WTF? Where have you been. First of all, population in China has not been increasing. Secondly, it's well known that they're been building ghost cities without tenants to fill them for at least two decades.
As someone with a degree in this stuff, there are indeed legitimate lab uses for a lot of the scary sounding things they had in that garage. Still, if it wasn’t set up properly, even without the worst case scenario, they were breaking plenty of laws related to biosafety and hazardous material transport, disposal, etc. California laws and those that are EPA-enforced.
Hopefully they get a slap on the wrist since they’re still a minor.
What 'scary sounding things' did they have in the garage?
Many households across the country have cleaning supplies that if mixed together can be harmful before being heated. Not to mention that this student was performing his experiments in a makeshift lab in the garage. Be aware that hundreds of calls to poison control centers occur every year because exuberant cleaners mix the wrong cleaning products together.
Just reminder, there is no such thing as a "cure for cancer". There are over 200 distinct types of cancer, and there will never be a silver bullet treatment that will "cure" all of them. That being said, "Big Pharma" is not trying to block the treatment of these, and there are now numerous types of cancers that can be treated with greatly reduced fatality rates that 20 years before.
This speaks to the naiveté of a 17 year old, gifted or not. This should be a slap on the wrist, if there were real bio hazard risks to neighbors and surrounding properties.
Otherwise, let kids be kids. Nurture curiosity. Encourage critical thinking.
Big pharm doesn't want a cancer cure. Then their money train would dry up. That's the real reason why this happened.
People used to say this about a cure for obesity and then they got what they believed to be a cure for obesity and big pharma is pushing it like you wouldn't believe. "Big Pharma" isn't a single entity: if one of these companies finds a cancer cure they can patent and run their competition out of business they'd love to.
As someone with a degree in this stuff, there are indeed legitimate lab uses for a lot of the scary sounding things they had in that garage. Still, if it wasn’t set up properly, even without the worst case scenario, they were breaking plenty of laws related to biosafety and hazardous material transport, disposal, etc. California laws and those that are EPA-enforced.
Hopefully they get a slap on the wrist since they’re still a minor.
What 'scary sounding things' did they have in the garage?
Things like isopropylmagnesium chloride in tetrahydrofuran. It’s used in chemistry to synthesize stuff, but it really shouldn’t be in a poorly ventilated garage. I also saw some news stories about some bacteria and viruses found there, and each are used to produce proteins that you could use for therapeutic purposes. E.g., antibiotic resistant E. coli sounds scary but specific strains have been used make useful things for decades.
WTF? Where have you been. First of all, population in China has not been increasing. Secondly, it's well known that they're been building ghost cities without tenants to fill them for at least two decades.
You post this weird junk on your running message board and then stick it on the home page and gawd dramnit if I don't click on it every time. Here's to you, Mr. Master Clickbater.