I kid you not, last night, I met a man at the MEC party that was afraid of carbon.
He pointed out that carbon was in smoke, and smoke was bad, so carbon was bad.
Now, this occurred in the midst of another conversation about polonium 210, and I really wasn't expecting that a carbon-based life form capable of rationality could come to the conclusion that carbon was a toxin, and it took a minute while this sunk in.
Then, when he went off into how smoked meat was carcinogenic in order to supplement his theory.
When I couldn't pull the word 'nitrosamine' out of thin air in an instant, it 'proved' it for him (that really it was the carbon).
If you look at the wiki article on it, it seems that the theory that nitrosamines in meat cause cancer was extended from the theory that tobacco causes cancer, so they might well be harmless, too.
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