Reading various magazines you learn about all the good these crazy alchemst for humans and science. Who helped create a crucible that could handle high heats melting various metals and elements?
If you've taken Chemistry Classes Gen, 134 and 135 plus Organic Chemistry all the projects done by many scientist using Alchemy were not all stupid, many were really smart! Isaac Newton spent too long and got stuck trying to use physical methods to prove the existence of a metaphysical being, don't work like that.
"If two of the greatest scientists who ever lived were dedicated alchemists, then alchemy needs a makeover, a big one, contend Principe and his colleague William Newman, a historian of science at Indiana University. Back in the day, the two argue, alchemy was not the misguided pseudoscience that most people think it was. Rather, it was a valuable and necessary phase in the development of modern chemistry. Among alchemy’s signature accomplishments: creating new alloys; manufacturing acids and pigments; inventing apparatus for distillation, the process used in making perfumes and whiskeys; conceiving of atoms centuries before modern atomic theory; and providing a template for the scientific method by running controlled experiments again and again"
http://discovermagazine.com/2010/jul-aug/05-isaac-newton-worlds-most-famous-alchemist
http://www.cracked.com/article_19777_5-great-scientists-who-believed-wildly-unscientific-things.html