Chemistry
Until recently, it was common practice among synthetic chemists to taste newly prepared compounds. The purpose was to provide an additional characteristic for identification, taking advantage of the selective chemical receptors that form this sense. However, as one might guess, this practice also led to numerous fatalities and near-fatalities. Surprisingly, it was not recognition of the risk of this self-experimentation that led to its extinction, but rather the advent of instrumentation capable of exacting physical characterization of compounds (particularly spectrometers with infrared, ultraviolet, NMR and mass selectivity). The routine tasting of new compounds by chemists of bygone times is, in fact, the main source of knowledge of the human toxicity for certain chemicals.
This practice had positive and negative aspects. It probably contributed to the death of Carl Wilhelm Scheele from apparent mercury poisoning. Joseph Priestley discovered soda water while experimenting with carbon dioxide and tasting the results. Dr. Albert Hofmann discovered the psychedelic properties of LSD by accidentally absorbing it—and later intentionally ingesting it—in a self-experiment.
Read more about this topic: Self-experimentation
Famous quotes containing the word chemistry:
“For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world.... I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: “I will understand this, too, I will understand everything.””
—Primo Levi (1919–1987)
“...some sort of false logic has crept into our schools, for the people whom I have seen doing housework or cooking know nothing of botany or chemistry, and the people who know botany and chemistry do not cook or sweep. The conclusion seems to be, if one knows chemistry she must not cook or do housework.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)
“If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)