depends a great deal on discoveries made by lone,
amateur experimenters. People like to point out Leonardo
DaVinci's genius and his wonderful contributions to science.
Ironically, they fail to recall how public outrage at the time would
have had the man lynched, if only the common people and the authorities
had known what DaVinci was doing in his "clandestine" lab.
In DaVinci's day, the lingering dark-age mentality would have had him
burned at the stake for dissecting cadavers (now a standard exercise in
all medical schools). A new type of dark-age thinking, spawned
for different reasons, is becoming unfortunately common.Another misconception is that "everything that could be
discovered easily already has been". This couldn't be farther
from the truth. It is still entirely possible for an individual
to run across phenomena that science hasn't adequately explored.
These discoveries don't always require mass spectrometers or
million-dollar grants. Moreover, a vast body of knowledge has
been forgotten or perhaps
lies buried in some German or French scientific journal from the
1860's. Every scientist seems to have a citation with the
journal's abbreviation; nobody seems to know the full title
of the thing; and no library seems actually to have a copy
(sometimes the citations don't even point to the right article, because
nobody has ever actually found the journal...).
Who knows what useful advances could arise from re-exploring this early
work, now that the average amateur has more technology at her disposal
than did the entire world of the 19th Century?Something attracts chemists consistently. It's very
important to recognize what this is. People become chemists
because they like chemistry,
not because they
randomly picked it from a list of careers or because they think it will
lead them to riches or fame. In turn, they like chemistry because
something introduced them to it. What introduced
them to chemistry was, much more often than not, seeing a spectacular
demonstration and then going on to do their own experiments.Science
is crucial to maintaining a nation's vitality and its industrial
base; when the supply of budding scientists diminishes, everyone
suffers eventually. If you pick any random
person on the street and ask him what he thinks of "chemicals", it will
often be mistrust or even outright fear. The same person finds
no irony in the fact that he wears clothes, eats food, and drives a car.A great many chemists, this writer included, became
interested in the science because of its sheer "wow" factor. Now,
the "wow" factor has ceased to exist for many. Would-be chemists
are now told in school to do these experiments in their
"imaginations". They get discouraged quickly and
often give up science for life. Ultimately, that is society's
loss. Something is grievously wrong when we as a society can turn
out legions of disenfranchised youth, street gangs, and broken
families-- often without giving it a second thought-- but chemistry gets people
uncomfortable. The rising industrial powers of Asia put great
importance on chemistry and other basic sciences, as any rising
industrial power must. They also don't
have the stifling, litigious, chemophobic atmosphere so common in many
Western nations. It becomes obvious who will ultimately take the
crown of industrial supremacy. Compounding the problem is the gross overreaction on the
part of lawmakers and others who have criminalized or severely
restricted certain chemicals. The reasoning is always the
same: a few people misuse them, so let's restrict them for
everyone. Good examples are
red phosphorus and iodine. When outlawing the possession or
sale of methamphetamine proved unable to fix the
problem, someone thought it might be a good idea to restrict a couple
of reagents that
are very useful in general chemistry. When a normal person claims
he doesn't know of "any legitimate reason" to possess these chemicals,
that's just harmless ignorance. When someone ordained with
power of arrest says the same thing, it is no longer harmless.In a just society, buying iodine crystals and red
phosphorus would
no more make someone a drug cook than buying gasoline would make
someone an
arsonist. Worse, now we have legislators who for some reason
think it's a good idea to control the sale of
baking soda. That's just ridiculous.Phobias are all the same, in a way. The irrational
fear
of something becomes so much more debilitating than the thing
itself. If the phobia sufferer
happens to be aggressive, that
phobia will affect others who want no part of it.It is very difficult to outlaw high places, spiders, and
large bodies of water. One imagines that if it were possible,
those would be illegal too. | The
distillation apparatus and the three-necked flask-- symbols of the
noble and dignified profession of chemistry-- have been twisted by the
chemophobes into the basest tools of fear-mongering. Some people who ought to know better have aided and abetted
the chemophobes with their actions or words. Sometimes it's
subtle.A Wikipedia
article, evidently written by a chemist (i.e., someone who should know
better), claims that "any distillation procedure is extremely hazardous"
(underlined, no less!). That's ridiculous.Only a few kinds of distillation are "extremely"
hazardous. Most are only moderately so. |
Chemicals
are an
unavoidable and necessary part of every person's life. It's true that
some laboratory chemicals, when handled improperly, can cause injury or
death, but there are varying degrees of hazard (as you'll see
browsing through the MSDS for
various
chemicals- though some MSDS writers got carried away with their
over-use of capital letters). It's all about magnitudes. There is a dangerous, public misconception that
chemicals in
general are 'evil'. Lawmakers, having once been members of the
public themselves, bring their misconceptions with them to places they
shouldn't.The news media, largely ignorant of
chemistry, have only fueled the fire-- after all, hysteria gets
ratings.
Assigning evil qualities to inanimate objects is a hallmark of
primitive societies dominated by low intelligence, yet it routinely
comes from people who in all other respects are fairly smart. In
the common way of
thinking, the word "chemical" has become an emotionally-loaded
word. The word "synthetic" is looked upon with suspicion, at
best. Conversely, "natural" is often thought of as inherently
harmless.Cyanide is natural. This writer occasionally jokes that people should be
required to get an MSDS sheet and live in fear of a dozen regulations
every time they buy a stick of butter or even a gallon of water.
(Enough of this silliness
would cause modern society to grind to a halt, perhaps making people
realize the frank absurdity of chemophobia). According to more
than one
study, cooking butter-- actually, fats in general-- releases
several compounds that are hazardous by ingestion and inhalation.
Hexane and toluene are just two of these. Accidentally overheat
that butter and you also end up with acrolein, which is even
worse. There's potential DNA damage, cancer, and reproductive
harm- all from natural foods. | For
all
the time the author has spent working with hazardous chemicals over the
years, it was an ordinary tuna
sandwich that caused
the most harrowing experience. It appears there were either
bacterial
toxins or toxic breakdown products of protein (e.g., histamine), possibly
both. No amount of chemophobia,
nor environmental impact studies, nor
bumptious old ladies from the drugstore could have prevented this
incident.A
sandwich doesn't even have a warning label. On the other hand,
people have
been injured or killed for doing something they
really had no excuse to do: failing to read warning labels that
clearly stated the hazards. This has happened with power
tools, ladders, stairs, bicycles, buckets, automobiles, and household
cleaners. |
Banning
"chemicals" makes some uninformed people "feel better", but this can be
at everyone else's expense rather than benefit. Often it seems
they don't even know what it is they're banning. There
is class of chemicals that includes alkyl sulfonates and aryl-alkyl
sulfonates. These have killed numerous pets and people,
especially small children. To demonstrate their deadliness, one
can take a water solution of these compounds and pour them on some
grease ants. The ants will die within seconds-- often, faster
than they would from ant poison. Alkyl and aryl sulfonates can
disrupt cell
membranes and therefore are fundamentally dangerous to living things.Should we form a committee to ban these chemicals?
They
are the detergents we use every day. The
deaths are easy to prevent: not by banning detergents and making
everyone wear dirty clothes and eat from dirty dishes, but by keeping
detergents in a locked cabinet
when toddlers and pets are around. A
carpenter's hammer is a very dangerous weapon. You don't pull it
out
of the toolbox and smash yourself one, though, do you? I didn't
think so. A hammer is safe to use in some ways, but not in
others.
To
expect unconditional safety-- to demand some way to make everything
perfectly safe under all conditions-- is to be dangerously out of touch
with reality.Despite
the best intentions of those who want to make our world safer, there
will never be such thing as a "non-toxic house" or a "non-toxic
workplace". Even
the
oxygen in the air you breathe would kill us if it weren't for certain
enzymes
in the body-- and in fact, oxygen eventually kills us anyway.
How about water? Too much of that's not safe,
either. Water can disrupt electrolyte balances, and we all know
what it does when it's inhaled. If
people don't stop bandying about the
phrases "highly toxic" and "extremely hazardous" in connection with
everything under the sun,
they'll soon demean the phrase to the point where it's useless.
The same goes for "deadly", "poisonous", and so forth.The
constrictive atmosphere that has grown out of chemophobia seems
difficult to
stem, because several factors have entrenched it very deeply within our
present socio-economic framework. However, educating the
public is certainly within reach of even the average
citizen.Chemical Safety, Part I
Chemical Safety, Part II
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