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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 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.
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