Alchemy, relocated

[featherynscale]

This morning, on Marketplace, there was a report on, of all things, an alchemy conference. The attendees seemed to all be historians and chemicals industry people, and the coverage was brief and vague enough that I couldn't get a clear picture of whether these people were studying the history of alchemy, or studying/practicing alchemy itself. The reporter did her best to make everyone sound like drunks and lunatics, but the sound bites from attendees sounded as if the people involved were scholarly and respectable, which was an interesting contrast. The report ended with something about how, like alchemists struggling to turn lead into gold, these folks were struggling to turn alchemy (which she called something like 'an ugly duckling' or 'an ugly embarrassment' or something) into a fruitful field of study. Which I thought had already come to pass, to a certain extent, in the field of psychology, but maybe psychology is an ugly embarrassment to scientists, too. It's hard to say.