I really enjoyed this post! Look wistfully at pictures of Welwitschia, indeed! I got to see some in person a few years ago when we went to the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens in Cape Town, and my wife was very forbearing with my gaping at the unassuming piles of green straps.
If you’re interested in learning more about what the plant developmental toolbox looks like and how it’s been deployed throughout plant evolution, I’d recommend David Beerling’s Making Eden. It’s a pop-science book but pitched at the upper end of that range. Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life is also fun if you want an intro to the crazy stuff that happens in the fungal kingdom.
There are a few problems with DIY organic chemistry. The first one is that many of the reagents are toxic. Some of those are volatile or readily absorbed through the skin. Others will spontaneously burst into flame when exposed to air. Sometimes the dangers of working with chemicals is overstated, but sometimes it’s very much not. In academic or industry labs we
solvemitigate those problems with fume hoods and personal protective equipment (and no, the exhaust fan above your stove is not an acceptable substitute). The second problem is that chemical reactions typically generate waste in addition to the products you want. And it’s not the kind of waste that most municipal garbage collectors are willing to accept. Third, the hard part of organic chemistry isn’t running reactions, it’s purifying and characterizing your products. Purifications might be tractable, depending on what you’re doing (recrystallization, anyone?) but modern characterization techniques like NMR or mass spectrometry require hardware that’s beyond most people’s side-project budgets. A fourth problem, at least in the US, is that buying certain types of chemicals, including some common and useful reagents, will get you on the DEA’s radar unless you’re buying through an academic or industrial research institution (thanks, wannabe Walter Whites!).There are examples of chemistry experiments that are safe and fun to do at home. As Mary says, you can illustrate many principles with safe DIY experiments but unfortunately I just don’t know how to mitigate these very real hurdles to at-home micro-projects in organic chemistry.