> b) Thalidomide was all roses compared to the horrors you can inflict.
Just to expand on this for the audience. Even a perfectly reasonable synthesis of MPPP, a synthetic opioid, can produce MPTP[1], which will destroy all of your dopaminergic neurons and give you permanent brain damage. This was discovered entirely by accident. Or, Karen Wetterhahn, who got a single drop of organic mercury on her gloved hand and spent the next year suffering from her brain rotting from the inside out.
This only barely scratches the surface from what I can remember, but there's absolutely, unambiguously a lot of good reasons why these barriers are there. These are rules that have been put down through blood and tears.
Just to expand on this for the audience. Even a perfectly reasonable synthesis of MPPP, a synthetic opioid, can produce MPTP[1], which will destroy all of your dopaminergic neurons and give you permanent brain damage. This was discovered entirely by accident. Or, Karen Wetterhahn, who got a single drop of organic mercury on her gloved hand and spent the next year suffering from her brain rotting from the inside out.
This only barely scratches the surface from what I can remember, but there's absolutely, unambiguously a lot of good reasons why these barriers are there. These are rules that have been put down through blood and tears.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPTP