Derek Lowe is a medicinal chemist who writes In the Pipeline about drug discovery, the pharmaceutical industry, and hazardous chemistry.
HN commenters recommend it for understanding drug target validation and for the 'Things I Won't Work With' series, including the chlorine trifluoride post.
Many of the challenges Prasher faced were hardly unique to him. Scientific opportunities often appear only at specific times and places, potentially a serious impediment for a parent who doesn’t want to relocate the family. Do your work in the wrong place, or publish it in the wrong journal, and it may vanish without a trace. And once someone drops out of science, it is hard to get back in.
Bad timing/luck was compounded by the fact that he was a bit of a loner and not driven to follow through on that area of research, even when given the opportunity to do so.
One other issue that this story brings up: There are a lot of out-of-work postdocs and PhDs, owing to the major reduction in funding/grant opportunities and the consolidation taking place in certain industries, such as pharma. A very talented science blogger who covers this (as well as biochemistry research) is Derek Lowe -- I recommend bookmarking his blog at http://www.pipeline.corante.com/
This is a bit off-topic, but if you enjoyed his writing on this, I would also recommend perusing the category "Things I won't Work With"[1], but maybe only if you have the afternoon free. It's a hilarious compendium of chemicals that are simply too unpleasant to work with for his tastes. For values of unpleasant including explosive, smelly, corrosive, or some combination thereof.
I'm not a chemist, but his tellings of not just how things could go terribly wrong once you have the substance, but the myriad ways it can wrong merely trying to make the substance had me in stitches for the better part of an afternoon.
Then again, I was always the one setting stuff on fire, breaking glassware, or trying the reaction with more reagents in high school chem lab, so maybe it only appeals to me...
[1] http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with/
In The Pipeline[1] covers this well. http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/04/01/live_long_and_prosper_and_be_bright_yellow_at_the_same_time.php
Researchers were speculating that if they could just bind something to defective proteins they could get them cleaned out of cells. Noting that they could see the defective structures because they were staining them yellow, they used their yellow stain. Instant 60% lifespan increase in (yellow) nematodes. If only nematodes could award Nobel prizes.
Other non-dye chemicals were found to work similarly. If this goes anywhere in the end, I don't think we need to fear being ruled by an upper class of chartreuse immortals.
[1] Best known around HN for the "Things I Won't Work With" series: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with/
This is an interesting point, and this very background may have found its way into the ruling. Specifically, that the judge has a background in chemistry and directly speaks to the difference in perspective between biologists and chemists :
"We recognize that biologists may think of molecules in terms of their uses, but genes are in fact materials having a chemical nature and, as such, are best described in patents by their structures rather than by their functions" [1]
The blogger goes on to state in more plain terms :
"In other words, this ruling affirms that molecular biology is, in fact, chemistry, if you want to look at it that way."
[1]http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/08/17/the_myriad_gene_patent_case_trickier_than_you_might_think.php
Another worrying development: Pfizer buying Astra-Zeneca.
It's not to streamline drug development, the deal is a tax dodge in its entirety. Some lovely commentary down the hallway, in the Pipeline: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/04/28/pfizer_and_astrazeneca_what_the_hell.php
Scientists worry about the cuts to NIH funding, but the cuts to pharmaceutical research are ten times more worrying - who is going to develop the compounds to replace the current set of antibiotics when they have become useless? Wall Street is entirely unequipped to deal with this question; there are things that cannot be bought with money or at market, and scientific progress is one of them.
I'm not sure I'd call plutonium metal "not that dangerous" - it is pretty toxic, can catch fire spontaneously and once if does catch fire you have to be really careful trying to put the fire out. There is an excellent book on the history of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant near Denver that describes some of the problems with handling plutonium on an industrial scale:
http://www.amazon.com/Making-Real-Killing-Rocky-Nuclear/dp/0826327982
Edit: Of course these things are relative. I guess compared to chemicals like chlorine trifluoride or FOOF it is pretty tame from a chemical perspective:
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time.php