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Students, the Other Unprotected Lab Animals
theodp writes "Slate reports on the horrible — and preventable — death of a young UCLA biochemist in a t-butyl lithium incident, which led a Chemical Health and Safety columnist to the disheartening conclusion that most academic laboratories are unsafe venues for work or study. It's estimated that accidents and injuries occur hundreds of times more frequently in academic labs than in industrial ones. Why? For one thing, Slate says, occupational safety and health laws that protect workers in hazardous jobs apply only to employees, not to undergrads, grad students, or research fellows who receive stipends from outside funders."
Linux just isn't ready for the desktop yet. It may be ready for the web servers that you nerds use to distribute your TRON fanzines and personal Dungeons and Dragons web-sights across the world wide web, but the average computer user isn't going to spend months learning how to use a CLI and then hours compiling packages so that they can get a workable graphic interface to check their mail with, especially not when they already have a Windows machine that does its job perfectly well and is backed by a major corporation, as opposed to Linux which is only supported by a few unemployed nerds living in their mother's basement somewhere. The last thing I want is a level 5 dwarf (haha) providing me my OS.
I spent 2 and half years (I graduated early) studying Computer science in University. What surprised me when I got out was that the things I stressed over every day in school were only the thinnest onion skin of what was required of me in the industry. If I were to retake an exam after a couple years in the industry, I wouldn't have any problem with it.
The difference is that industry requires so much more focus and professionalism than schooling does. So it's no surprise that students would fuck up in a laboratory much more than a junior clinician with a month of on the job training.
It isn't about lack of OSHA oversight, it's about how academia considers safety as an afterthought.
I wonder if some of the lab students fall into the trap of thinking that they knew enough, and not realizing that their earlier practices were put in place not to protect them as novices, but to protect them at all times.
It seems similar to something that I've read happens to some pilots. In those cases, a pilot with, say, 200 hours still considers himself a novice, and will carefully follow the checklist and be extremely careful to not get overwhelmed. That pilot may reach 800 hours, and think that he's got it down. This is, according to one investigator (Australian, I think) the most dangerous time to be a pilot. Once this stage is passed, usually around 1500 hours, the pilot has had enough close calls to realize that what they learned early on should be applied all throughout their career.
IIRC, this was the conclusion of an inquiry into a crash of an Australian military helicopter that killed most or all aboard when it came down too hard and too fast to the back of a ship, bounced off, and landed in the ocean. The base reason was "pilot error," but there was much more to the psychology of the situation.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
But, if they make the labs safe, where will the great stories (like pouring liquid nitrogen down a drain, or projectile canisters) come from? C'mon, someone has to serve as an example to everyone else...
what a load of crap. We had tons of rules and safety precautions that we had to take when I was an undergrad in chemistry. The problem is people who think they are invincible against battery acid and other such dangerous chemicals. If you made it to college, one would hope you have enough common sense to follow the safety rules and not be careless, but an amazing amount of less than intelligent life manages to sneak through admissions.
Thou shalt not use tools thou does not understand, lest they rise up and smite thee
Didn't any one pay attention in high school chemistry? Johnny was a chemist But Johnny is no more For what he thought was H2O was H2SO4
*Just* what we need... As if my school didn't have enough issues already getting the lab supplies we want and need...
I am a grad student, and every lab I have seen puts an emphases on putting your safety first. I have a difficult time believing that commercial labs are any safer.
of a comic that reminds me of a lab I used to do undergrad research in: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1023
Most companies experience an accident and put in place procedures to handle the danger. Most procedures performed in academic labs are designed by the student for that one time. There is some common sense, but things can more easily go wrong if the procedure hasn't had the same rigor as an industrial procedure applied to it.
When I was in college, a long time ago, a friend and I filled silver-zinc battery cells with acid in our apartments instead of in the chem lab. I'm guessing my landlord never figured out why there were burns in the arms of one of his chairs. The batteries were for our school's solar car team (this was a big deal in the late 80s).
...you let undergrads lose in a lab. A friend of mine was nearly electrocuted because one of her undergrads took it upon himself to do some wiring, and "grounded" the black wire to the body of a vacuum chamber. Little did he know that the "red is power, black is ground" convention that he learned in his intro to EE course doesn't apply to AC circuits.
And that's just one of countless examples I've seen. Undergrads, and even many grad students, don't really know what they're doing half the time. That'd be fine, but the dangerous thing is that they think they do. If the guy in my previous example had taken a moment to ask, "Hey, which of these is ground?" then there would never have been a problem.
Short of keeping an eye on all of them at all times, there's not much you can do. And since the people who would do the watching are probably first or second year grad students themselves, it might not even do you much good.
Where I work, everyone in the entire BUILDING is required to take safety training. Everyone that actually works regularly in the lab space are required to take more training. If you don't, the school shuts off your access card.
The school makes your supervisor fill out a form each year that specifically inquires as to what you will be working with (gross simplification: animals, radioactive materials, hazardous chemicals.) Training is based off that.
Just because safety protocols at one school sucks (example: Texas A&M) doesn't mean it does everywhere.
Please help metamoderate.
Yep. In terms of computer usage, I've always said that it is the people who "think" they know what they are doing who get into the most trouble.rec
Think of learning Unix. You start out, you double check the manpages, you double check what directory you're in, what machine you're on, your current user ID etc. Then a little bit later, when you feel like you're finally getting the hang of it, you end up as root sitting in '/' and in one window, and in another your sitting in a directory that you need to delete files in. You type 'rm -rf *' and realize, only afterwards, that you were in the wrong terminal window!
Then you learn: double check everything before typing something stupid like 'rm -rf *'!
My blog
Such as age, funding, skill, etc. The kids in a university/school setting are most likely younger than employees who work in an industrial setting. Schools don't have a lot of funding so that leads to trying to cut corners. Also, It's a school, a place where they are still trying to learn. In an industrial setting [hopefully] the company understands what it is dealing with and takes appropriate precautions. As mentioned in the first comment, schools do consider safety as an afterthought, but that IS in part due to lack of OSHA oversight since there is nothing forcing the safety issue like in a business setting. NASA has had the same problem for a long time. Cutting corners due to lack of funding/trying to save money and that compromises the safety of everyone involved.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
As an individual who works at a pharma company, I can tell you that the joke isn't "I'm off like a Prom dress" - it's "I'm off like a flaming lab coat". You would be surprised how quickly they will throw down those, if the time is right. A $10 item could have saved this individual. This is a tragedy.
I am sorry that this woman died, but I 100% disagree with this fine. The woman was a research assistant who was working off-hours, alone in the room, and did not have the necessary protection on. She screwed up bigtime.
I find it hard to believe that she made it through all those years of schooling without knowing that (1) a lithium compound is pyrophoric and (2) she probably should have had protective equipment on. No amount of training that the UC system could provide can fix a lazy student with a key to the lab.
For someone with a PhD to make these mistakes is akin to a regular Joe forgetting to look both ways before crossing the street and then getting hit by a car. It sucks, but it is only the victim's fault.
Of course, it is never fashionable for politicians to blame the victim.
Normally I don't like to post as an AC, but it seems justified in this case.
A lot of times, undergrads in university labs are allowed to use the facilities relatively unsupervised. Staff who are around may not have the authority to force the students to follow safety procedures -- and the staff may not have been trained on each piece of equipment.
A lot of it seems to come from a sense of entitlement on the part of the students -- their reasoning being, apparently, that they pay $$k for tuition, so they are the clients. True enough, except that they are also sometimes unaware of proper procedures and the risks involved. A clearly-defined set of lab operating rules, as well as a clear chain of authority (with "Someone In Authority" with proper safety training present at all times when the lab is in use) would be very beneficial.
When I was a grad student I had to transfer sec-butyl lithium, which I think is slightly less intense, but still fairly nasty. I wore thick gloves, a labcoat, cotton clothes, safety glasses, and had the fume hood shields between my face and what I was doing. If graduate students in their lab were routinely doing stuff like this without even a labcoat, they have some serious safety issues which I don't think are representative of academic research in general.
of a comic that reminds me of a lab I used to work in: [url=http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1023]http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1023[/url]
These are teenagers learning to work with dangerous chemicals and devices. Of course, accidents will occur, and that's tragic. But are there any statistics that a university research lab is a more dangerous place to work than an OSHA-compliant workplace filled with workers of the same age? For that matter, is the university research lab any more dangerous, hour for hour, than, say, teenage driving or basic training?
In different words, is there any indication that there is a problem that needs fixing? If people are willing to accept a higher level of risk for other activities, then university research labs might not be the place to start optimizing safety.
... You're an idiot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition
a) Those "progressive forces" are _right_. Stringent safety procedures are vital.
b) The "university" "exempt themselves" from compliance? Read the friendly summary: Congress exempted Universities from compliance.
c) ... I can't go on. Fallacy of composition. Attributing the failure to implement lab safety procedures at an institutional level to the people who got those same procedures implemented at a national level? Attributing a phenomena that is demonstrable (to some degree or another) in many university and high school labs to one single entity? And presupposing that that entity is the same one that managed to get the standards applied?
And, finally, to protect myself, some humor: http://xkcd.com/386/ .
The way graduate students are used in academic labs is unethical.
These are people who are told that their part-time pay for full-time (or more) work is offset by the opportunities that working in an academic lab and receiving an advanced academic degree will bring them. This is flat out not true. Prospective graduate students are misled into thinking that they have a place waiting for them at the top of academia or in charge of an industry lab.
Congress and the media are told that we have a shortage scientific labor. Meanwhile, there is so much labor available to academic research labs that they are often getting people to work for them for free. It is absurd that postdocs working in commercially relevant fields of physics make less money than a construction worker or fast food manager. Why is that? It's not because there's a shortage of labor. At least the postdocs are employees.
Why are we basing our research infrastructure on a rotation of untrained students? Why do we force those who are best at labwork to immediately move on to desk jobs? It certainly does nothing to promote safety, as people who know what they're doing are very quickly replaced (that's kind of the idea) and labs are structured and encouraged to keep the average level of competance low (it's education, right?). The whole thing makes no sense to me.
Good, then skies the limit on my settlement.
And, finally, to protect myself, some humor...
Exactly, if only they had been joking around they would have been fine, I can sit comfortably in liquid nitrogen while naked, as long as someone is laughing.
This is why I am prone to putting > tmp.sh at the end of commands that are very destructive. Deleting the wrong 30,000 files is something you only have to do once.
Work bio at MMWD
Actually, there are many "plateaus" that pilots need to go through as the learn their craft. When I was getting my private pilots license, I very clearly remember flight instructor Dave telling me that the only thing that flight instructors did was to basically teach us just enough to kill ourselves. The flight instructors hope was that when we inevitably got ourselves into a fix, he/she had taught us enough so that we could get ourselves out of it in one piece. Dave also said that I would, before a 100 hours of "pilot in command" time frame had elapsed, get myself into trouble and he really hoped that I would survive. And he was serious...and he was right. At the 60 hour time frame of piloting, I did the "low altitude, low airspeed, NO place to go" mistake on landing. Nearly killed myself. It made a lasting impression.
Gordon
I am an experimetal physcist and luckily i am spared from handling biologically active or organic compounds. However, i observe the following
* electrical/fire safety (my father was an electrical engineer, and we installed the electrical outlets in a holiday home together): The most important princiciple i see violated is that the electrical conductor should not carry force. In the lab people regularly attach no additional mounting. An all scales of electrical wire, from nA to 200V*30A
* procedural safety. Are there rules like: just do certain things with two persons? No, after all you have a PHD, masters, or bachelor, so you are more intelligent than the stupid morons and can handle that alone
* instruction: have you ever had to sign of a "sheet which says: yes, i was instrcten on this machine, which potentially releases dangerous gases". Fuck. In industry, to operate a dangerous machine there needs to be some kind of proof you can do it. In research claiming to have seen somebody operating a similar machine is enough.
* Exits. Hey, its resarch. We need this rack here, now. We dont care what you say, what we do is important and no, we dont have time to mount this cable over the door instead of creating a tripwire.
* Gross miseducation in the lab courses (noe spefic instruction, operating devices by general rules of thumb). Instead of: "this is a pump. Dont the fuck operate it outside its operation range. may burn or explode" we hear: "yes, the inlet pressure meter is a little broken. The manual is actuall for another pump type, because we gave the students lab course the smallest pump. No problem it ran the last 5 years in that way". The other part is that if you mention in a lab course something is broken you usually get punished by spending more time there, and no reward at all.
* After all: organizational issues: If student burns his hand, who is responsible? The Professor? he wasn there. The direct Supervisor (maybe also a student)? No, he usually doen not oficially supervise, its the professor. The security responsible of the institute: he has done his job with checking one time per year everything is roughly in order.
Yes. labs are a fucking mess. I was my hands all the time when going out the lab. You never know what the asshole before you left on the desk. I always look for the exits and usually check the safety valves (i work with cryogenics), at least verifyin that no fuck-up blocked them by a clamp (i have seen that, that dewar could have levelled the lab quite efficiently). I check if the ground wire is attached. I make tricky questions to estimate the credibility of the co-workers. I am a pain in the butt if believe sth is dangerous. And i get really annoyed if people exhibit a "i kept the checklist by the letters" approach. Such assholes just make the checklist longer and longer and less comprehensible because they force the one keeping it to add every single part to be checked (i knew people whos task it was to check the marks of the fire exit which lead trouch a small storage room, they walked around up to the door of that room, i said "there is a huge pile blocking the door in this exit and the bulb in the small room is burned out. They just said: "yes but the markers leading there are ok", and put a check mark). I am very willing to bend rules, but everbody should be kept responsible for his safety and the safety of co-workers in the lab.
My Australian university (I'm a grad student in the physics department) is ridiculously anal about safety. There are regular audits and weekly safety meetings.
It's all got something to do with much lower WorkCover insurance premiums for certified institutions.
I have been a private pilot for 10 years now.
I feel ya pal. Keep using that license to learn every time you push the balls to the wall.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
This article details what happened. What burned and how the handling mistake was made.
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2009/January/23010903.asp
Institutional labs typically suffer from transient researchers - mostly students. Having worked (and studied) in both areas it seems to me that the problem in universities is that there is often noone specifically in charge of safety and the people spending the most time in the labs are the least experienced ones - talking about university labs. In industry, they make sure to assign a safety officer and there is always experienced people actually in the lab.
No one else is going to care about you. Except you.
You must take self-responsibility for your actions, non-actions, and everything in-between and beyond.
You are responsible for what you do, ignore, or any other action you do.
In this case, safety at "school".
I remember school. I remember almost no safety protocols at all. I did science and all the other tech stuff.
Safety? What? You mean using a band saw with no breathing, eye, face protection? OH yeah. I remember.
Schools can't pay for safety. Schools don't care about you.
You have to take care of yourself.
YOU are on your own.
Having worked in several academic research labs, this is an easy question to answer. Some of these have been previously mentioned.
1) The main person in charge of the lab is the professor but he is too busy to deal with your day to day activities and probably has no idea what is inside the hoods in his lab. The person in charge at the University level just gives the lab a quick once over every now and then. This means the people who are suppose to train others in lab equipment are mostly poorly informed graduate students.
2) Many academic labs have a very transient nature compared to industry. There are a lot of undergraduates or passing graduate students who need to use some machine as quickly as possible. They are taught hastily by whoever happens to be around and even then whoever is around probably doesn't want to teach because it's not their job. They're just trying to get a degree, why is it their job to teach some new undergrad/grad a process/equipment? This also relates to item 1.
3) The transient nature of academic labs means that there is no one around who consistently knows everything and there are few people who you can reliably turn to.
4) The professor doesn't care until someone fucks up. Lab practices slowly degrade until someone fucks up and makes the news. The professor then get angry, yells at grad students which subsequently prevents nothing because those grad students are replaced soon anyway.
5) Academic labs are poorly or unevenly funded and most have no dedicated staff outside of graduate students who are very busy, unsupervised, and feel very little obligation to help others.
To sum it up, the poor funding, lack of dedicated personnel, and transient nature of many academic make them more likely than their industry counterparts to be more prone to lab accidents.
Let me give you an example. A new international student got permission from a bioengineering research lab I used to work at to work there as part of a project he was doing. The professor gave the ok, a quick tour of the lab and that was it. The student didn't talk to anyone else in the lab and immediately started his experiments. He setup a large beaker on a hotplate with some very nasty chemicals in it for his experiments. He walked away to his desk while the large solution warmed up. It turns out that he set his experiment up next to someone else was using a pryogenic material with a relatively low ignition temperature. The international student's boiling hot mixture bubbled over the side and hit the other students material sending the entire lab hood up in flames. It hasn't replaced to this day (due to funding issues of course).
Another time, someone decided it was a good idea to laminate some FR-4 at a temperature way above it's crystal transition temperature. Why did he doe this? Of course because there was no information on what temperature to put it at, there was no one around who would help and he figured any temperature would do. This caused large bellowing smoke from the lamination machine and everyone went home with some very severe symptoms from inhalation of the fumes.
At my university, students are required to complete the same safety training as employees before they are let loose near a laboratory bench. Labs are regularly inspected for to verify that they are following safety standards. Nevertheless, I see no way that university laboratories, which have many graduate students with just a few years of experience, will ever be as safe as industrial labs in which the average employee has much more practical experience.
Basic economics. Quite simply, it is because nearly every postdoc would much, much rather be doing science than working in the construction or fast food industries. And in general, people are willing to accept a lower salary for doing something that they like doing than they will accept for doing something that they don't like doing.
Years ago, I went back to academia after a few years in industry. At the time, we had a post-doc working on vaccines; a salesperson from one of the big vendors had walked in, and I was shooting the breeze with them when the post-doc left the room. I noticed she had left a brand-new container of an exotic toxin that she just received from Sigma on her desk- right next to her coffee.
"Do they do this in industry?" I asked the vendor. Seriously- if it had been a "working" environment instead of academic, that would have been a firing. Instead, that's just how it goes in academia.
The wording of these safety reports is essential. Same happened to the subway of Cologne. They sent engineers to one of the buildings along the track that had cracks in it. These engineers wrote a report in which they described that it didn't look so bad, but recommended further investigation. This lead to the city not looking in to it anymore, and a collapse of the city library a few months later, killing several people and destroying irreplaceable historical documents. As far as protective lab clothing is involved, during my chemistry master's project I didn't wear protective clothing in the lab most of the time. I guess it was a bit of a prestige issue, having the feeling that you know enough of the risks to assess when to wear a labcoat or not. In retrospect, I was bullshitting myself, even if I myself would be able to assess the risk of my work, there is no way on how to assess the risk of what the others in your lab are doing. Or just bad luck, a tube could just let loose all of a sudden. And indeed, why was this lab accessable by this girl at all, at this day. Shut the bloody lab down during obligatory holidays.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
In second year university physics in the late 80's I had to do an experiment observing positron annihilation by counting gamma ray energies around 511 keV. We used some tiny radioactive source which emitted positrons (which one it was I can't remember positron emitters, but Wolfram Alpha is cool). The source was stored in a lead-lined safe and we were given radioactive tabs to watch our dosage. The workbench was surrounded on 3 sides by lead-walls so we were safe in the lab. Just behind the bench was a concrete brick wall and behind that a major staircase in the physics department. So out I went with the Geiger Counter and found the highest readings were naturally outside on the stairs. When I came into the lab the next day, my gamma-ray counter was gone. I found it in a chem lab watching a bucket of water with hydrogen bubbling through it. Fleischmann and Ponns had just made their famous announcement.
If there's a problem elsewhere, it's a cultural problem in that sector or institution.
Sorry, not sure I follow you: how does this help ?
That's why I use cat in cases where others might say "useless use of cat".
;). ! is a stupid misfeature - since the command line is not expanded before you execute it.
On my keyboard > is rather too close to < so I do:
cat important_file
instead of:
<important_file
Because if by mistake I type:
>important_file
Important_file goes poof.
One also has to be very careful when using dd since i is rather close to o.
There have also been some fools who thought they were smart and used "!". For example:
!mysql
Go figure
the whole lefty money is the root of all evil
I thought the Bible said, "The love of money is the root of all evil." And you're whining about this being a "lefty" thing? Idiot.
In the end I think the only difference is the experience, younger people haven't seen enough accidents to fully understand security. And this applies to everything.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I was a chemistry undergrad myself, and in looking back on lab conditions during that time, I can't help but think that the situation was pretty sorry from the safety standpoint. Between the low budget for equipment, lack of time for safety education (a one hour safety class for a three-tear long study program!) and the general don't-give-a-crap attitude of a lot of the students, I ended up inhaling more funky fumes, running for the eye baths, scrambling for the emergency lab shower and spending way too much time evacuating the premises than is generally considered acceptable (more than zero is too much). Then again, the time I spent doing lab work convinced me that in some respect, private industry is not always that much better, and I'm better off being in computer tech now.
Because in industry you find only those who made it out of university alive.
I worked as a grad student for 7 years in a chem lab. I had to go through school mandated safety for whatever I was working with chemical, biological, cryogenic, whatever. While OSHA and EPA did not breath down my labs neck, they breath down the schools neck on a regular basis.
a few things to keep in mind on the difference between industry and academia.
1) Academia is all R&D: there are very few reactions you do as process so you are constantly trying new things, new things lead to the possibility of accidents, regardless of training.
2) number of chemicals: I deal with this right now in my current job. in industry you have a very limited number of different chemicals on site related to your process. in academia you could have hundreds if not thousands on site as different researchers are working on various new projects.
3) grad student work hours: yes grad students are like medical residents they work long and hard hours. they are there to get their Ph.D. and leave not be all comfy in a job. the more you work the faster you leave. if you work too long, you'll make a mistake, it happens.
a few other items on this.
OSHA applies to anyone working in the lab, even undergrad students. Grade students are Employees, they are paid as graduate assistants.
Graduate students are not paid that poorly. when I was in grad school (late 90's) I made nearly $20k/year (which is not that much, but hey I was fresh out of undergrad) but I also got free tuition (9 credits a semester of graduate level courses is not cheap) and full medical and dental insurance. That is not a bad first job for someone just out of school with a bs in science. one of my students is going to be making closer to $30k/yr + tuition and benefits starting this fall. still NOT BAD for someone with little experience and just out of school
The most important thing to remember is that
ACCIDENTS HAPPEN!!!! they happen everywhere, both in industry and in academia. You learn from making mistakes. one just hopes that you have enough sense in your head to make sure your mistake is not fatal! This person violated the golden rule of the lab. NEVER WORK ALONE! I may have worked with someone not in the same room, but I always have someone close by who can hear me scream if something happens.
In academia, the accidents tend to be personal. a single person is hurt or dies (this person or Karen Wetterhahn (which I'm surprised no one hasn't brought her up yet). If the popular news gets a hold of this tragic student story, it goes like gangbusters. Schools are public, the media is there and has good access and when you put a young face to a tragic accident we all feel for them and say that it shouldn't have happened, just like we say after every tragic accident that befalls a single person (car crash, house fire, etc)
if the guy working the viagra production line spills some chemical on the floor, do you think that accident makes it out of the plant? he's probably written up, maybe suspended, and sent for retraining. if an injury occurs, yeah OSHA finds out, but how many of those accidents are reported to the public as an individual hurt in a lab accident? Industry reports their accidents as faceless statistics. The industry accidents that make their way to the public are normally so large that it's a public health threat (i.e. Bhopal or three-mile island) Thus our response to them are different. Either we don't know the person hurt or it's so big that its the evil industry that is out to hurt us all. No not really, just industry is bigger and when someone or something screws up the accident is a whole lot bigger.
While I feel for the person, remember that training only gets you so far, if someone ignores it then something is going to happen. Training only gets you so far, after that its lab experience that helps you prevent accidents in the future.
If there was something wrong with the safety training or rules set up by the university, I hope something is done to fix it.
It's certainly not PC to blame the victim, but in cases like this they ultimately hold the bulk of the responsibility for what occurred.
I'm a scientist and have worked in labs where chemicals like this are used. You ABSOLUTELY KNOW that this stuff is crazy dangerous... there's simply no way you don't. Even as an undergrad your profs and older students tell you stories about how dangerous this stuff is. If you don't have a chemistry background then I know it's hard to put the incident in question into perspective... but let me put it like this: It would basically be like a nuclear scientist working in a radiation lab who just reached in with their bare hands and picked up some highly reactive radioactive substance, walked around with it and then died of radiation poisoning (then everyone trying to blame the 'lab' afterworlds).
The university/lab certainly has some questions to answer (such as why was someone who was clearly inexperienced and not qualified to be performing such experiments given a key to the building and allowed to access such dangerous chemicals on their own?), but again if you're a chemist you know this stuff is crazy dangerous and if she didn't feel comfortable handling it she should have sought additional assistance and supervision... which given the lack of protective clothing it and standard safety precautions it was obvious she didn't know what she was doing. I do feel really bad for this girl and her family/friends as nobody wants to see something like this happen... but people need to stop trying to find a scapegoat here and accept that there's a strong element of personal responsibility at play here.
No amount of safety procedures and training will matter if an inexperienced student with a key to the lab decides to come in on their own and mess around with crazy dangerous chemicals... period.
Most of them seem to come from the lab.
We all know something is wrong. Normally wearing the right clothes is not enforced in a lab if it slows people down. It is normal that 23year old undergrads work alone with dangerous substances. It is normal that dangerous substances are not broken up into appropriate quantities by lab personal but that students use syringes to take these from a big bottle. We all know that bad planning leads to the phd student asking the masters student to wire the pump/heater/rack instead of bringing the thing to the workshop to do the power electrics a few days earlier. We all know how to skip the fuse if we don't have it in stock and then forget about it. We all know that the direct pressure on the student to bring scientific results will make him skip rules to save 10-20% of his worktime.
So, dear co-postdocs, what will we do?
I've worked in labs and in art studios, and let me tell you, as bad as labs can be at times, art studios are far worse. Those paints and solvents are really quite toxic, and artists are all the time doing things like sticking them in their mouths.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rLV-ZuNPwJ4/R31LQI8DQLI/AAAAAAAAA08/CC_Hz_AByQ0/s1600/FantasticFour05-04.jpg
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Any lab used for production or quality control in industry has to meet more stringent standards than an academic research lab. The rules to a certain degree assume qualified personnel and experiments without forgone conclusions. See http://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_table=standards&p_id=10106
As someone who works in a university lab (I only do computational stuff now, but the lab still does experimental work), I thought I'd throw my two cents in. The differences between private biotech and public biomedical are not really that similar to the differences between academic CS and a software development shop, so most of the background that's been given is kinda irrelevant.
First, there is a large reporting bias. People in the private sector have some greater tendency (we can argue about how large) to cover stuff up. In academia, the system of incentives discourages coverups much more thoroughly; also, there's a cultural difference between people who choose to be university professors and those who choose to go private, although obviously individual people vary tremendously.
Second, in the academic sector you do actual experiments. Meaning, you don't know how things are going to work until you try it, and most people are doing different experiments. In most corporate research facilities, everyone does the same experiment on slightly different subjects or whatever. This does have a big impact on safety, industry is somewhat discouraged from having 500 people do the same unsafe experiment, but in a university you could have 500 people doing 300 experiments of which 75 are unsafe.
Finally, there is a culture of disregard for safety precautions at the University level. In Industry, many of the safety rules are stupid - but following stupid rules is 90% of the job so people follow the rules. In the academic sector, when the fire department tells us we can't pour urea and ethanol down the drain because those are *dangerous chemicals*, it breeds resentment against the rules themselves.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
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You open tmp.sh in a text editor and then run tmp.sh
A little check that you are doing what you expect to do.
Work bio at MMWD
There is an attitude that it is far better to have an accident in a school lab where help is at hand than in an industrial environment in which help may not be near and the quantities of chemicals and the power of machines is far greater.
In addition there is a side benefit in that one student losing a finger when a test tube explodes tends to keep the whole campus alert as to mistakes in the lab. Even a lost finger from two or three years ago will keep many students on their toes.
Maybe for some people, but this is wholly evident to me. When I was a grad student, part of the reason we got as much funding as we did was because we could do things at a fraction of the cost as a private lab. That was largely because there was no OSHA oversight, and we didn't adhere to a number of safety regulations. I got burned in an acetone explosion one time and had to do workman's comp. I took this all in stride and only after I started working in industry did I realize that we were even ignoring a lot of safety questions.
All the same, I still think OSHA goes overboard. I'd rather go back and work in that lab and be careful than have someone come in and tell me that the stepladder I'm using isn't safe...
I think this shows another related problem. Consider the number of hours a good student has to put in between work and his/her studies. That number is often in excess of 80 or 90 hours a week. After that many hours, it is easy to make mistakes. Also, since there is no protection for the amount of coursework a professor gives to his/her students, this sort of thing is likely to happen.
Wait. There are other lab animals than grad students?
I know of incidents at a major educational institute in which grad students were forced to do things like put their hands into dangerous chemicals, causing pain and mutilation. They were terrified that their world-renowned professors would destroy their lives if they reported the incidents. There are some sick (not to mention criminal) fucks out there controlling these dangerous lab environments. Some of them are Nobel prize winners.
I recently finished my PhD in microelectronics and I have to say some of our labs were HORRENDOUS. Sure, our spanking new cleanroom had a decent set of safety procedures drawn up when it opened (which weren't always followed, but generally infractions resulted in a decent telling off or suspension), but our regular measurement lab? It was a total mess and no-one really cared. Whoever was in charge of it (ie some academic) had probably not set foot in there in years. There were old bottles of random chemicals all over the place (at least one of which was handled pretty carefully when finally removed over the course of a few cleanups that were finally initiated by those of us grads who could stand it no longer). Basically most grad students, and most academics, are guys, and they are pigs. Sorry, but it is the truth. You should see their offices/desks. If their mom cleans the dishes at home, no wonder they don't give a shit about wiping down a bench after making a mess. And we had a lot of them in the labs (the presence of undergrads only makes things 100x times worse). Sure some mess was not dangerous per se, but en-masse the effect was that no-one cared if they really DID make a dangerous mess. Unlabelled bottles of clear liquids all over the place - is it iso or tric? Big difference!
Didn't help that some of the most-loved stories were of our current supervisors as grads themselves in the 70s handling BUCKETS of HF and swishing them around to clean out quartz annealing tubes, without gloves or safety gear. Pouring vats of HCl on the floor. Why aren't they dead? Blind luck is all I can say. So when I get antsy about not wanting to work with HF even with safety gear they give it the brush off.
So yeah, read the MSDS sheets in your own time, and then be told that no, you CAN boil acetone at over 60 degrees (its flash point) because 'we're all been doing it for years'. People in general do not like to be told they don't know what they think they know. They get very defensive and only constant nagging makes any difference. And you know what? It's not my job to nag or clean up after others, yet I spent a shit load of my time doing it, so that MY devices were not ruined by the state of the laboratory and so that I did not have to get cancer later.
You need a decent lab manager who has time to monitor what goes on. Other labs in the university were run much better because the academic basically had his office off the lab, was participant in the work, had only a few students and CLEANED UP. I always thought we should hire someone's mum as a lab tech - get her prepped on lab safety, chemicals etc, then pay her to clean the lab one day a week. It would give work to older ladies who would be valued for their experience because they are CLEAN and ORGANISED and would do a much better job than the guys. It would also mean someone took responsibility for the lab. That said, I wouldn't want my mum doing it, because there was scary stuff in there.
Of course, all those accidents could be caused by students that are stupid from being hung over and lack of sleep because they had to go party last night. I mean, what could possibly go wrong when an asshole student decides to go to chem lab drunk, high, and not having had a decent nigh's sleep in 4 days?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Frankly, the powers-that-be, who also decide how much gets spent on what kind of public education, don't particularly WANT the general public to be technically proficient in a general sense. Obviously specialists have to be good at their specialty, but beyond that there is little incentive to broaden scientific education.
If you know how to make fireworks without killing yourself, there's a significant chance you might do so. It's much easier to deal with the threat of pipe bombs if the number of people who know how to make them properly is kept to a minimum -- and those who do it on the sly are risking life and limb to do so. It blows up a few, but it dissuades many more.
Similarly, if you're afraid to mix chemicals for fear of what they might do, you're not going to be cooking up bathtub napalm. It's wise to remind people not to mix chlorine bleach with ammonia, but even then it's done in a way that implies it's not the only dangerous combination out there. Admittedly it ISN'T the only one, but the public perception is that you just don't mix cleaning chemicals. So much the better for the interests that don't want private individuals mixing their own brews AT ALL.
It's not to keep the number of knowledgeable people to zero -- we obviously need some to do the legitimate dirty work. Some of them take up "side jobs". But it's easier to find them if there are 30,000 possible (registered) suspects than it is if there are 300,000,000 (unregistered) people who might know how to do it.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I've been in some labs (not working but visiting.) And, here's how it works:
1) They tend to be pretty safe. RTFA, they manage to find just a few examples of lab deaths and one included a wiring fault that really could have happened anywhere.
2) It's very "us versus them" regarding OSHA... they tend to have a lot of "one size fits all" rules, and many labs will ignore those rules that don't make sense (and in the process probably ignore a few that *do* make sense.) "OSHA's coming, put away the sodas!" and such.
3) I've never seen a lab treat staff and students differently regarding safety. The article gravely mischaracterizes this to imply students would not get safety training and equipment staff would get. If you get past the rhetoric to the facts, it seems (based on a previous OSHA visit) staff at this lab were not wearing lab coats either, it wasn't just the students (see #2 above).
When I was in University studying Physics, I had a little incident with the department. The 3rd year lab was about radiation, etc (like pretty much all of them). So, lots of sources. Well, I wasn't exactly impressed as the lab was basically, here's compton scattering! Here it is again... and again...
It was essentially, here's how to write something up lab. But, the problem is obvious: why expose people to radiation needlessly, regardless of if one is well within yearly exposure safety limits when something else could go wrong. Especially, when proper radiation safety procedures weren't being followed. There's nothing like having your lab instructor grab the source with his bare hand and say, "Here it is" and expect you to grab it with your bare hand.
Politics ensued, nothing changed, and I switched to Maths. But, I was out of that lab and away from that instructor.
Needless to say, this story doesn't exactly surprise me.