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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."
It is anything like my university, the chemistry labs keep blowing up due to students trying to make illegal drugs off hours.
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.
Students less likely to follow safety procedures. News at 11.
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
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.
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.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
A group of grad students and postdocs in Minnesota decided to address the issue had-on.
Well, that typo could've been worse.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
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.
There are no bad experimental chemists.
Not for long anyhow....
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.
I sure as hell hope that's a natural number of boxes, otherwise my whole world is a lie...
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).
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
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.
-> I dislike sigs...
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"]
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
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
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.