Motivational Poster #6, Become A Chemist

Humanity has always been doggedly slogging away from the primordial ooze from whence it came. The advances from hominids to the first human, Lucy of Olduvai Gorge, came slowly. Then we evolved into Neanderthals, next Cro Magnons, and finally to our current state, the Modern Human. Along the way, we learned to hunt, raise crops, and build settlements. All of these advances were pretty darn exciting. People buzzed about the new achievements for decades.

But that was also a problem. The advances did take decades, if not millennia, to occur. Then chemists got involved. And Bam! Boom! The ideas and inventions kept coming, faster and faster. Before one could take down the year’s calendar, a new breakthrough in chemistry had occurred. And those new achievements were whizz-bang ones as well. Thanks to chemists we now have: distillation, gunpowder, pharmaceuticals, chemical batteries, petroleum, and plastics. “Those chemists have done it all,” I hear you say. “There’s no more breakthroughs to be had.”

But you’d be wrong. Why just recently, after extensive research, chemists came up with sliced peanut butter. Yes, no longer must we labor excavating peanut butter out of its jar and then, and then, spreading it painstakingly over a fragile slice of bread. Now, thanks to those visionaries we can simply peel off a slice of peanut butter and place it easily on a slice of bread. Life is good! Life is truly good. We are living in a golden age. Life couldn’t possibly improve.

But you’d be in error once more. That is if we don’t run out of chemists. A world without chemists is a world without blessed innovation. We need new chemists. Will you be one? The current and future generations will be ever so grateful.

Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D., motivator