The costs of putting knowledge into the wrong hands

As a chemist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., David Nichols studies psychedelic compounds in a quest to understand the brain, often creating new compounds as part of his research. He was recently dismayed to find himself cited by name in a newspaper article about an amateur chemist who scours the scientific literature for recipes that he can use to produce designer drugs that are legal but untested and often unsafe.