Where Oh Where did our lead go? When I was a young chemist operating out of my laboratory in my Dad’s smokehouse, I dreamed of performing the alchemist’s trick of turning lead into gold. Years later, I finally found that it could be done by means of a nuclear reaction, but the yield was only a few atoms and the cost in terms of energy expended was very high. This project, however, started me to thinking. If the government could ban lead, then what couldn’t it ban. Since it has banned all my most favorite chemicals: chloroform, carbon tetrachloride, benzene, pcb’s, DDT, chlorodane, and a whole slew of chlorinated pesticides all of which were made as derivatives of hexachlorobenzene as well as the industrial plants that developed and made them. It has banned bromine and a whole slew of brominated chemicals like tris-2,3-dibromopropyl phosphate of kid’s pajama fame: the most effective flame retardant of fibric ever devised. It banned “Ravage”: the herbicide that would have taken the world of agriculture by storm, before it ever got off the ground. What should a chemist do? My advice today is, “Young man, do not go into chemistry?” It is no longer a “Better world through chemistry”. Instead, it is a world where the government is constantly out to get you and everything chemical. Lead is an excellent element. It makes an excellent paper weight. Nuclear reactors are impossible without it. Chemistry is an interesting subject if the government and its EPA would just stay out of it and let us smart chemists and our industry do our own policing and regulating.