DIY science: should you try this at home?

Jon Ronson writes for the Guardian:

I wanted to meet Richard because I keep seeing reports of home science experimenters clashing with the authorities. There's been a spate of them this past year or two.

I glance into Richard's kitchen and recognise his cooker from the news. It was horrendously, alarmingly blackened then, but it's clean now.

"So, you aren't currently doing any experiments?" I ask him.

"I'm banned," he says.

"By whom?" I ask.

"My landlord," he says. "And the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority."

Then we sit on the sofa and he tells me his story.

When Richard was a teenager, everything, he says, was fine. "I had friends. We'd go partying. I have Asperger's, so I was a bit of a nerd, a geek. My interests were chemical experiments. I'd make solutions that changed colour. When I was 13, I made some explosives in the garden, using gunpowder, stuff I got from a paint store and from my father's pharmacy. He had sulphuric acid, nitric acid. Visiting my father in his pharmacy was very exciting."

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