> One of the struggles the science education community deals with from all sides is the need to include safety education in with science education.

This points to an additional issue that Iâ??m concerned with relative to this video: the social hazard to chemistry, in addition to the physical hazard to the participants. While the students we can see in this particular video seem to think itâ??s cool, I suspect itâ??s likely that some students in the room were terrified by the scene more than intrigued. And I suspect this emotional trauma will result in those students being less likely to want to learn anything more about chemistry and take the â??Food Babeâ?? approach to chemical hazards (see
http://gawker.com/the-food-babe-blogger-is-full-of-shit-1694902226 for more information about this).

If chemists want to increase participation in their science and improve the social image of their work, they should to rethink their approach to introducing the general public to their work. This is discussed in terms of chemophobia at
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2013/10/chemophobia

- Ralph

Ralph Stuart
rstuartcih**At_Symbol_Here**me.com

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