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Students, the Other Unprotected Lab Animals

Posted by kdawson on from the protection-available-but-not-to-you dept.

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."

8 of 236 comments (clear)

  1. Emphasis is on the students by Werthless5 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Emphasis is on the students by ctmurray · · Score: 5, Informative

      Wait till you get to industry. Much stricter. Everytime there is an accident there is a report to OSHA and an internal investigation. Procedures are changed, even to the side of overkill. Factories all keep track of the number of days since a reportable accident, and this number is rarely more than a couple of months. We get training each and every year on safety. We get monthly email bulletins of near misses and what we can learn. There are walk around audits of the lab areas.

      Example: recently the factory started requiring a splash shield over the standard wrap around safety glasses. Why? Someone splashed a small amount of isopropyl alcohol in their eye even though they had the wrap around safety glasses. Do you wear both a splash shield and safety glasses when you dispense IPA from a squeeze bottle?

      In grad school a woman was severely burned refluxing THF (flammable solvent) with metallic sodium (pyrophoric as in this article) in a glass round bottom flask in a hood (using an electric heating mantle). By accident the round bottom was not vented to atmospheric pressure (the stop cock was still in the neck). The THF was refluxing under pressure and this woman noticed and removed the stopper. The THF immediately turned into a gas, filled the hood, caught fire and exploded. Blew out the windows from the building.

      No industrial lab would allow a flammable solvent near an electrically charged heating mantle. This would have to be done in a Class 1 Group D flammable safety room (intrinsically safe electricity wiring and blow out walls (no windows), you have to wear ESD shoes to prevent sparking) in a sealed container. At the graduate level you have no supervision, unlike undergrad labs that have been somewhat pre-screened and made medium safe. Not in grad school.

    2. Re:Emphasis is on the students by backwardMechanic · · Score: 4, Informative

      I work in an academic lab. We have potential biological, radioactive, chemical, cryo, electrical and magnetic field hazards. Without a serious safety regime it could be a dangerous place. Like most university labs we have very few undergrad students, who are continuously supervised while they are with us for short projects. Everybody has to take regular safety courses. We also have to report safety incidents. We have regular safety audits. This is normal for a university. That you rarely reach more than a couple of months between reportable incidents speaks as much for your own record as for the quality of the system, we typically go for much longer without incident.

      I think part of the problem here is that most university grads have not been grad students. As an undergrad you are well protected (mainly from yourself). The experiments you undertake have been pre-designed to allow for your limited experience. But it's cool to talk about how dangerous your lab work is. If you start working as a grad student, the safety training really starts. It's not about going on courses where you learn about what to do in a fire (we have to do those to), it's about learning to always look for safety risks in what you do. As a scientist, you are best qualified to recognise risks in your own experiment. A good scientist quickly forms the habit of always checking.

      In my experience, safety for our industrial partners means someone in their safety office has signed off on an experiment. For me, it means I sit down with a colleague or two and work out if we need anything above the normal safety procedure. Different approaches for different environments. Both can work, if done properly.

  2. meh by SuperBanana · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  3. Re:Give me a break! by Arguendo · · Score: 4, Informative
    Blaming the victim sounds harsh when the article indicates that the failure to wear protective clothing was systemic:

    The 15-page report cites a deficiency in the department's records of safety and health training on exposure to hazardous chemicals. It notes that a safety inspection of the Harran lab by UCLA on 30 October had "identified [the failure of employees to wear required protective clothing] and recommended that laboratory coats must be worn while conducting research and handling hazardous materials in the laboratory."

  4. Re:School vs Industry by tyrione · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    Don't compare Computer Science to Chemistry. Having Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science on my c.v., M.E. stomped all over CS for professional standards, strict materials and manufacturing lab rules and much more. Why? Because you don't work with Milling Machines in CS or Oxy-Acetylene/Arc Welders while machining and assembling a CAR versus writing test cases in software. The fact this University doesn't have strict standards falls square on the shoulders of their full time professional staff who manage the labs and should be drilling into these kids Factors of Safety. If we ever mishandled metal lathes we got our asses chewed by the machinists. The manufacturing lab, strengths and materials labs and metallurgy labs were brutal on idiots who were not cautious about what they did in a building with plenty of options available to cause an explosion.

  5. Re:Give me a break! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    I am posting anonymously, since I don't know how much of this information has been previously published, but here you go:

    1) Working in a chemistry lab is all about working odd hours. In many labs, your PI forces you to. It's not really a choice.

    2) She was not alone in the lab. There were other people there, but they did not speak English.

    3) She was a research assistant, so she had a BA and thus the knowledge of the average first-year graduate student. No more and no less.

    4) While t-BuLi is spontaneously pyrophoric in lab, n-BuLi is not. Even if you somehow manage to learn this in class (unlikely, since you're probably not going to use it in an undergraduate lab), it's easy to mix up.

    5) As is mentioned below, no one in the lab wore appropriate protective clothing. It's hard to blame Sheri for following the example set by the rest of the lab.

  6. Additional information on the accident by JavaManJim · · Score: 4, Informative

    This article details what happened. What burned and how the handling mistake was made.

    http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2009/January/23010903.asp