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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."
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know if it's overconfidence so much as getting lazy. I worked in a lab that was classified biohazard level 2 (I think) when I was a lab noob. Always wore gloves for one thing. I'm somewhat less of a noob now in a different lab. When I first started in my current lab, I would wear gloves for everything, even, say, when cutting chicken embryos out of their eggs. Clearly nothing in that which is going to hurt me.
Now I've probably swung too far the other direction. I've caught myself doing stupid things like not putting gloves on when carrying a test tube full of toxins because I would have had to walk 10 feet to the gloves and was in a hurry. I guess there was a little "I probably didn't get any outside the test tube" but it was mostly just laziness and bad habits. And I think that's probably where most of the dangers in academic labs come from.
Experienced researchers are often just as cavalier about dangers as anyone else in my experience, I think because a close call with lab safety, in some labs anyway, is much less dramatic than with a pilot. If you almost spill something bad on yourself, you might know it's something you want to avoid, but that's kind of academic. "Oh, a carcinogen almost landed on me, that would have been bad." You might laugh about it with your labmates next week, hopefully tell yourself you won't do that particular mistake again.
If you almost crash a helicopter on the other hand, you probably nearly wet your pants, and the reaction isn't "Oh, that would have been bad," it's more "OHMIGOD I CAN'T BELIEVE I'M STILL ALIVE!" A much more viceral experience that probably causes you to be more careful with -everything- rather than just that one mistake. At least, I would guess that's the case.