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."

Comments

Re:School vs Industry

[timmarhy]

yes, do you? the money thats supposed to be evil is in fact saving people.

thanks for playing.

Re:School vs Industry

[LaskoVortex]

The lab is "on the job". Knowledge is created there. My guess is that you have never done real physical science so please stop pretending you know what you are talking about. If you have done real physical science, point to a real publication about *physical science* (chemistry, biology, biochemistry, physical chemistry, etc.) with your name on it. In industry, they don't do real physical science because they use a work flow for production or synthesis. Work flow is not science. Real science is work on the very edge of the unknown--so a worker doesn't even know what dangers she will encounter before she actually does an experiment. And she can't know what will be the result without doing the experiment. Do some science and come back and give us your thoughts. Until then your spewing flamebait that isn't going to be modded as such because 95% of the /. crowd doesn't do real physical science themselves.