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Wired magazine recently wrote about amateur chemistry in an article titled “Don’t Try This at Home” also covered on BoingBoing.net and OpenScience.org (and probably lots of other places too).

I think there are two key points in this article:

• Hands-on chemistry education, particularly labs for younger students, is being cut back in the name of safety. (OpenScience.org also suggests “chemophobia,” which is a great word.)
• Access to scientific materials, including chemicals, is being cut back except to “licensed” users. The article quotes Popular Science columnist Theodore Gray “I can walk into Wal-Mart and buy boxes of bullets and black powder … but mention mixing up chemicals in your home lab, and people have a much lower index of acceptable risk.”

The former may be related to another recent article, this time in the International Herald Tribune: Science ability drops in U.S. high schools.

I think it’s particularly ironic that Wired wrote about this in the same issue where they discuss open innovation efforts like InnoCentive, NineSigma, and YourEncore — which allow companies to draw on retired and amateur research to solve problems.

If amateur science is key to education and to overall innovation, there needs to be some way to balance security, safety, and science at the same time. Why limit access to chemicals entirely when you could log and track and investigate illegal or unsafe practices instead?

Yes, make sure there are safeguards — in high school, someone put nitric acid into a bottle labeled for hydrochloric acid. So when my lab partner and I were performing the lab to produce hydrogen gas, we knew something was wrong with a brown gas appearing in the glassware. My teacher stepped in immediately to quench the toxic nitric oxides and move the materials to the hood. Everyone in the room, however, was excited and surprised, rather than scared.

Personally, I think we should be strongly encouraging hands-on science education and experimentation and I’m not afraid to say it.

The Wired article quotes Prof. Roald Hoffmann of Cornell University, who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1981:

There’s no question that stinks and bangs and crystals and colors are what drew kids – particularly boys – to science, now the potential for stinks and bangs has been legislated out.