It is interesting to see how much of the replication is done by the Chinese and how little is done by the Western countries. Is this the difference between the making-stuff-happen attitude and the sclerotic attitude?
I doubt the table is representative of actual replication efforts going on, as according to some tweets, suppliers everywhere are out of precursors due to a large amount of orders. I would guess that there are many labs that started trying to replicate as a side-project with an attitude of "if it replicates we'll go public, if not, we don't, as we don't want to spend a lot of efforts on retries".
Based on that trying to connect that to wider cultural innovation trends seems quite far-fetched.
Someone on Twitter spoke on this, so I cant' confirm its accuracy.
They said that the reagents for this are usually made in China. As soon as this paper was published, labs in China bought out the reserves and they became hard to source in the West.
Weren't the raw materials lead, copper, sulfur and phosphorous or something like that? Seems hard to to buy out elements that are so common in industrial and chemical processes.
There's nothing exotic in there that you can't just buy from Spectrum Chemical (though they need to know you and that you're not likely to be making methamphetamine).
It’s definitely a serious issue for amateurs or new entrants in general but I think it’s conceivable that a capable and legitimate institution might want to or otherwise be able to run the experiment, but they just didnt happen to have red phosphorus.
Yes, but they won't be a new customer to chemical suppliers. If they've ever bought anything DEA List I before (like iodine) they can just pay a few hundred bucks and get a few hundred grams in a couple of days.
The US was a hotbed of scientific quackery at the same time it was developing its leading position in the physical sciences (~hundred plus years ago). So, let's just wait 100 years and see how many of these "replications" are really just fooling themselves (and others).
