Next thing, they outlaw cooking at home: it's chemistry, after all....

Robert Bruce Thompson is the author of Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments, a book I have and like, but cannot really use as it is hard to get the chemicals. Thompson now writes a guest popst on MAKE blog: Home science under attack

The Worcester Telegram & Gazette reports that Victor Deeb, a retired chemist who lives in Marlboro, has finally been allowed to return to his Fremont Street home, after Massachusetts authorities spent three days ransacking his basement lab and making off with its contents.

Deeb is not accused of making methamphetamine or other illegal drugs. He's not accused of aiding terrorists, synthesizing explosives, nor even of making illegal fireworks. Deeb fell afoul of the Massachusetts authorities for ... doing experiments.

So, even if you can find chemicals, you can have the cops coming and confiscating them?!

As NNadir says, It Must Have Been Beautiful to Do Science In Those Days, but not any more. I used to have a decent chemistry kit, and a good little microscope, and bought some additional glassware from a lab store downtown. Can't get any of that any more:

These days science involves heavy duty - and often expensive - instrumentation, software programs with arcanely programmed guts - LIMS systems, speed, speed, speed, dense arrays of information, and all too narrow focus.

But all this was brought here on the shoulders of giants well after Newton, giants who labored maybe in more obscurity.

Some of what I was looking at today was science from the 50's and the 70's, the men and women of the time who first moved beyond this planet's atmosphere and gravity. And I was struck by the beauty of their jury-rigged lives, where they built stuff from scratch.

Or, as John Wilkins says:

Kids today have emasculated chemistry sets that do precisely nothing interesting. And if Mythbusters has taught us anything, it's that kids love explosions. That is the route to an educated population of science loving psychopaths. But we didn't turn out to be psychopaths, we turned out to be lovers of science. We have lost something important. If a frigging chemist, who knows how to work safely, cannot do science at home, the west can pretty well forget about the next few generations of kids ever learning anything useful.

Which now feeds to the entire question of amateur science - can people outside science institutions do science any more (apart from Christmass bird count, I guess)? Janet has written two posts recently that touch, in a way, this question: Peer review and science and Objectivity and other people. Who is a scientist? Who are the peers, and what forms peer-review can take? If you play with a chemistry kit at home, and discover something new, and post it on a blog, and other chemists come by and read your detailed descriptions, and replicate the findings - was that peer-reviewed? How many people would negate this is science because it was not peer-reviewed in a formalized fashion in a scientific journal? How many would understand that peer-review can have many forms? See the comment thread on Chad's post on this topic.

But if you cannot even do science in the basement, the whole question of peer-review of home-made science gets murky.