Chemistry, smells and bangs.

There is a growing shortage of chemists, and of students wanting to be chemists. I think I know why.

It’s not a boring subject, it’s a fascinating one – and I speak as a non-chemist. When I was a child, I had a chemistry set made by, if I remember correctly, Thomas Salter. I think their motto at the time was “If you haven’t maimed yourself, you haven’t lived.”

My set included potassium nitrate and sulphur. Charcoal was easy to come by, so I had the basic ingredients for gunpowder. Naturally, I used them, to great effect. I had magnesium ribbon, which burns with an intense flame when ignited. The set included instructions on how to do this. I had cobalt chloride, a wonderful purple compound. I don’t think I ever worked out what it was for. I had a methylated spirit burner. I had racks, glass test tubes, the means and instructions to make Pasteur pipettes by heating glass tube to melting point and then stretching it. I had things that generated smells, and I had lots of ways to make things go bang.

In school, we were treated to demonstrations of what happens when you drop pure sodium or potassium in water. Yes, they go bang, with wonderful coloured flames. We had demonstrations of what happens when you mix one part oxygen with two parts hydrogen, and light it. That was a big bang indeed. We were allowed to heat ethanol with a flame – we were in fact instructed to do this. Cyclohexane, too. So many more deadly and fascinating things, too numerous to mention. Do you know what happens when you spill concentrated sodium hydroxide on your sports kit? Do you know how to fill a room with sulphur dioxide? How to produce nitrogen triiodide, a compound so unstable it will explode if you give it a funny look?

I know all these things, and from experience. I enjoyed every minute of it.

Look at a modern chemistry set. You get plastic test tubes, plastic safety goggles (something I never possessed, or would have used), and enough chemicals to make a variety of salty waters. Nothing goes bang. Nothing stinks.

The jump-at-shadows safety-conscious have done the same to schools. Gone are the days of poking mercury around with your fingers. No playing with explosive chemicals, or high pressure gases. No dropping your friend’s pencil into the nitric acid to see what happens to it. I suppose they can still fill Bunsen burner tubes with water, then reattach them to the gas taps, but that was never really part of the curriculum anyway.

All the fun has gone. Children with modern chemistry sets and modern chemistry lessons find it dull and sanitised. They’re right. It is. There is no danger of damaging yourself or anyone else. No danger at all.

What’s that? Did you say that was a good thing? Is it, really?

Children grow up and some go to university. They take a look at the chemistry option and think “Oh, no, that’s really boring.”

The reason they think that is because their experience of it so far has been boring. We’re running out of chemists because of over-protective sheep who run scared at the slightest risk of Little Johnny getting so much as a bruise. Stop mollycoddling children. Let them hurt themselves. That’s how they learn what’s dangerous and what’s not. That’s how they learn to cope with life.

Without that experience, they grow up as dull and lifeless as the subjects they are forced to endure at school. With no experience of being hurt, they believe themselves invulnerable to harm and immune to retaliation for their behaviour towards others.

And they don't become chemists. They become thugs.