Editing Lewisite (section)

==Applications==
Apart from deliberately injuring and killing people, lewisite has no commercial, industrial, or scientific applications.<ref name="whatisitgoodfor"/> In a 1959 paper regarding the development of a batch process for lewisite synthesis, Gordon Jarman of the United States Army Chemical Warfare Laboratories said:
{{blockquote|The manufacture can be one of the easiest and most economical in the metal-organic field, and it is regretted that no one has ever found any use for the compound. It is a pity to waste such a neat process.<ref name="whatisitgoodfor"/>}}

While the compound itself has no useful application, a 1993 report from the US [[Defense Nuclear Agency]] detailed attempts by Russian chemists to deal with existing stockpiles of lewisite by "exploring processes for the conversion of these agents to marketable products", including the extraction of high-purity [[arsenic]] for use in [[semiconductor doping]] (as [[gallium arsenide]]). The report, however, concluded that "the engineering and scale up of the process to a production level may be prohibitively difficult" and that "unless other metallic impurities which are likely to be found in Lewisite are removed, the high purity required for chip application may require additional steps", noting that worldwide demand for arsenic compounds (already declining at the time) was projected to shrink further, and that the proposed economics of the conversion process did not align with then-current prices for gallium arsenide.<ref name="mudamudamuda">{{cite web|url=https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADB173450.pdf|title=Commercial Products from Demilitarization Operations|first=Salvatore|last=Bosco|date=May 1993|publisher=Defense Nuclear Agency}}</ref>