Pharyngula

What kind of age group are we talking about with these?

And what would you suggest I buy my daughter individually and assemble into a jury-rigged chemistry set for her when she reaches about that age?

Posted by: Azkyroth | May 31, 2006 9:11 PM

On one of his trips to England, my brother bought me my first chemistry set. I was about 10 years old at a time. Soon enough, I started buying my own glassware and chemicals at a "real" store where real scientists buy theirs. Good old days. I hate the way they are making the sets less and less interesting - a process that has been going on for quite a while now, i.e., it is not this years' news.

Posted by: coturnix | May 31, 2006 9:18 PM

PZ--

Are you suggesting that EZ Bake ovens do not blow things up in interesting ways?

If so, I beg to differ.

.

Posted by: RossK | May 31, 2006 9:33 PM

My thoughts exactly. Of course, in 10-12 years she won't be inclined to eat the contents, which she now is...

Posted by: Azkyroth | May 31, 2006 9:51 PM

"It was a process that separated American youth into the majority who got bored with it all and gave up on science, a very rare few who maimed themselves, and a less rare but still minority group who built on the experience to become scientists and engineers one day."

I don't fall in any of those three categories; I'm neither maimed nor a scientist nor an engineer, but I certainly never grew bored with science, but didn't pursue an academic track, dropped out of college, and worked in science fiction and other publishing from the age of 15 on.

"There was stuff in there that would burn, or blow up, or stain the furniture irreparably, or kill someone...that was the fun and the thrill of it all."

Along with actually experimenting for one's self to see what would happen, and what one could do.

This is just criminal; I'm so glad I'm not a kid today in the sense of how over-protected and limited they are (and not to mention how over-regimented so many are), even with the compensations of today's computers and technology.

Posted by: Gary Farber | May 31, 2006 10:03 PM

It's the lawyers, and the fear of liability suits that have killed off the chem sets of our youth. The mfrs are afraid of Mr and Mrs Citizen suing for millions of dollars if little Johnny or Janey blows off a hand or goes blind. Of course, you'd have to try really hard to do either even with my set of 40 years ago.

I did find out that mixing all the chemicals into water produced a greenish-gray gloopy mess that left a nice stain on our cardtable and smoked a little. Nothing exploded -- my mother was probably grateful for that!

I also had a geology set with a hammer. It's a wonder I didn't put out an eye with that thing, chipping away at rocks in the yard. Back then, no one gave a thought about eye protection.

Another big boogeyman now is mercury. My science teacher used to let us play with the stuff back when. Nowadays, teachers who do that risk losing their jobs. Risk and liability, that's what it's all about.

Posted by: wheatdogg | May 31, 2006 10:23 PM

Tiax rules all!

Hehehehehe...

I never had much of a chance to play with chemistry sets, not that I wouldn't have loved the opportunity. For my parents, most of the ones they could find were expensive as well as dangerous. I think that was the excuse...

Same for model rocketry. And the Justice Department's claim that terrorists could use model rockets to blow up a commercial airliner needs to be publicly ridiculed on every channel. Unless the plane was on the ground, I'm quite certain that nothing short of a malign miracle would permit someone to destroy it with a tiny, unguided missile lacking the thrust to carry a significant quantity of explosive.

As for Joey...well, at 10-12 I'd get her the hammer but probably insist she wear goggles, or at least sunglasses or something of the sort. However, from about the age of 6-10 I would routinely (an hour or two most days) entertain myself by simulating Star Wars-style space battles using bits of gravel to represent the ships and pulverizing the ones that were hit with a convenient chunk of what appears to be somewhat weathered gabbro, and I certainly never managed to hit an eye. (As one might have surmised, my parents initially bought the hysteria about television and video games harming children hook, line, and sinker, and consequently I was severely deprived in those departments as a child. They still seem to have trouble getting their minds around games like Baldur's Gate and Deus Ex that are as intellectually complex and immersive as some of the better novels, and actually require the player to *think*.)

Posted by: Azkyroth | May 31, 2006 10:35 PM

My science teacher used to let us play with the stuff back when. Nowadays, teachers who do that risk losing their jobs. Risk and liability, that's what it's all about.

The rite of passage in the high school chemistry lab was to catch the bottle of mercury. This was always amusing because the bottle was a lot heavier than it looked. To this day, I'm amazed that nobody ever dropped the thing.

After that, it was mercury hockey in the large sink, with the goal being the drain. My high school chemistry teacher will probably burn in hell for that, but nobody really paid much attention to mercury hazards back then. (Of course, this is the same teacher that managed to burn a hole in the ceiling with a slightly larger than recommended hunk of sodium, so ...)

Posted by: Rick @ shrimp and grits | May 31, 2006 10:59 PM

HANDLE CAREFULLY. NOT EXPECTED TO BE A HEALTH HAZARD.

I actually found a warning label a lot like that in our lab the other day, on a box containing molybenum foil.

(Of course, this is the same teacher that managed to burn a hole in the ceiling with a slightly larger than recommended hunk of sodium, so ...)

Hey, my AP chemistry teacher set the lawn on fire with a larger than recommended chunk of sodium. Gotta give her credit for having the foresight to do it outside, at least. I wonder how many of us who became chemists had teachers like that, who were willing to take a chance to show their students something interesting about science?

Posted by: The Disgruntled Chemist | May 31, 2006 11:07 PM

Overzealous warnings are pretty common on laboratory chemicals. Take sand, for instance:

http://www.sciencestuff.com/msds/C2448.html

"Generally not hazardous in normal handling, however good laboratory practices should always be used. Avoid long term exposure to skin or by inhalation."

"Effects of overexposure: Acute and chronic: May cause irritation to eyes and skin. Inhalation may cause pain in chest, decreased vital capcity and cough and is a suspected carcinogen. Conditions aggravated: Chronic lung scaring leads to a progressive massive fibrosis. Target organs: Lungs"

I guess I'm glad I don't live at the beach.

Posted by: Rick @ shrimp and grits | May 31, 2006 11:23 PM

It would be nice if someone scanned a few of those old Chemistry set manuals and made them available to the general public.

It'd probably be better to go back to books / publications that are no longer under copyright and modernize those instead. Depends on how old the set you're talking about is, though.

There are one or two chemistry books with experiments on Project Gutenberg. Sadly, no pictures. (I actually have an original copy of one of the old chemistry books that's available on PG and have debated scanning the pictures and making an HTML version ... if there's interest.)

Posted by: Rick @ shrimp and grits | May 31, 2006 11:33 PM

I had a small one when I was a kid. All I can remember doing with it was putting aluminum foil in a clear liquid and getting heat, bubbles, and brown stuff, and getting iron filings in my eye.
I did, however, have a decent collection of insects in mason jars, and spent a fair amount of time looking under rocks. I also remember being fascinated by a preserved fish eye in one of my science teacher's shelves.
That said, this is sad. Without the fun of doing it yourself, it just doesn't feel like science.

Posted by: RCP | May 31, 2006 11:52 PM

So Texas has actually passed the Buy Lab Equipment Go To Jail law? A number of years ago some guy in the Lege got the Ig Nobel Prize for proposing that. Progress marches on.

We really are doomed, you know. Not that this stuff is new, just that it's progressing, as noted. During the Eisenhower admin there was some survey on high school students' attitudes, and it was as disgusting as you'd expect; but I recall that in addition to their worries about too much of this free speech stuff, the majority agreed that it was necessary to be careful about who would be allowed to be a scientist. Well, now we've solved the problem: suppress the production of scientists as much as possible, right from the start. We can always import them -- oooops, scratch that, we're not about to let that sort of people get visas!

But, as you know, the republic has no need of scientists.

Posted by: porlockjr | June 1, 2006 1:44 AM

I never had a chemistry set. Although I remember ones with literally dozens of tubes being advertised, I wound up getting a microscope instead (and making some hideous kind of agar jelly out of Oxo cubes). This was around the mid '90s.

Fortunately when I came to high school, most of the science teachers were certifiably insane (one would mess around with chlorine and ammonia without a fume hood, warning us in advance that we might get headaches from the occasional leak) and did some fantastic experiments. Were it not for that I probably wouldn't be in chemistry.

Alas, compensation culture and a lack of qualified people means that even this exposure to experiment is dissapearing. So I think we're in trouble. :/

Posted by: sockatume | June 1, 2006 3:12 AM

Overzealous warnings are pretty common on laboratory chemicals. Take sand, for instance.

And dihydrogen monoxide!

It's a bit worrying that nucleotides are sometimes marked hazardous, as well. How to get rid of all the nucleotides in my cells?

Posted by: windy | June 1, 2006 4:44 AM

I think the best DHMO warning labels are:

"DHMO is a major component of acid rain" and

"Thousands are killed by accidental inhalation of liquid DHMO each year".

Posted by: windy | June 1, 2006 5:01 AM

Seems to me that with the Internet, all things are possible, but I don't have the background to know whether this will be good for my kid some day. Any opinions? I mean, it comes with an alcohol burner 'n stuff. They even mention the dreaded hydrogen peroxide! ;-)

http://www.physlink.com/estore/cart/CHEMC3000.cfm

You can also buy the old manuals that came with the classic chemistry sets and assemble your own:

http://www.essex1.com/people/speer/chem.html

So all does not appear to be lost, right?

Posted by: zadig | June 1, 2006 6:53 AM

Heh,

I lobbied for, and got, a very nice chemistry set when I was about ten. The workbench I used was quickly scarred with acid stains and spilled electrolysis solutions. I may have been a little young by some standards, although I still don't think so.

But as a related experience, I'd like to share an experience I had when I was in India in the late 1980's. I was talking with an Indian government official and we were comparing the educational systems we both went through when we were younger. I described the alarm clocks I took apart (and couldn't get back together), the chemistry set I used to destroy things, the thermite bomb some of us made in middle-school with stolen materials, and even the various cars I drove and repaired.

His comment was that, at least during his childhood, India was too poor to have the artifacts like clocks and cars for children to play with and possibly destroy. In his case, and he implied it was typical, the family had textbooks which each child studied in turn in order to learn how clocks, cars, or chemistry happened.

He attributed American ingenuity to the fact that our children were able and allowed to dismantle and modify all sorts of devices, giving them an edge in understanding the limits of each design. Knowledge of how things operate which cannot be discovered in a textbook.

Now, this is an anecdote, and I don't know how true it was at the time, or even if it was true if anything has changed in India. It seems to be popularly thought that the opportunities for American children to take apart things are less today than it was when I was growing up. I don't know how true that may be, I have no children myself and my own experiences may have been exceptional.

However, it seems to me that rather than stifle the curiosity of children by telling them an activity is unsafe (and thus not allowed), we should do what we can to improve safety but also recognize that some activities have an element of danger and accept it. As adults we don't live in a world of cotton wool, we should allow our children to learn how to deal with hazards before they reach the age when they are allowed to drive or drink.

Again, not having children, I don't have much of a feeling as to how important they are to people. So if I have completely miss-read the emotional aspects, I apologize. It is never my intent to preach, only share my own thoughts and experiences.

Cheers,

-Flex

Posted by: Flex | June 1, 2006 7:15 AM

It's a cliche, but it's a real cliche. My HS chemistry teacher was one-handed because of a teenage mishap with a matchhead rocket or bomb.

Posted by: John Emerson | June 1, 2006 7:51 AM

(For those of you interested in the history of chemistry I've always found the Norton volume to be a good one volume one.)

My father is a chemist by training, and he illustrates that kids are going to do crazy dangerous crap regardless of where they get their stuff. He still has a slight scar from where he burned his neck (!) with nitric acid as a kid. I doubt even these old-timey kits had large amounts of conc. nitric acid, so it suggests that ambitious kids will find a way.

Myself, I never had any chemistry kits, though I did some weird stuff at home. I remember making some wonderful blue ... something by dissolving (and then some) a crazy amount of something I don't remember and food colouring in water. I brought it to school in a little bottle or something and it got some attention because the colour was rather remarkable. Something about

Posted by: Keith Douglas | June 1, 2006 8:50 AM

I think my view is outnumbered about 40 to 1 here, but I don't see anyone offering a reasonable proposal; you're just offering another take on the old "I survived childhood" canard (without child safety seats, with lead paint and asbestos ceiling insulation everywhere, etc.) I sympathize with it more (I was too young for good chemistry sets and I did play with a soldering iron a little) but it's still the same naive libertarianism.

There are two conflicting public goods. One is providing kids with unbridled access to fascinating science. The other is keeping them safe. Of the two, I think the latter is clearly more important. (Note: I agree that what drives in practice this is fear of lawsuits, not a careful balancing of public goods, but I don't think the outcome is as terrible as virtually everyone else here does.)

I assume the actual number of deaths/maimings from chemistry sets was always pretty low, or else they would have been dropped sooner. Let's say you produce a product that results in about a dozen deaths per year. Some people would argue (correctly) that this does not rise above background risk from other products consider safe enough. However, this argument ignores the importance of a causal connection. By analogy, suppose I announced plans to pick a social security number at random and kill the person who holds it. It would be right to devote public resources to prevent me from carrying out my plan even though I could correctly claim that my plans had little effect on the background risk.

Obviously, lots of products are dangerous in one way or another, but we cannot ban them because we need them. The judgment on chemistry sets is that we don't actually need them the way we need cars, ladders, or cans of Drano. It's true that some number of kids would greatly benefit from having chemistry sets. However, even if the result were, say, 100000 additional scientists per year, I don't that would justify a dozen deaths causally linked to the decision to release a product. (You could say that the kid gave consent to the risk but we usually do not allow minors to make such decisions.)

I also see a false dichotomy here, mixed with a good bit of nostalgia. Some people have fond memories of being inspired by playing with the old kind of chemistry set. But it's not obvious that this is the only way or the best way for kids to be inspired by science. Chemical puttering around does not make you a scientist, clearly (but it does set the groundwork in terms of interest).

Actually, kids today do many very dangerous things with the consent of their parents and some do get maimed and killed without the activity's being banned. This is usually in the context of sporting activities, and centers that support this kind of thing (e.g. kayaking, indoor rock climbing) have (in theory) high safety standards and require a waiver to engage in activity. I know we all hate additional paperwork, and I also realize that organized activity will never substitute for individual exploration. However, it seems to me that the same method could be introduced for scientific experimentation if there were sufficient interest.

I don't claim that my proposal is ideal, but I really don't see any other proposals here, just a lot of grousing.

Posted by: PaulC | June 1, 2006 9:03 AM

I think my view is outnumbered about 40 to 1 here, but I don't see anyone offering a reasonable proposal; you're just offering another take on the old "I survived childhood" canard (without child safety seats, with lead paint and asbestos ceiling insulation everywhere, etc.) I sympathize with it more (I was too young for good chemistry sets and I did play with a soldering iron a little) but it's still the same naive libertarianism.

The Wired article's not really about chemistry sets - it's about outlawing Erlenmeyer flasks and harassing people who sell chemicals to the general public. All done in the name of the War On Terror or the War On Drigs.

Posted by: Rick @ shrimp and grits | June 1, 2006 9:10 AM

When Homer Hickam (October Sky) came to our campus, the biggest theater was filled to capacity with students from gradeschool to gradschool, faculty and the public. In the present situation, he and his friends wouldn't have been able to escape the coal mines. Maybe that's what the purveyors of joylessness really want to suppress - science as upward mobility.

Posted by: frank schmidt | June 1, 2006 9:41 AM

It's not just the REAGENTS which are limited. It's the SIZE.

I mean, half the fun of my brother's chem set was that you could make a fairly large amount of good shit.

Now, it's all about "micro-reactions" which is corporate speak for "nothing to see without a magnifying glass."

I am, sadly, not joking. One chem set I wanted to buy came with a small tray and a pipette so that you could do "exciting" things like "Mix a drop of this and a drop of that in a hole, and look for the tiny amount of lead precipate with the included tiny poorly made plastic-lens magnifying glass! Fun, fun fun!"

Sigh. All I want is to blow up sodium. Is that so wrong?

Posted by: Sailorman | June 1, 2006 9:51 AM

Ammonium dichromate. That's the whole reason I went into chemistry. I just HAD to find out what that orange stuff was that made the green ash on the top of that home-made volcano....and it's even better if it lights itself after you drip glycerine on potassium permanganate.

Posted by: Coragyps | June 1, 2006 10:16 AM

frank schmidt:

When Homer Hickam (October Sky) came to our campus, the biggest theater was filled to capacity with students from gradeschool to gradschool, faculty and the public. In the present situation, he and his friends wouldn't have been able to escape the coal mines.

That's one of my favorite movies, but I disagree with your conclusion. Hickam and his friends were unusually fortunate in escaping their coal mining community through personal initiative and the freedom to work on rockets. But the "situation" that imprisoned them was a cultural prejudice that all the kids who grew up in the mining town were unsuited for going on to college and were somehow predestined to work in the mines.

That's the first order effect that needs to be addressed. Whether the same kids are also prevented from pursuing potentially dangerous hobbies is a second order effect. In short, if our schools are prisons, the problem isn't that we aren't getting enough cakes with files into the schools, the problem is that our schools are prisons.

Posted by: PaulC | June 1, 2006 10:45 AM

Rick:

The Wired article's not really about chemistry sets - it's about outlawing Erlenmeyer flasks and harassing people who sell chemicals to the general public. All done in the name of the War On Terror or the War On Drigs.

I agree that these kinds of policies go way too far. My point was addressed only at child safety. Adults can give consent to all sorts of risks and must do so routinely. My pet peeve in this area is the way "hydroponics" seems to conflate to "growing pot" in a lot of people's minds. In practice, that is probably a big commercial driver, but I find it offensive that the act of buying some fluorescent grow lamps gets you on a registry of suspected drug purveyors.

Posted by: PaulC | June 1, 2006 10:58 AM

There's a serious inability to comprehend scale going on here, a la "they call it pollution, we call it life." According to the article, the chem-set-hobbling feds are worried about the "manufacture" of illegal fireworks, or the setting up of meth labs. Why does that mean you can't buy one chemistry set (mine only had a few ounces of each chemical), or for god's sake one pack of Sudafed? Don't tell me they've got no way to set off alarm bells if they catch you buying 300 kids' chemistry sets and you aren't a school administrator.

About the dangerous class experiments...I kind of hated my chemistry class, because I didn't like memorizing ions, and we did more memorization than cool experiments. But one of the things I learned from the experiments we did do is that it's important to be careful when you're told to be careful -- titrate one drop at a time, don't pour sulfuric acid all over yourself, basically follow directions and common sense. What are we teaching kids by forbidding any access to potentially dangerous materials? Basically, that they cannot possibly be trusted to behave sensibly. It's the AA approach to chemistry: because it's dangerous, you cannot be around it, because you're too weak to cope. Then they leave class and burn themselves with Drano because they haven't learned how to handle hazardous materials.

Incidentally, I know a lot of great nerds who grew up playing with bottle rockets and homemade napalm and fireworks. The only person I've met who's ever reported being stupid enough to let one go off in his hand? C. Everett Koop. I shit you not.

Posted by: jess | June 1, 2006 11:06 AM

When I was growing up, the regional mecca was Edmund Scientific in New Jersey. Anyone know if they still have that big store? I vaguely remember them more focused on optics than chemicals, but I think they had some. I wonder if that has been significantly dumbed down.

I suspect there is an independent trend away from experimental to computational science, anyway, since most middle-class kids have computers and science itself is increasingly reliant on computational models. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not. There is probably more room to do something really new, but obviously a computational model is no substitute for empirical data.

Posted by: PaulC | June 1, 2006 11:13 AM

My mom taught me to make gunpowder. Seriously. And I turned out ok, ten-fingered, and everything.

I think there is real danger in the overprotection of kids; part of childhood is trying stuff out and getting hurt. Child seats and lead paint are one thing; there's no benefit in using them. But chem sets, or even playing in the dirt, are supremely important to growing up curious. The whole "antibacterial" BS is yet another problem...

As for the 100,000 scientists per 12 deaths - show me evidence that deaths were occuring at anything like this rate! This paper shows one fatality in a study in Britian (full text not available online, so unfortunately the time period is unclear...); They agree that poisoning is a significant problem (note that inadequate supervision was determined as the cause in 64% of incidents), but in the US in 2001 134 children died from bicycle accidents. Shall we ban bicycles? Swimming? Travel in motor vehicles?

Point is, we cannot protect children from every risk and still have them grow up to be interesting, healthy people. We have a resposibility to protect kids, but also a responsibility to expose them to the world.

Posted by: Evan Murdock | June 1, 2006 12:06 PM