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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.
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...
...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.
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.
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.
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