Estimate: Academic Labs 11 Times More Dangerous Than Industrial Counterparts

Jim_Austin writes "Academic science labs are generally far less safe than labs in industry; one estimate says that people working in academic labs are 11x more likely to be hurt than their industrial counterparts. A group of grad students and postdocs in Minnesota decided to address the issue head-on. With encouragement and funding from DOW, and some leadership from their department chairs, they're in the process of totally remaking their departments' safety cultures."

Comments

Depends on what they are doing

[Carewolf]

It is anything like my university, the chemistry labs keep blowing up due to students trying to make illegal drugs off hours.

Re:Depends on what they are doing

[ameoba]

Our problem was Electrical Engineering grad students continually burning popcorn in the microwave.

Yeah... the admissions standards were a little soft.

Re:Depends on what they are doing

[usuallylost]

Are you sure it is just the students?

One of my professors in college told me that when he was a graduate student one of his professors got arrested. The guy and a group of his grad students had been cooking up significant amounts of drugs in one of the schools labs after hours. They were using them to throw big drug parties. According to my professor the primary goal of the whole operation was to help them pickup members of a certain sorority that liked to attend the parties. One of the students involved got arrested which lead back to the professor and brought the whole thing down.

Re:Depends on what they are doing

[oddaddresstrap]

One of my roommates in college was in the pharmacy program and had a *lot* of parties at our house. It quickly became clear that the they were in the program because, duh, "That's where the drugs are".

Re:Depends on what they are doing

[interkin3tic]

There's also the fact that industrial labs often have routine things they do (mix up these chemicals, repeat until the patent expires in a decade or two) while academic labs have fewer. Academic labs aren't generally suited to doing one thing over and over again, there's a high turnover of people and more incentive through profits to optimize standard operating procedures in private industries.

That can lead to increased safety: if you have a protocol you follow every day, it's probably pretty well thought out, with potential dangerous parts examined closely. Liability, etc.

Meanwhile, me in an academic lab, I'm kind of flying by the seat of my pants at all times, since I'm supposed to be doing new things. "Okay, I'll just pipette off this and put it in the... oh... is this water or is this that horrible carcinogen? I can't remember... What am I even doing, I got really into this Taylor Swift song..."

Re:Depends on what they are doing

[Shinobi]

Industry also has another thing that leads to increased safety: Avoidance of solvent stills for example. Another factor is that in industry, you often work in scale, which leads to avoiding highly exothermic reactions that work fine in academic lab scale, but goes BOOM when you scale it up above 10cl or so...

Re:Depends on what they are doing

[Anonymous Coward]

Academic labs still have things they do nearly every day even if you are doing completely different experiments. You still have basic stuff like wearing proper clothing, wearing goggles, that certain classes of chemicals need to be used in the fume hood, etc. And I don't know where this idea comes that industrial labs only do cookbook chemistry instead of trying to research new things too...

Re:Depends on what they are doing

[jellomizer]

Education is a funny thing.
It has all the trappings of a big business, however there is utter dislike of the idea that they run like a business.

Because getting a Professorship job is so hard in Academia and a pressure to obtain tenure is so high, that they will be more willing to skip steps in order to get the next big thing out. If someone dies in the process, that means there is now a job opening.

Re:Depends on what they are doing

[interkin3tic]

I think I acknowledged that I was not making an absolute statement, I don't know why you'd assume I was.

Re:Depends on what they are doing

[Anonymous Coward]

Having worked in both academic and industry labs, about the only point you made that is actually applicable is that academic labs have higher turnover due to students coming and going (and the incoming ones are typically inexperienced). Otherwise, both labs spend a lot of time doing new, random things, although both are usually within some specific focus. An academic or industrial lab specializing in inorganic reactions in batteries isn't going to suddenly be working with protein chemistry. Likewise, neither spends all their time just sitting there going through infinite permutations of the exact same procedure. What the labs actually do, and their motivation to do things right, are pretty similar for many fields. About the only difference in research content is timescales, and involvement in management in decision of what direction to go.

Re:Depends on what they are doing

[pepty]

The "11x safer" part of the article seems to be referring to research labs at Dow vs university labs, not manufacturing facilities. Some of those industry labs will be doing work on scaling up synthesis, but overall since its research it's not that repetitive.

The big difference between industrial and academic labs is in the consequences for accidents and safety infractions. Accidents or not wearing safety gear or ignoring other safety rules can have a big effect on the bottom line of a company: OSHA, fire marshal, and other regulator problems, insurance rates, lawsuits, etc., so employees who don't follow rules get fired instead of just a wag of the finger. This difference may shrink now that Big Consequences are showing up in academia: a UCLA chem professor is standing trial on 3 felony charges for not properly supervising a student who burned to death.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ucla-prof-20130426,0,1938374.story

Re:Depends on what they are doing

[Defenestrar]

Nah - there's a process called a hazard analysis that should reveal the potential hazards of what somebody is doing. Why these aren't performed at an academic institution is a separate problem. The problem in academic institutions which doesn't exist in either corporate or government research labs is a lack of line management responsibility. The university culture generally allows for throwing a professor (or even a department) under the bus when something goes wrong and OSHA has allowed them to get away with it. In other areas it's been pretty clearly demonstrated that line management is responsible for safety.

For example look at NIST Boulder's plutonium incident - the director of the entire facility is who lost the job because it was his responsibility to have a lab safety program that was sufficient and effective. What is only just starting to wake up academic institutions is the fatal UCLA lab fire which the university was able to plead out of criminal charges, but the professor in charge has not. While the university had some pretty stiff penalties as part of the plea bargain - all of the accountability has come down on the professor and not the university management chain (i.e. with the criminal charges against the university, it should have landed at least at the VP level). I don't think universities will actually foster a safety culture until core administration accepts that the responsibility for doing so is theirs - and this is not likely to happen as long as a professor can be thrown under the bus (whether or not he or she deserves it) and administration escapes major personal (as opposed to institutional) penalties.

Re:Depends on what they are doing

[mikael]

In my undergraduate university, the computer science department installed air extractors in the computer labs. But the workmen got the installation the wrong way round and they extracted exhaust fumes from the chemistry department air system back into the computer lab. People were starting to feel sick and turning funny colors.

In another college, one of the entrances was actually right next to the outdoor storage tanks for liquid nitrogen. Valves would be hissing with little clouds of gas around them.

Re:Depends on what they are doing

[JP205]

That hissing sound is normal. They are releasing excess pressure from the boil off.

Re:Depends on what they are doing

[Anonymous Coward]

My place of study was relatively quiet, except for an occasional student borrowing cannabis seeds to grow at home. In the lab chemicals and radioctive substances were handled in small quantities, so an explosion would blow up a flask, rather than flatten a city block.

Re:Depends on what they are doing

[Anonymous Coward]

Has the storage area airflow been analyzed? If not, how do you know that the boil-off isn't displacing oxygen and generating an asphyxiation hazard?

Re:Depends on what they are doing

[pepty]

Wow, your chem labs had off hours? How quaint. A professor I knew was known for taking new hires aside and saying "The state says I have to give you 14 days vacation every year. Which weekends do you want?". He was half joking.

Re: Depends on what they are doing

[MrResistor]

I've never seen microwave popcorn burned by accident. It's always been intentional to cover up the smell of smoking pot.

Possibly valid, but..

[blackraven14250]

Possibly valid, but the estimate in question seems to only be based in a remark by Dow Chemical's CTO. Not exactly the kind of thing that you'd expect to be news alone. In fact, the article is about the safety procedures they've implemented at University of Minnesota in conjunction with Dow, not a comparison between industry and academia as the title implies.

Re:Possibly valid, but..

[jasper160]

I believe it. The labs my wife work at the UM were never held to the same standards as an industrial or government lab. Safety, MSDS, and OHSA rules were ignored and never enforced. PI's have no management background in those areas and were more concerned with the life of getting published and securing another grant, a whole other topic.

Re:Possibly valid, but..

[Rich0]

Yup, having worked in both I can vouch that the industrial labs are much safer. There really is no expense spared when it comes to the basic OSHA compliance (ventilation, use of PPE, etc). You can be fired for not wearing your eyewear in a lab, and you're talking about a career that would be hard to replace. There are safety procedures for everything, and monitoring of safety equipment like HVAC. People take it seriously, and when there is any kind of adverse trend in safety it becomes a talking point at all levels. The insurance companies and legal wouldn't stand for anything less, because these companies have deep pockets and a dead employee is a MAJOR expense.

I remember a story at work about a manager who wanted to get rid of some safety/disposal procedures because he considered them pointless/wasteful. His subordinate basically pointed out that it was a legal requirement to his boss and the executive told the manager that he wasn't going to go to jail so that his workers could spend a few less minutes a day filling out forms. Safety is an incredible priority at most industrial labs - at least in petrochemicals, pharma, etc - the big players. Now, if you're talking food/etc I can't tell you what it is like.

I've been in academic labs as well and it is FAR more lax. The bigger ones make some efforts, but it isn't anywhere near the same. You also tend to have a less mature workforce in general, and PIs who act like gods and have a definite libertarian streak.

Really?

[rebelwarlock]

Students less likely to follow safety procedures. News at 11.

Re:Really?

[thegarbz]

No. An over simplification of the matter. The reality is when I was at university there was no safety messages from the faculty, absolutely nothing from on high. Oh, we were told to wash our hands after working with solder because it wasn't lead free and to not put it in our mouth but that is it.

First day in industry, fume extractors, safety glasses, soldering irons with deadman switches in case they were left on absolutely no use of a knife without wearing some gloves.

This isn't students not following safety procedures, this is no safety procedures existing. The head of our school stood right next to me while I was stripping wires by holding the wire between my thumb and a very sharp knife, nothing was said. When a student heated a wire under tension the semester I left and it flicked molten solder in his eye, nothing happened. At my work the HSE team would have lost their collective shits.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

The head of our school stood right next to me while I was stripping wires by holding the wire between my thumb and a very sharp knife, nothing was said.

To be fair, though it seems backwards until you spend a lot of time working with knives, if the knife was very sharp, that's actually quite reasonable... if the knife was dull, you'd probably lose a finger.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The head of our school stood right next to me while I was stripping wires by holding the wire between my thumb and a very sharp knife, nothing was said"

Perhaps he wanted to get rid of a dullard student who would do this?

Did he stand silently right next to you while you failed to look left and right before crossing the road too?

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

The idea is to expose students to NO procedures so that eventually, the dumb ones blow themselves out of existence and the smart and intuitive ones make it to industry to serve society!

Darwins law in action!

Re: Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Q: How do you know if a knife is sharp or dull?

A: After you've lost a finger.

Re:Really?

[flyneye]

Well..theyre learning to operate in the real world. Put OSHA on their asses with regular surprise inspections, make them sit through hours of tedious HAZMAT safety classes, DHS security classes and environmental impact classes and for good measure give them forklift training even if they will never use one. THAT is closer to the real industrial world. If they do not comply with the rules , throw them out of the course, just for a touch of realism.
Soon students will follow safety procedures and possibly question their vocational choices to the benefit of us all.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

University educators unable to have even the smallest iota of leadership or practicality. News at 11.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did he stand silently right next to you while you failed to look left and right before crossing the road too?

And here we have the fundamental difference between academic and industrial environments. In an academic environment, somehow neophyte students are expected to think through all the possible ways that a procedure or chemical reaction might go wrong and take their own active steps to prevent those accidents. If a student cuts his thumb off or sets himself on fire, somehow it's his own damn fault. In an industrial environment, highly trained experts are known to have lapses of attention, distractions, and occasionally to make just plain mistakes. If one of those inevitable accidents hurts someone, it's because inadequate controls allowed the error to escape containment.

Maybe it's the cost: students are cheap - they're paying to be on-site, and if one of them gets disabled, there's another standing in line behind him ready to jump blindly into the same situation. Employees are expensive - they've been trained; if they're off the job then the company loses production while still paying said employee (disability if they get blown up); they're often working with larger, more expensive volumes; the cost of their accident might be incalculably large.

So yeah, if your department head is standing next to you, and you've never seen a road before, then I hope he'd tell you to look both ways. More importantly, if he sees a car and you don't, I hope he would stop you stepping into the road. That's what "culture of safety" means: everyone looks out for everyone else, and you don't let your friends do stupid shit just because it won't hurt you directly.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except in a case a student does get injured, it is a massive mess of bad PR and all sorts of inquiries and often heads roll . In an academic environment, if a higher employee gets injured, then it is just some more subdued calls to have procedures and policies improved. Students aren't disposable in any easy sense when it comes to safety, unless you catch them before something bad happens and want to kick them out.

It might depend on what environment you're in, and I don't have much experience with chemistry labs. But in multiple academic machine shops I've heard someone yelling at someone to stop and think, and do something differently because they were about to do something that has a chance of going wrong. In a couple cases I've seen students thrown out of the shop for doing something was more certain to go wrong. All of them were required to have gone through training on how to use the machines.

This is not to say academic labs have laxer safety, as many people from top to bottom have a get-it-done mentality, that during research you sometimes have to bend rules to get things done in a expedient manner. You have stuff like the previous poster mentioned of stripping wire, which probably didn't get a complaint as a lot of people learned it doing that way growing up, and do it that way at home, and think you can reasonably do it safely at work while some employers don't want to take that chance. That is a different game than not adequately ventilating an experiment you know can produce fumes, or say manually holding a device that if dropped could likely be fatal when it should be mounted securely to a stand, etc.\

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The reality is when I was at university there was no safety messages from the faculty, absolutely nothing from on high"

The faculty never told me acid would burn! Its their fault! They never told me those knives were sharp! Its their fault!

Youre a goddamn adult - supposedly intelligent - working in a fucking lab and its somehow the faculties responsibility to tell you to be careful?

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Research laboratories are exempt from OSHA regulations.

Re:Really?

[Attila Dimedici]

You really think that people in an academic setting have more of a "get-it-done" mentality than people in business?

Re: Really?

[Immerman]

Har har.

Sharpness is typically by gently and carefully dragging your thumb *across* the blade, which is perfectly safe even for medical grade scalpels.

If you use a knife sans cutting board without first testing it's sharpness you kind of deserve what you get. Except that basic knife safety seems to be an skill that's not taught anymore. Used to be a child (boys especially) got their first pocketknife by age 12 at the latest, and were taught how to sharpen it and use it responsibly. What has happened to our culture that such basic tool-using skills are no longer taught? It's not like knives have gotten much less common.

Re:Really?

[ttucker]

The EE lab at my university had safety practices mirroring the industry, but none of the more academic departments did.

Re:Really?

[Sarten-X]

There's a difference in what they consider "it", though. In academia, the research has to get done, in time for that conference deadline. In industry, the production has to get done, but then it has to get done again next week, and the week after that, and it's really preferred if we can do it with the same crew, rather than rotating shifts between the production floor and the hospital. Both want to get their jobs done, but there's a difference in what can be sacrificed to do it.

Re:Really?

[slew]

Research laboratories are exempt from OSHA regulations.

That is not true.

AFAIK, Academic or Industry Lab makes no difference, all research labs are treated the same by OSHA lab regulations. Labs that solely do Quality Assessment/Control procedures for production facilities are the only labs exempt from OSHA lab regulations. Even labs that do environmental testing, or say simple blood testing are covered by OSHA lab regulations. The exemption is really strict, so basically no research or general analysis can be done in the lab.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was in graduate school (1990) there was a two day lecture series on lab safety that graduate students were required to take. They spent 1.98 days discussing chemical safety (it was put on by the chemistry department), 0.01 days on laser safety, and 0.01 days on electrica safety. The electrical safety training was precious: a single viewgraph showing a plugged-in extension cord, and a note that when unplugging, pull from the plug, not the cord. That was it. I'm working in a lab overhauling a 1970's era Ruby laser passbank which runs on 220V@75A, rows of capacitors as large as coffee mugs (wish I could recall the capacity of them), and your advice to me is pull from the plug not the cord!?!?! Thank God my father taught me electrical safety and soldering as a kid.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except in a case a student does get injured, it is a massive mess of bad PR and all sorts of inquiries and often heads roll .

I don't know what kind of events you've seen, but around my university, there was shock and surprise that Patrick Harran was charged in the death of Sheri Sangji. In my experience, injuries that don't require an ambulance ride rarely evoke any response at all. Injuries that do involve an ambulance ride evoke a bureaucratic review of policies and procedures, often with explicit refusal to consider culpability. I have never heard of anyone lose his job as a consequence of safety violations. In fact, prof Harran is still employed by UCLA, and the campus newspaper's editorial board opposes assigning any blame to him. But if "bad PR" is the highest cost associated with an academic accident, then you may want to review Bhopal as a high cost industrial accident.

There are a lot of people in academic settings who come into the lab or the shop and do tasks similar to those they've done at home, so think that the procedures they use at home are acceptable, and they're not. It's a question of probability: you can probably strip wire with a knife 100 times and not cut yourself. In the lab, you may be required to strip 1000 wires. In a factory, you may strip 1000 per hour. A 1% injury rate at home may be ok, but there will be 10 people cut in school at that rate, and a factory would be out of business.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

The following website has a picture of a large capacitor passbank:
http://www.savedpennies.com/co...

Each capacitor is rated for 450 Volts DC and has a capacitance of 2400 uF.

Re: Really?

[Matheus]

Actually in a way they have... since bringing said pocket knife to school is often an expulsion offense the kids are only learning those skills now at home or in scouts/other program like that. I'm not that old but even when I was a kid we used "dangerous weapons" all the time and leaned how to use them properly in *school (as well as the other listed). The bubble wrapped world we live in doesn't go for that so much.

Re:Really?

[pepty]

Probably just as well. Back in the day academic chemists liked to think of themselves as cowboys to some extent, which resulted in lots of small fires, explosions, etc. Can't say as I remember hearing about many EE or ME students messing themselves up while I was in school, but I ended up taking two chemists to the ER for stitches. Also was evacuated from buildings several times due to explosions/fire and watched people wheeled out on gurneys due to burns/flying broken glass.

The only guy I know who electrocuted himself (a little) was a molecular biologist. There's a technique called electroporation where you zap DNA into bacterial cells by discharging a ~25 microfarad capacitor across the sample at 2500 V. Commercial rigs have lots of safety features; his (DIY) did not. Went home for the day after the oopsey, but was fine.

Re:Really?

[as.kdjrfh sxcjvs]

Except in a case a student does get injured, it is a massive mess of bad PR and all sorts of inquiries and often heads roll .

I find that's true for undergraduates, but not for graduate students. Granted, grad students are older and smarter, but grad students are also much more likely to be doing something they've never done before that no-one else in the lab has done or is doing. (YMMV. In my department, a constant.)

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've sat through several such safety classes in the last two decades, including as an undergrad, grad student, postdoc, and researcher. They all seem to emphasize chemical safety, with a small bit on office safety (and earthquake safety in the west coast). The laser and high voltage safety amounted to not going in anywhere with flashing lights and/or signs. But then they had a whole separate course for people actually working on lasers, and a separate one for people working on high voltage. The latter had a second level that was really in tense for those that needed to use arc flash PPE. The initial course basically assumes that nearly everyone will have to deal with chemicals at some point, but most will not have to deal with high voltage and laser, and relegated that to a separate course.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've rarely seen people in industrial settings put the hours in that I saw in grad school. In a start-up environment, there was an occasional case of a couple people sticking around to safely do lab and shop work after hours, but that occurred every week in grad school. Otherwise, people certainly worked their ass off in the industrial labs, trying to get to deadlines, and would work a little over the 40 hour weeks, but then packed up and went home at some point.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

One major difference between academic and industry labs, is you can find things that technically graduate students are exempt from some OSHA requirements. But it is usually kind of moot anyway, as every university I've worked at and many I've talked to friends at make it university policy to enforce the requirements on everyone.

But as far as difference between research labs in general from other environment, there are some pretty big gaps in OSHA regulations at times. There is a lot of stuff the ends up becoming vague or recommended only, or exempt if something is in a temporary/development situation.

Re:Really?

[Dabido]

Have to agree. Not all students are bright enough to be in labs. When I was at Uni, we had one guy who, after everyone got told NOT to sniff the chloroform, said, 'Why not?' and sniffed it. He was in a coma for a few weeks, and then when he came out of it tried to sue the University for not giving him sufficient warning. The lawsuit failed. A lot of us had always wondered how he got into Uni in the first place, as he was thick as two bricks and very weird. (Weird, as in, turned up to our geology field trip in mid-winter in shorts, flip flops and a T-shirt, then saw an ice cream van and went and got ice cream ... whilst the rest of us were rugged up to the eye balls complaining of the cold).

Re:Really?

[flyneye]

My point was, to NOT exempt them.

DOW

[Another, completely]

On first reading, I thought that would be Department of Works or something. Since when is DOW capitalized? It's named after a person.

Re:DOW

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when is DOW capitalized?

On the NYSE?

No no no not more "Health And Safety" please...

[coder111]

Yes, wrap everything in red tape and "health and safety", wear a helmet and a high visibility jacket all the time inside the university and even going to bed... That's the answer. Oh, and more stupid courses on how not to break your neck sitting at a desk.

Labs are more dangerous, because they are doing non-standard groundbreaking stuff in the labs, not some conveyor repetitive stuff that people have been doing for 100 of years and every move is known. That's why it's a lab and not a factory- you do risky unproven stuff there. Also, you get young hotshot students/postdocs working in labs, not professionals with experience and a mortgage and a family, so they are more accident prone as well.

I'm not working in a lab, but in my experience accidents happen in following circumstances:

* People are too tired or stressed out. * People are being rushed too much. * People don't know what they are doing. * Well, small number of "Hold my beer and watch this" moments. I guess students are somewhat more prone to those.

So if you want less accidents to happen, make working hours reasonable first (I know post-docs and students in universities work insane hours). And train them better. Of course safety equipment should be available when needed. But more red tape is not the answer, and getting higher-ups involved will wrap everything in so much red tape that getting anything done will require even more hours and frustration, probably leading to more accidents.

--Coder

Re:No no no not more "Health And Safety" please...

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was at uni they were proud of the fact that they cut corners on safety, as it meant that companies would give them money to do research that would be too dodgy/expensive to do in house. My personal "favourite" was the solid state laser lab where they decided students didn't need proper eye protection. The lack of insulation on the HV bus bars powering the damn thing and having to perform contortions to adjust the kit in a confined space just added spice.

H&S does often go too far, usually when you let administrators who don't understand the actual risks set the rules. Having said that there is no need for anyone to get injured doing lab work. Ever.

Re:No no no not more "Health And Safety" please...

[thegarbz]

Ahh yes the old blame the worker. Sorry but I've witnessed accidents happen at uni that simply wouldn't happen in industry due to some very simple safety guidelines such as put on safety glasses while soldering. It seemed really silly to me when I got out of uni that people wore glasses / goggles to solder, but it didn't seem to silly a semester after I graduated when I heard a student managed to fling solder in his eye.

The problem is two fold:
a) students are quite gungho when it comes to their work and will quickly take shortcuts because they don't know any better or don't have the right tools, example: I didn't see a wire stripper till I got to industry, I used to do it by pressing the wire to a knife using my thumb and I got many cuts as a result.
b) complete lack of protective gear. You piss off the idea of PPE because it's been applied too haphazardly by HSE idiots who think protective gear should be worn everywhere at all times, but that is no excuse for not wearing it when you are actually doing potentially dangerous work or working in a potentially dangerous area.

The whole ground breaking research stuff is a load of crap. There's just as much if not more ground-breaking research in industry as there is in a university lab. There needs to be a middle ground.

Re:No no no not more "Health And Safety" please...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh yes the old blame the worker. Sorry but I've witnessed accidents happen at uni that simply wouldn't happen in industry due to some very simple safety guidelines such as put on safety glasses while soldering. It seemed really silly to me when I got out of uni that people wore glasses / goggles to solder, but it didn't seem to silly a semester after I graduated when I heard a student managed to fling solder in his eye.

Wha... how the... um, if you need safety glasses for soldering, you may also need to be re-taught how to solder.

Re:No no no not more "Health And Safety" please...

[Anonymous Coward]

You might be able to solder fine, but what about the person in the next spot along? Can you trust them with your safety?

Re:No no no not more "Health And Safety" please...

[confused one]

You're talking about students. They're not veteran technicians. Of course they don't know how to solder. And based on my experience with university engineering labs, it was learn by doing -- there was no "training". As a 20+ year veteran of electronics technician and engineering jobs, I can tell you some employers assume you know what you're doing, and some run IPC training programs (if you don't know what that is, then you probably don't know how to solder properly. One site took it to another level because they categorized soldering as "hot work", requiring additional training for fire safety and carrying extra safety regulation.

I think the premise of the article is probably correct.

Re:No no no not more "Health And Safety" please...

[Anonymous Coward]

You might be able to solder fine, but what about the person in the next spot along? Can you trust them with your safety?

After you've been to a gun club a few times for target practice, you either trust people or not. After trusting a functioning adult to not shoot you dead, I think it's reasonable to trust a functioning adult to not attack you with a soldering iron -- because seriously, you've soldered before? Because short of flicking it around with destructive purpose, I have a hard time imagining getting any in your eye. Do you ever see people that solder copper pipes together using safety glasses? As soldering as a really young kid, the only three dangers were forgetting to wash your hands after, forgetting to turn off the iron when you leave, and burning yourself from touching the iron (and the newer irons make the last two much less likely... irons from the 60s though...).

Get off my friggin' lawn.

Re:No no no not more "Health And Safety" please...

[Anonymous Coward]

some run IPC training programs (if you don't know what that is, then you probably don't know how to solder properly

There are many, many levels of "proper" soldering, from some guy soldering plumbing fittings to soldering a couple of resisters together for a hobby project to surface mount projects to the even higher demands of soldering for things used in space flight.

Re:No no no not more "Health And Safety" please...

[Shinobi]

"a) students are quite gungho when it comes to their work and will quickly take shortcuts because they don't know any better or don't have the right tools, example: I didn't see a wire stripper till I got to industry, I used to do it by pressing the wire to a knife using my thumb and I got many cuts as a result."

Students being the only gung-ho ones? Bwahahahahaha.... Students being gung-ho is a result of PI's and others not having a proper safety mindset, or even deliberately pushing students to ignore safety, or not teaching it at all...

http://pipeline.corante.com/ar...

Re:No no no not more "Health And Safety" please...

[Pinky's Brain]

Rosin cored solder can spit, when you tap the soldering iron to get excess solder off you might bump into something on the upswing ... control is an illusion, you are confusing luck with the ability to avoid the long tail.

Re:No no no not more "Health And Safety" please...

[Anonymous Coward]

How about those soldering without the nice temperature controlled soldering irons? They run hot, resulting in a lot of boiling flux. It isn't always the solder that is being flung around, but the bits of hot flux.

Or what about when removing a component? It seems students have to be reminded that hard way that when you rip out a part with hot solder on it, sometimes the leads will spring outward when pulled out of the board, and in the process fling that solder some distance.

Re:No no no not more "Health And Safety" please...

[grep -v '.*' *]

Yes, wrap everything in red tape and "health and safety", wear a helmet and a high visibility jacket all the time ...

I'm just going to leave these here:

• This,
• That, and
• The other.

Re:No no no not more "Health And Safety" please...

[Rich0]

Wha... how the... um, if you need safety glasses for soldering, you may also need to be re-taught how to solder.

The whole point of safety is defense in depth. Why do you need to engines on a plane? Don't you hire competent mechanics?

The point is that if something goes wrong there is no need for 300 people to die. The same is true of solder - to err is human, but to be maimed by an error usually indicates a lack of basic preparation.

Re:No no no not more "Health And Safety" please...

[thegarbz]

s/students/academia

The point was that culture in the universities in general does not promote safety. I'm going to hazard that it is a lack of unions willing to sue the company for better conditions / pay increases every time someone stubs a toe. The classic argument: "My job is not a safe job so I deserve to get paid more."

The shit we did at uni would be instant dismissal in some companies.

Re:No no no not more "Health And Safety" please...

[thegarbz]

And here we go again. The through that training and experience can prevent all accidents. I'm very sorry for you if you think this is the case. Where I work a 30 year veteran accidentally spilled hydrofluoric acid on his hand having the same mindset of "Safety is for those who don't know how to do it."

The fact is, industrial accidents are called accidents for a reason and in many cases it's the veterans who get injured the most as they become complacent around hazards. Our plant operators were the last we were able to convince to wear gloves while working. They were also the ones with the highest number of hand injuries per staff member after we introduced the new glove policy which they ignored.

Go figure.

Re:No no no not more "Health And Safety" please...

[coder111]

Sorry for late response, but where did I say "blame the worker"?

I did point out that IMO main causes of accidents are stress,fatigue,haste and inexperience/incompetence/lack of training and "gung-ho" attitude.

Stress, fatigue and haste are mostly down to failed project management- workers are pushed to do long hours, and frustrated or stressed because of lack of progress or bad management or low pay. This is all down to management. Lack of training/inexperience/incompetence is also quite often a management failure- either you train your people, or you don't give them tasks they are not ready to cope with. Gung-ho attitude is mainly cultural or youth thing. It's only down to worker if they should have known better, and decided to cut corners themselves without any reason.

And I do believe safety equipment should be available when the occasion calls for it. Although I have done my share of soldering without feeling the need to wear glasses- but there weren't any people around me to bump into me or disturb me.

--Coder

Re:No no no not more "Health And Safety" please...

[thegarbz]

Yes that is true. Most injuries are the result of some human factor. But if you drop back to the human factor you are blaming the worker when the problem isn't the worker but rather the system. If your intention was to blame the system then right on, I misunderstood you.

The point of HSE is to reduce the human factor and to eliminate possible consequences. If you can't ensure people are always giving 100% and not dropping spanners then make sure people walking under them wear a hard hat. That is the point. An accident should not lead to an injury. Another part of HSE policy is fatigue management. That's kind of hard to do at universities where students typically pull all nighters to get assignments done.

You hit the nail on the head really, Gung-ho attitudes is about culture. It's a culture that is accepted at universities but not in industries. What persuaded you to solder without safety glasses? Was it a thought that you'll be just fine, or what could possibly go wrong? For the record the student was alone in the lab when he did his eye in. He heated a solder joint where a wire joined the board and the wire was under stress and flicked. Distractions can be controlled, momentary lapse of reasons can't.

Working hours

[skund]

When I consider that I leave the lab after a 10 hour day (plus breaks) and everyone is wondering why I leave already, 12 hour workdays or longer are the standard and at least 50% of the staff is here on weekends also, I do not wonder why they are more dangerous.... Despite of this we are only payed for 20h/week and the administration gives a sh*** about work regulations... Kind regards from a academic biology lab in germany where the default working hours for a full time job are 40h a week or less.

Re:Working hours

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, as they say in German: S-S-K-M.

Re:Working hours

[dwpro]

Max Planck Leipzig? I hear similar stories from there.

Re:Working hours

[skund]

Darmstadt, but it is the same with all my friends and former students in other labs....

Lab != Industrial site

[Anonymous Coward]

An industrial site or process is generally the result of experimentation carried out in a lab. That means shit in the lab sometimes goes wrong.

Re:Lab != Industrial site

[confused one]

An industrial site or process is generally the result of experimentation carried out in a lab. That means shit in the lab sometimes goes wrong.

They're making a comparison between university labs and commercial labs.

Re:Lab != Industrial site

[Talderas]

Even assuming this wasn't comparing lab to lab and basing it solely on the fact this is experimentation, that is no reason not to take prudent steps and implement prudent safety regulations governing PPE or other behaviors.

Re:Lab != Industrial site

[FatLittleMonkey]

And if you don't have sloppy health and safety standards in your lab, how can you accidentally discover new phenomena.

If Fleming maintained correct use of an autoclave... If Spencer hadn't walked in front of that unshielded magnetron... If Goodyear had a proper hood over his stove... If the Coca-Cola guy had properly labelled his supplies... If Becquerel properly stored his equipment and samples... If Hoffman (LSD) and Schlatter (Aspartame) had worn gloves or just hadn't licked their fingers after working with chemicals...

[If I hadn't regurgitated the first result of typing "accidental di"]

Re:Lab != Industrial site

[Anonymous Coward]

If Fleming maintained correct use of an autoclave...

Please stop using this as an example... Antibacterials have been in use for hundreds and in some cases thousands of years. And more specifically antibacterial treatments for syphilis was in production and sale, before Fleming had made any discoveries... Hell just look at Louis Pasteur, Paul Ehrlich, etc.

Re:Lab != Industrial site

[PvtVoid]

If Fleming maintained correct use of an autoclave... If Spencer hadn't walked in front of that unshielded magnetron... If Goodyear had a proper hood over his stove...

Serendipity will still happen in labs if you wear safety glasses.

Re:Lab != Industrial site

[Anonymous Coward]

And if that student had followed basic policy about tying up hair instead of getting killed using a lathe, what discoveries might she have made? While some progress has been made by accidents, how much progress has been impeded by lost man-hours due to injuries and breaking expensive equipment?

Re:Lab != Industrial site

[FatLittleMonkey]

Serendipity will still happen in labs if you wear safety glasses.

Sure it might, but am I willing to that risk with my students? No.

Re:Lab != Industrial site

[Rich0]

Serendipity will still happen in labs if you wear safety glasses.

Sure it might, but am I willing to that risk with my students? No.

My kingdom for a mod point...

Not surprising at all.

[meglon]

I remember my days in ochem, being partnered with a guy i went through high school with. Easily the smartest kid in the class, it was, unfortunately, all book learning. He was the most dangerous person to be around in the lab, so much so that for certain experiments he was banished to the secondary lab where no one else worked... and because almost no one could stand to be around his ego (except for me some of the time), i ended up being placed in the hinterlab just to make sure he didn't cause the world to end (or at least, his world to end).

Undergrad labs are filled with people of widely disparate skill levels, knowledge, and understanding, and as (chem students) progress, some of the things they learn are downright dangerous. I still remember an experiment that if the glassware hadn't been dried thoroughly, if there was any water present, the unwanted byproduct would be phosgene gas. Nothing like that to perk your attention up a little when it comes to safety.

It's great that there are labs coming around to enforcing safety more, but there should be little surprise that it was needed.

Re:Not surprising at all.

[thegarbz]

I tutored an electrical engineering class and one student asked me how to use the soldering iron. I told them to hold it like a pencil. So they did.... right at the end of the tip like a pencil.

Ignore for the fact that soldering irons are designed to get hot, and that part of the iron clearly had a nice rubber grip to hold, some people (and this is not confined to universities) have such little common sense it's a wonder their lived as long as they did.

Re:Not surprising at all.

[meglon]

Bet he had a burning desire to be learn proper safety practices after that. David Gerrold said it best: "Common sense isn't."

Re:Not surprising at all.

[thermopile]

Mmm, the sweet smell of freshly cut grass...

For those that don't know, phosgene has been reported to smell like a freshly-cut field.

Re:Not surprising at all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. I remember somebody's beaker of distilled that had no water present, only acetone... Dumb mistake, but at least they had the presence of mind not to knock it off the burner stand while extingushing it when it boiled over and ignited. Don't think you're going to cultivate quick thinking or serendipity with OSHA level rules and a Dean of Safety Compliance, but common sense, and regular review are always in order. That, and periodic inspection of the plumbing draining the quant lab for corrosion, azides, etc. The lonely undergraduate in the instrumental lab on the floor below will appreciate the ceiling not crashing in almost on his head late one evening...:-)

PChem Zombie

Re:Not surprising at all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ignore for the fact that soldering irons are designed to get hot, and that part of the iron clearly had a nice rubber grip to hold, some people (and this is not confined to universities) have such little common sense it's a wonder their lived as long as they did.

Because people are born knowing how to solder?

Re:Not surprising at all.

[thegarbz]

Maybe because things designed to get hot shouldn't be picked up by the metal end?

Common sense doesn't exist, but there are very few people who you show a soldering iron for the first time, tell them that it's used to melt things, who would then feel the compulsion to grab it by the metal instead of the plastic grip.

Tell me, the first time you ever saw a chainsaw did you lift it by the blade or by the handle?

Please, editors, do some editing

[wonkey_monkey]

A group of grad students and postdocs in Minnesota decided to address the issue had-on.

Well, that typo could've been worse.

Re:Please, editors, do some editing

[Anonymous Coward]

Had-on! Apply directly to the forehead!

Re:Please, editors, do some editing

[Anonymous Coward]

A group of grad students and postdocs in Minnesota decided to address the issue had-on.

Well, that typo could've been worse.

Could've been an issue with the leptons.

Re:Please, editors, do some editing

[slapout]

Portal: The cake is a lie

Slashdot: The editors is a lie

Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Academics is the place where scientists get selected for fitness.

Re:Duh

[BVis]

Putting some damn goggles on does not require experience.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

The required PPE for the lab I worked at was goggles, "to keep flying bits of metal out of our eyes". Those of us who actually did the work knew that the "flying bits of metal" tended to be about four inches long and carry enough energy to crater a concrete floor.

The protective gear we actually used was sheets of quarter-inch hardened steel plate. The goggles only came out when someone was doing a safety inspection.

There are liars...and statisticians

[hyades1]

The results might be somewhat different, of course, if industrial labs didn't conduct most of their investigations "in-house". (snicker)

Student supervisor

[Anonymous Coward]

Walk past one of the first year students, notice the saucer full of shiny black crystals, not the fun 'a few crystals', mounded high ....

'k, two choices, I clear the lab, you carefully fill the sink with water, submerge that shit, then carefully wash it down with lots and lots of water, or I hit the panic button, you don't get to finish your degree, and we probably lose the top three floors of the building ...

Around 300gm's of nitrogen tri-iodide WILL at least blow all the windows at least ....

There we are, standing behind the lifts, the lecturer who's supposed to be supervising finally turns up "Um ?"

"Seriously don't ask, and if I'm wrong, the bang will let you know"

Got away with it, but strangely, the local sewers had problems for months ....

So yes, mostly, industrial doesn't have to deal with that shit, probably safer, probably, but then again, there's scale ....

Presumably they're not 11 times more productive?

[eeyore]

N/T

I was hurt at university...

[dohzer]

... when my lab supervisor told me I didn't have what it takes to be a biologist and gave me a B-.

A: Because it breaks the flow of a message

[DNS-and-BIND]

Q: Why is starting a comment in the Subject: line incredibly irritating?

Re:I must have taken the wrong courses

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I never saw anyone get hurt in the Math, CompSci, or Stats Labs when I was in college

Don't get too complacent, though. Even in the worst cases, the chem labs always send you home to mommy in a finite real number of small boxes. That...isn't always true... after certain classes of mathematics accident.

Re:I must have taken the wrong courses

[rsmith-mac]

That...isn't always true... after certain classes of mathematics accident

Quantum physics isn't any better. Oh sure, they send you home in one piece; but you're in a state of quantum superposition. As a result no one is willing to open the box and let you out, for fear of collapsing the superposition and killing you.

Not really a problem

[Alomex]

There are no bad experimental chemists.

Not for long anyhow....

Re:Not really a problem

[confused one]

You want to weed them out, have them do experiments with halogens. Fluorine, Chlorine, and Bromine do not react in kind and gentle ways with a great many things, including students.

I'm not sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

...that it is.

Academic labs do...

[Anonymous Coward]

...research on completely new areas. Industrial labs do refine research done in academic labs.

Re:Which ones have more nubile girls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are the men better hung, academic labs or the industrial ones?

[this is a balance question to test for gender bias among the moderators. Moderate this or parent, ready-set-go]

No surprise there

[Anonymous Coward]

Where I worked, the industrial regulations didn't apply, the budget needed to work safe wasn't there, half the lab workers were inexperienced students, and most of the machines and experiments were so cutting-edge that no one on the planet could predict how they'd behave. This anomalous behaviour sometimes included emitting röntgen laser beams in unpredictable directions. One of my professors had a black spot in his eye for that very reason.

Fundamental science comes with risks

[captainpanic]

Typical research at a university involves trying to find out what happens when you do something new. They keep trying until they find something that works or that is interesting. It's fundamental research. Companies typically do more applied research - optimizing things.

At a company, you have to gather 15 signatures before you can start a fundamenal science experiment with unknown outcome. At university, you just go ahead. Companies typically outsource such experiments to universities (or they just pick up on the research after a PhD student put in a few years of good work). It's not the same type of work, so you should not compare the risks. Test pilots also have a higher risk of injury than a commercial pilot.

Re:Fundamental science comes with risks

[captainpanic]

Ok, I actually take back everything I just wrote (above). If basic things like 'bringing food into a lab' or 'wearing lab coats and gloves in an office' actually still go wrong, then they should just start acting professional, and this is a good thing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
In my university (in the Netherlands), this is already common for at least 15 years.

Re:Fundamental science comes with risks

[Registered Coward v2]

Typical research at a university involves trying to find out what happens when you do something new. They keep trying until they find something that works or that is interesting. It's fundamental research. Companies typically do more applied research - optimizing things.

At a company, you have to gather 15 signatures before you can start a fundamenal science experiment with unknown outcome. At university, you just go ahead. Companies typically outsource such experiments to universities (or they just pick up on the research after a PhD student put in a few years of good work). It's not the same type of work, so you should not compare the risks. Test pilots also have a higher risk of injury than a commercial pilot.

test pilots also do everything to mitigate the risks. Safety is not about not doing inherently risky things; it's about minimizing those risks. It involves assessing the risks, eliminating them where possible, and taking steps to mitigate those you can't eliminate. It also means ensuring people don't do stupid things like not wear safety gear, work on energized equipment, rather than deenergize it, simply to save time, or take any of the hundreds of other shortcuts on the mistaken belief it can't happen to me. Finally, it means thoroughly investigating and fixing the root causes of minor incidents so bigger ones don't happen.

Re:Fundamental science comes with risks

[Anonymous Coward]

Bureaucracy is not the answer, though. Safety is everybody's business. It should be taught as part of your experimental design, and the results analysed aloing with the rest of the experiment. I think that's the kind of culture being looked for here. At least it should be.

Re:I must have taken the wrong courses

[ericloewe]

I sure as hell hope that's a natural number of boxes, otherwise my whole world is a lie...

Academia is a different environment

[physicsphairy]

IMHO the issue is that academia is not really a hierarchy like in industry. At a big school the freshman labs will be plenty paranoid about safety because of legal liabilities, but once you're talking about professors' private research projects, it's more like a hobbyist working in their basement, and in that situation we're all inclined to become comfortable and take shortcuts. Part of it, also, is the assumption that anyone with a degree comes packaged with knowledge of proper lab technique. What you will find is that, especially when you are talking students and Ph.D.s from different countries, they were trained differently. We have a lot of Russians who seem particularly cavalier. (honestly, if Chernobyl had't already happened, I might be expecting it).

Re:Academia is a different environment

[Anonymous Coward]

I shit you not, we still have to explain to certain foreign students that mouth-pipetting is not ok. When they think nobody's looking, we catch them doing it again, too. Yikes!

Re:Which ones have more nubile girls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Answer: it doesn't matter because women either go with the bad boy or the fat wallet.

Editors - learn to type

[Muad'Dave]

... address the issue had-on.

Had-on? Really?

Been there, done that, got the lung condition...

[Mr Foobar]

As a graduate research assistant, doing a series of tests ordered by the research professor, in a supposedly inspected fume hood, using glacial acetic acid. Waking up the next morning hacking up pieces of my throat and lungs, and being told to go to the student medical clinic. Being given some antibiotics -I had to pay for myself-. Later seeing the same damn fume hood being used by others weeks later, including myself. No changes or fixes done at all, at any time. Well, at least I got my name on a major research paper, guess it was worth it.

All the safety procedures were determined by the professors in charge, some who cared, most who didn't. Even almost forty years later I can still get an annoying cough, and I still do not go by a fume hood without using the simple test of a sheet of paper held at the fume hood, watching for the tale-tell bend of the paper in the right direction.

We should not discourage this trend.

[OglinTatas]

Where will the next Spider-man com from if not an academic lab?

because you can't deal with . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

. . . antici-

Re:because you can't deal with . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

pation.

Duh

[Vermonter]

And I bet high school parking lots are far more likely to see an accident than your local strip mall parking lot. The people using the former are mostly people with no driving experience.

Not surprising, and acknowledged by chemists

[Wdi]

To those posters claiming that these are sensationalistic numbers, or fake statistics:

This problem is well known among professional chemists, and there have been a string of high-profile accidents in recent years (and very expensive settlements for involved universities as a result).

The ACS (American Chemical Society) has instituted a task force to guide academia in establishing a better safety culture..

See for example

http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2013_10_02/caredit.a1300217
www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/about/governance/committees/chemicalsafety/academic-safety-culture-report-final-v2.pdf

"Accident should not be prevented"

[edremy]

That's what one of the lab supervisors I worked with at an old job used to write up on the accident reports of about half the students who hurt themselves. Picked up a piece of glass without checking to see if it was hot? You've got some nice blisters to go with that learnin'. Forgot to check the stopcock on a buret and dumped concentrated NaOH all over your experiment and books? (That was me) Oh well, buy another book. Ice shifts suddenly while you're trying to get a beaker full of fuming nitric acid into an ice bath and you splash your hand? (Me again) Get used to having no hair and brown spots for a week. Minor accidents are great teaching tools- so long as nobody loses an eye or fingers everything's good.

Meanwhile, back when I worked in industry I got to see an open can of ether sitting on a benchtop (not fume hood) and the chemist smoking less than ten feet away. Oh, and my desk was in the radioisotope lab for a while- the one with two broken fume hoods and an area around the balance that was hot enough I didn't like to be near it for long periods.

Of course!

[morgauxo]

Of course more accidents happen there. Safety is hard! Why bother when you have an endless supply of easily replaceable grad assistants?

Convenient Memory Lapse

[Roger W Moore]

It seems the CTO of Dow is forgetting certain events which a company that Dow now owns caused a few years ago. If academic labs are 11 times more dangerous then somewhere we must have lost about 176,000 grad students which I think might have been noticed by now even if it were spread out over a few decades.

Besides academic labs are doing research which means that outcomes are not known and you are doing things which have not been done before. This is inherently more risky than repeating established procedures with minor variations. Even so I still don't see how academic labs can come anywhere close to the death toll from a single industrial accident, let alone 11 times it.

Re:Convenient Memory Lapse

[Anonymous Coward]

That was not a Dow lab, but a Dow production plant. There are some big differences, orders of magnitudes between the two. This is a comparison between industry labs, which do research just like academic labs do too: small scale experiments trying to find new things and sometimes unexpected outcomes.

Re:Convenient Memory Lapse

[ttucker]

Industrial labs do research. Many of your favorite petrochemical products were designed in industrial laboratories.

Re:Convenient Memory Lapse

[Roger W Moore]

Great, so they have very safe labs but their production facilities kill thousands? This isn't a very convincing argument that we should be listening to them in matters of safety.

Re:Convenient Memory Lapse

[Anonymous Coward]

They really are two different environments, and at least in this case are trying to compare apples to apples. in a research environment, things will ultimately go wrong one way or another, as you do new things, and standard procedures are layer on top of that so that things don't go more wrong, and that people and equipment are not damaged as much as possible. At the scale of production in large plants, you don't have the option of things going wrong in all but a few ways, and everything should be anticipated as you work with a very specific procedure that doesn't change day-to-day. You can even see small version of this within a lab: if I am trying something out for a quick once through, I might spend a moment thinking if there are any issues I should prepare for, but otherwise wing it, while if something is going to be used regularly and by multiple people, a lot more effort and multiple reviews go into making a checklist or procedure to follow addressing all contingencies possible. The latter case should be the only situation a production plant is run, with custom equipment and procedures as necessary for their exact process.

Re:Convenient Memory Lapse

[Roger W Moore]

They really are two different environments

Understood but there is something very wrong with the safety culture in a company if one environment is very safe and the other kills thousands. Throwing enough resources at a problem can often fix it and if you have an appalling track record of safety in one area they may well be doing this to distract from their appalling record elsewhere. Would you take advice on how to improve a lecture from a school teacher with an appalling teaching record in the classroom? These are very different teaching environments which need difference teaching skills but there is enough similarity that any advice from someone who is really terrible in one area is highly suspect.

Re:Convenient Memory Lapse

[blackraven14250]

The "other" wasn't owned by Dow until 17 years after the accident, so I think bringing it up as an example of Dow having a dual-mind about safety is completely out of place.

stupid people = stupid events

[Anonymous Coward]

Have done some instrument design contracts for local university labs. A truck-load of safety procedures and regulations cannot offer portection from a building full of idiots.

Kids will be kids

[Anonymous Coward]

This just in: Kids playing in labs are more dangerous than adults working in labs - news at 11....

Re:I must have taken the wrong courses

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever see anyone drop a compass back in the old days when they were a bit of an investment to get a nice, solid, heavy, and sharp tool? Just falling out of someone's hand, they go an impressive distance into a leg...

I've also watched someone get burned improperly removing a jam from an old printer too.

Are people actually getting hurt?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are actual people getting hurt, or is it just students?

Re:I must have taken the wrong courses

[jeffb (2.718)]

Overflow from the men's room flooding the server room, with lots of high-voltage cables lying around under the raised floor. Fastest system shutdown I've ever seen an admin execute; pulling the main breaker will do that.

I was set on a career in chemistry before I discovered computers in high school. I count it as one of the luckiest breaks in my life. See, I've always tended toward absent-mindedness and clumsiness. In Computer Science, you frequently have an Undo option, and failing that you can go to backups. In Chemistry, not so much. There's a good chance I never would've survived grad school.

Not factual

[Jim_Austin]

Safety is about learning to do things with good technique. Surgeons learn good sterile technique--and many operations are improvisational. Precisely the same thing: If you know what you're doing, you can skillfully and safely handle the unexpected. The idea that safety in industry is about filling out forms is also false. Unfortunately it's a tale that many academic scientists repeatedly tell themselves, and it helps reinforce the (lazy) status quot. (I do not mean that people working in academic labs are lazy; as others have pointed out, they work too much. I'm saying that as a culture, academia is lazy about safety and messages like this reinforce that.) In industry, people learn good technique--just like the surgeon. They view safety considerations as a routine part of what they do. If you're a coder, I assume, you annotate your code, or structure it well. (Sorry, it's been decades since I did any significant coding, or had anything to do with it really.) In the lab you use good technique: sterility, controls, safety. It all fits together into the skill set that defines you as a professional and not some brilliant hack.

Shrug.

[FatLittleMonkey]

Eggs. Omelets.

Re:Shrug.

[Anonymous Coward]

Eggs. Omelets.

That's completely ignoring the AC's point. You'll have LESS omelettes if you carelessly break eggs for no reason, hoping that when they land on the floor there will happen to be a skillet there.

Re:Shrug.

[Anonymous Coward]

Eggs that break themselves while being laid probably weren't going to be very good omelet eggs anyway. They would have been the eggs that crack in the carton on the trip home and leave nasty egg runs all over the fridge.

Re:Shrug.

[FatLittleMonkey]

[The point of the phrase is that if you are too overprotective or risk adverse, you won't achieve anything. Otherwise, what the hell is the aphorism actually for?]

My response was intentionally arrogant-flippant as a joke. But in all seriousness, we coddle the young too much. I understand in industrial practice it makes sense, we should be seeing gains in working conditions over time. It's the 21st Century, we shouldn't have to break people to run an economy. But the young evolved to have fast reflexes, fast healing, amazing learning by exposure, and a natural tendency to take risks and experiment. Shutting them behind walls of cotton wool does not allow them to utilise their incredible gifts in order to learn about their environment before those gifts start to dry up, plus it also prevents our society from expanding. (Coz I sure as hell am not climbing over the next hill. I'm tired and my stories are on.)

There's a saying from... well I heard it somewhere in northern Europe... that "a childhood without a broken leg is a wasted life."

Having weaker safety in university labs, getting stronger as you move through industry, reflects how we naturally learn and age. It's how society should work.

Re:Shrug.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are accidents where you learn life lessons from, and there are accidents you can't recover from. By the time you end up in university research labs, quite a few things fall in the latter category. It is one thing to need stitches or break a bone, but another to face permanent blindness, hearing loss, disfiguring scars, or death. While it is quite possible to leave room for kids and students to learn, fail from trying things out on their own, and learn some more as a result, there are times you need to step in and draw some hard boundaries about things they should learn before hand. It won't work out well for anyone involved to have a situation come up, "Oh, you didn't know about arc flash because you only worked on smaller projects before, well, now you know to only wear proper clothing that doesn't melt to your skin.." or "Hey, now you know not to stand in the same room as someone using heating ether with an open flame...:" Not to mention, that while human safety is top priority, the next priority is protecting expensive equipment, where a few minutes of book learning can save thousands of dollars over screwing around with high end equipment.

A lot can be said for learning from trying, failing and retrying. But a lot of common safety things other things can be learned in a couple minutes, saving hours of the alternative process, saving that effort for learning the more difficult stuff.

Had-on eh?

[MugenEJ8]

Sure It's not hard-on? :P

CSB agrees academic labs can do better

[Anonymous Coward]

Academic laboratory safety has come to the attention of the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board.
http://www.csb.gov/texas-tech-university-chemistry-lab-explosion/

Academia should be teaching safety culture, but it is easy to get misguided and go in ineffective directions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIl45f6i1PU

Free STAR-LITE simulation of lab safety training

[Paul Fernhout]

http://www.starlite.nih.gov/
"Work with your colleagues (some humanoid, some not) to complete quests in a lab. The STAR-LITE laboratory can be chaotic and safety violations will occur. You will make critical safety decisions to ensure that you and your colleagues work safely in a lab. STAR-LITE (Safe Techniques Advance Research â" Laboratory Interactive Training Environment) is an innovative and groundbreaking method to learn about laboratory safety techniques. STAR-LITE was inspired by and is dedicated to the memory of Elizabeth R. Griffin."

And:
http://www.ergriffinresearch.o...
"The Elizabeth R. Griffin Research Foundation, Inc. (the Foundation) is a non-profit organization which is involved worldwide in promoting safe and responsible practices for handling biological materials in institutions such as hospitals, public health agencies, and research laboratories. The Foundation works to support the expansion of safe, secure, responsible laboratory capacity in under-resourced countries where diseases emerge/re-emerge. The Elizabeth R. Griffin Research Foundation, Inc. was formed in loving memory of Beth Griffin, whose vibrant, young life as a researcher was prematurely ended after contracting the rare macaque-born B virus (previously known as Herpes B Virus) from an ocular exposure to Macaque monkey secretions while doing research."

There is quite a bit about proper eye protection in the simulation.

I'd agree from what I've seen first-hand that academic labs tend to cut corners and take risks that would not be acceptable in industry. Cover ups might be easier too with less people involved and with the grad students living more on the edge and in more fear due to David Goodstein's "Big Crunch" in academia.
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...

But part of it also may be poor training coupled with a youthful sense of invulnerability of students.

Anyway, my kid and I played through that STAR-LITE simulation. It's a bit slow paced, but we both learned a lot. If it was open source (which I don't think it is despite being charitable funded), perhaps someone could improve the game dynamics of it? It's OK as is, and well worth anyone's time, but I feel it could just be better. That website also had troubles a while back including the download link not working, and we asked someone we knew at a government lab to ask them to get it back up. An open source safety simulation could have greater availability, although it would be good for any modules for it to be vetted by safety experts.

See also my essay from a dozen years ago on open source and charitable dollars:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open...
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to m

Re:Free STAR-LITE simulation of lab safety trainin

[pepty]

The big crunch isn't just academia, at least in organic/medicinal chemistry. Universities quit hiring more full time professors at the same time Pharma started unloading PhDs.

Academic Labs != Industry

[DeathByLlama]

The whole idea behind safety is that you follow certain rules. These simply *cannot* exist in academia the same way that they can in industry.

In academia, you're trying new things every day, often using protocols that you've made up, or have never used before at the very least. This is just the nature of the beast.

In industry you're generally making a well-defined product. You already know how to produce it, or your project would be in academia. If you already know what you're doing and have Standard Operating Procedures already in place, then OF COURSE you're going to make less mistakes!

Re:Free STAR-LITE simulation of lab safety trainin

[RockDoctor]

But part of it also may be poor training coupled with a youthful sense of invulnerability of students the young.

FTFY

I know for a fact that I did things when I was a youth (mid-teens to mid-20s) which I knew were pretty dangerous and not very smart at the time, and which make me shudder today. Kids, on the other hand, just seem to keep on killing themselves, and never getting any better at not killing themselves. Cars, drugs, and histrionics over sex/ love seeming to remain the biggest killers, but with a wide range of other stupidities too.

+This

[sl3xd]

I can't agree more. I have trouble understanding how people don't get that students don't come with all of the knowledge they need to be 'safe.' They are there to learn. Many lessons are from making mistakes - often bad ones.

The number of ways to produce surprisingly harmful substances by accident is large, as is the number of students whom haven't discovered their own mortality yet.