Anecdotally, many if not most passionate chemists I've known started with at least one of two often-illicit "gateway" interests in adolescence or early adulthoo

Anecdotally, many if not most passionate chemists I've known started with at least one of two often-illicit "gateway" interests in adolescence or early adulthood: - The chemistry of pyrotechnics and explosives - The chemistry of mind-altering substances I had both of these bugs in my late teens and early twenties. For mind-altering substances I wasn't personally interested in get-rich-quick or get-high-quick, but drug prohibition offended me on an axiomatic level. I spent a lot of time in the library looking for ideas that would circumvent government precursor control for various drugs, and shared my findings with other like-minded people on the late, great Hive: https://the-hive.archive.erowid.org/forum/forums.pl https://the-hive.archive.erowid.org/forum/forums.pl I never actually synthesized any controlled substances, but it was a great thrill finding ways to walk up to the line. (Eventually I gave this up and I suggest that others not follow in my footsteps, unless you have really strong incentives. Just collecting literature and synthesizing theoretical precursors to scheduled drugs is a great way to end up in legal trouble in the US, even if you're carefully avoiding making the drugs themselves.) In terms of mindset, government control of drugs and their precursors is somewhat analogous to DRM for molecules instead of data, with amateur psychonauts playing the role of circumvention software authors. I actually met a few clandestine chemists who had been involved with the Amiga demo scene before they started investigating drugs. I lost contact with the clandestine chemistry scene, even as an observer, about 6 years ago. Like DRM cracking it also unfortunately attracted people who were interested in transforming the discoveries of passionate amateurs into pure profit. I wonder sometimes if ever-more-draconian government reactions to unauthorized synthesis of explosives and drugs are going to constrict the pipeline delivering passionate chemists, as new generations are born who never knew what you could try before the War on Drugs or War on Terror. But it probably won't come up for a while. When I got out of chemistry and into software it was because the field was dramatically over-supplied relative to available research jobs.