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Dirtiest Jobs in Science
ExE122 writes "CNN and CareerBuilder have posted a listing of the top 10 dirtiest jobs in science. 'Whether they are sifting through reeking mud banks to find cures for contamination, or sorting stool samples to get to the bottom of our bathroom dilemmas, these are some of the science jobs that sacrifice their time, energy and comfort for the greater global good.' Sounds like a job opportunity for Mike Rowe!" From the article: "Hot-zone Superintendent - What they do: Perform maintenance work for bio-safety labs that study lethal airborne pathogens, for which there is no known cure. Their work enables scientists to study the nature of disease-causing organisms, such as anthrax."
Cleaning up Stephen Hawking after "Chili Tuesday" has had time to work its magic!
I knew a girl in high school who wanted to work as a hot zone researcher; last I heard, she was applying to law schools. I'm not sure which profession involves more noxious material.
In college I did some research at the USEPA in Cincinnati on Cryptosporidium Parvum, a waterborne pathogen that causes tremendous diarrhea. The only way to grow them is in the gut of a neonatal animal (or human). We opted for mice and calves and this poor guy did nothing but scoop up cow poo and separate out the oocysts. For mice they would "homogenize" then separate the entire intestinal tract. What was really weird for me was that I would occasionally go and pick up a small 5ml vial that represented about a month of poo duty.
Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately attributed to ignorance. -Napoleon
http://www.deathsacre.com/
"I want you to study T'Pol in depth and at at length and have a report on my desk by next Tuesday. Hopefully, there will be some hot eruptions."
Where were you when the voynix came?
"Where does the dirty part come into play?"
That's how you have to talk to the guy during the step 0) obtaining of sample.
Where were you when the voynix came?
the dirty grunt work would be assigned to a technician. Or by grad students.
Which brings us to the real dirtiest job in science: being a grad student. It doesn't matter what crap jobs the scientists in the article have, it's still better than indentured servitude.
Reminds me of a visit to a medical lab.
I was mildly embarrassed to be dropping off a urine sample for a 24 hour calcium test, which is a *huge* jug of piss collected over 24 hours.
Some other guy was trying to hand off a 'sample' to one of the lab techs.
She said very loudly (for all to hear): "I can't take your semen.
Semen samples can only be accepted between (some time range) on (some specific days)."
I thought they had more discrete ways of handling samples like that. It sure made me feel less awkward.
Or maybe it was the word "careers" that tipped it off.
...gynaecologist. You have to spend all day looking at the parts of women that they pee out from. What could be more disgusting? I can't imagine what they must pay those people.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Ewww poor baby
Quit whinging. My first work experience was six months of grinding uranium ore. By hand. With a mortar and pestle. And the "protective gear" they gave us? A t-shirt and shorts. And I'm not kidding.
Everyone's gotta spend some time at the bottom of the heap.
Depends where you are. I'm an engineer and an epidemiologist. I work in and around IDP/refugee camps in developing countries and conflict areas. I do a lot of things, but I'm usually a water and sanitation guy, either building the system, investigating an outbreak or once I've figured it out, trying to stop it and stop it from happening again.
Having a tech do it is great, but when you're the only guy around who remotely knows what he's doing, you're down in that pit latrine yourself.
Whether I'm wearing my engineer's hat or my epidemiologist hat, it's likely to get a bunch of people poo on it.
In our chemistry department, we had a lot of controls on exposure to chemicals: hoods, materials handling procedures, that kind of stuff. The prof who did tin chemistry, and almost all his grad students, had gray hair: a sign of tin poisoning.
I worked in the microbiology department, in a pathogen lab, doing research on mycobacteria, specifically tuberculosis. Every semester we had to get tested for antibodies to TB (indicating that we'd been exposed) and every semester at least one researcher had.
My best friend works as a clinical technician in a lab doing human tissue sample analysis. Pathology lab, basically. About a week ago they had a patient that was *really* sick with a bunch of nasty things, and they were working through samples, and one of my friend's coworkers started screaming because one of the stool samples *moved*. The patient had serious tapeworms, among other problems.
We're thinking about going back to school and becoming art critics.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Hell, that's a highly anticipated Friday night activity for some of us.
... what?
The examples they mention are nothing. You have to gown up to work in the pathogen lab, which is inconvenient and annoying, but otherwise there's nothing to it. Dealing with stool samples, likewise. By the time the pathogist gets it, the sample is in buffer and doesn't even smell. (Well, not much.) No, the dirtiest job I've seen in science is extracting fossils from the tar goo at the La Brea tar pits. The fossil work is in digs below ground level. The tar pits are exactly that. It's not just some cute marketing name. Tar fumes are heavier than air. So the idealistic scientists are down there in what amounts to a huge bucket of tar, getting covered in black goo, and breathing chokingly horrible carcinogenic fumes. That's what I call a dirty job.
When I worked for a hydrographic company as a young physics student many years ago, one of my assignments was to run a series of sonar scans of the sewage outfall lagoon of a large city on Lake Ontario. I did the runs in a small inflatable Zodiac with an outboard motor. Fortunately I was given a survival suit, although if I'd fallen into that water, I would've preferred to die right away. Besides the usual turds and toilet paper floating around, there were the occasional rotting animal corpses and some of the maintenance workers said they often cleaned aborted fetuses out of the filtration screens. On the shores of the lagoon were washed up tens of thousands of plastic tampon inserters, all in pastel pinks and blues. the maintenance workers called them "beach whistles". Absolutely nothing grew near the lagoon, and one day we noticed that thousands of sea gulls--those hardy beasts!--had died after they poked around the dirt turned over by a bulldozer. Scary stuff.
Anyway, after a few survey runs the outboard motor stalled right when I was in the middle of a large section of open water. I hoisted the prop out of the water and saw that it was completely wound up in dozens of used condoms that had got past the filtration screens. I had to free the prop using my Swiss Army knife. (I later threw away the knife.)
The scariest thing was what I noticed the next morning. The day before, I'd dripped some of the lagoon water on the jeans that I was wearing under my survival suit. Overnight, the liquid had actually burned holes right through the fabric of my jeans, as if mice had gnawed them. I was totally freaked by that and since then I've always wondered what effect the noxious chemicals I probably absorbed that day will have on my long-term health.
He's not kidding, dude.
I know, here in Colorado with the Arsenal Reclamation Project, they're cleaning up shavings from machinists having worked depleted uranium..........with a lathe..........wearing regular 'ol shop clothes. I've worked depleted Uranium with machine tools myself, not too entirely dangerous as long as you take precautions to prevent skin contact and inhalation.
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last