Quality breakdown on the views of "chemicals" vs. "natural" and "organic", and why so many people ignore the go-to chemist arguments.
It's fascinating watching someone whose world-view is dominated by a specialized discipline try to come to terms with how most other people see things. It'd be even more interesting if they ever got it right. Of course, since they're determined to see anyone who thinks differently from them as ignorant fools, they're bound to mess it up. For most people "chemical" doesn't mean "toxic," it means "synthetic chemical." And the reason most people are suspicious of synthetic chemicals isn't because they regard "nature as good" and "artifact as evil," it's because they recognize that we have millennia's worth of shared experience which tells us how to cope with the things already found in nature, but we have very little experience telling us how to cope with something someone just cooked up in the lab. It's really pretty simple to understand, and it's not as ignorant or foolish as chemists would like to believe.
It's not quite that though, depending on which crowd you are talking about. In the realm of medicine, alternative treatments are given credence for this very reason: Steve Jobs tried restricting his diet to fruits and vegetables before turning to chemo and surgery; the shops down the street from my old apartment sell bottles of nutritional supplements--as if a pill of vitamin B12 are any less natural than a pill of aspirin. In the food world, the discussion is a little different, "synthetic" can mean plants expressing natural, organic {in the chemistry sense} pesticides, artificial sweeteners, lab grown meat, or vanillin produced by yeast. Sometimes the push back is ideological. Sometimes it is justified. In cosmetics? Well I'm a dirty hippy at heart, so I'm not going to claim anything but ignorance of that whole branch of the world. :) The heart of what troubles scientists that this language is imprecise. Is a tartrazine allergy any more concerning than a peanut allergy? If I make vanillin in a lab, as long as it's the same chemical, it's safe, right? In the health sense, "chemical," "natural," and "organic" throw out the entire field of toxicology and replace it with language that falls short in so many ways, even if it is more intuitive. Edit I present you with the most cultural confusing thing I've seen all year: vegan synthetic cheese. This one is getting its own post, actually.