Word: chemisters
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...year old chemist was halfway across the world in Penang, Malaysia talking up investors for his company, Integrated Electronics. Investors were getting nervous and now, on a narrow dirt side road outside the city, his car came to a grinding halt, stuck...
...didn't sound quite so gooey. At that time, MDMA had a small following among avant-garde psychotherapists, who gave it to blindfolded patients in quiet offices and then asked them to discuss traumas. Many of the therapists had heard about MDMA from the published work of former Dow chemist Shulgin. According to Shulgin (who is often wrongly credited with discovering MDMA), another therapist to whom he gave the drug in turn named it Adam and introduced it to more than 4,000 people...
Among these patients were a few entrepreneurs, folks who thought MDMA felt too good to be confined to a doctor's office. One who was based in Texas (and who has kept his identity a secret) hired a chemist, opened an MDMA lab and promptly renamed the drug ecstasy, a more marketable term than Adam or "empathy" (his first choice, since it better describes the effects). He began selling it to fashionable bars and clubs in Dallas, where bartenders sold it along with cocktails; patrons charged the $20 pills, plus $1.33 tax, on their American Express cards...
Time and again, we find that plants and animals make strange molecules that chemists would never devise in their wildest dreams (and chemists do dream of chemicals in their wildest dreams). For example, researchers could not have invented the anticancer compound taxol, taken from the Pacific yew tree. It is too fiendishly complex a chemical structure, says natural-products chemist Gordon Cragg, of the U.S. National Cancer Institute...
...like this really happen? Probably not. Such fanciful scenarios are period pieces. They belong to the 1950s and '60s, when scientists harbored an almost naive faith in the ability of modern technology to end droughts, banish hail and improve meteorological conditions in countless other ways. At one point, pioneering chemist Irving Langmuir suggested that it would prove easier to change the weather to our liking than to predict its duplicitous twists and turns. The great mathematician John von Neumann even calculated what mounting an effective weather-modification effort would cost the U.S.--about as much as building the railroads...