Students, the Other Unprotected Lab Animals 236
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."
School vs Industry (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:School vs Industry (Score:5, Insightful)
And what kind of workplace hazards did you experience as a computer scientist? Aside from the obvious risks associated with sitting in a non-ergonomic chair for too long.
Re:School vs Industry (Score:3, Insightful)
Can somebody mod this down as flamebait? Seriously, lab safety has to come down to a left vs right debate? Sigh...
Procedure Design (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what happens whenever... (Score:5, Insightful)
...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.
Re:common sense prevents injury (Score:2, Insightful)
Which is why, when dealing with novices, I now try to stress the point that there is nothing uncool or wimpish about taking a few extra seconds for simple safety precautions.
What a shame! (Score:2, Insightful)
As an individual who works at a pharma company, I can tell you that the joke isn't "I'm off like a Prom dress" - it's "I'm off like a flaming lab coat". You would be surprised how quickly they will throw down those, if the time is right. A $10 item could have saved this individual. This is a tragedy.
Give me a break! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
This lab sounds particularly bad. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Do as I say, not as I do (Score:1, Insightful)
... You're an idiot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition
a) Those "progressive forces" are _right_. Stringent safety procedures are vital.
b) The "university" "exempt themselves" from compliance? Read the friendly summary: Congress exempted Universities from compliance.
c) ... I can't go on. Fallacy of composition. Attributing the failure to implement lab safety procedures at an institutional level to the people who got those same procedures implemented at a national level? Attributing a phenomena that is demonstrable (to some degree or another) in many university and high school labs to one single entity? And presupposing that that entity is the same one that managed to get the standards applied?
And, finally, to protect myself, some humor: http://xkcd.com/386/ .
Re:This is what happens whenever... (Score:2, Insightful)
Almost all of which could be solved by simply asking someone with experience. The unfortunate reality is that many engineering students are taught that 'labourers' opinions aren't valuable. The simple truth is that they provide the 'applied' to the science that was studied. It's a shame, but many students never learn this, and end up grounding the wrong wire, so to speak.
Re:School vs Industry (Score:0, Insightful)
Apparently you don't know what "yes" means, either.
the money thats supposed to be evil is in fact saving people.
Ignoring the false generalization that university types think money is evil, this would be irony, yes, but:
the whole lefty money is the root of all evil crowds that populate most university's permit their workplace to be so much more dangerous.
This is a loose connection between two unrelated things.
unethical use of students (Score:5, Insightful)
The way graduate students are used in academic labs is unethical.
These are people who are told that their part-time pay for full-time (or more) work is offset by the opportunities that working in an academic lab and receiving an advanced academic degree will bring them. This is flat out not true. Prospective graduate students are misled into thinking that they have a place waiting for them at the top of academia or in charge of an industry lab.
Congress and the media are told that we have a shortage scientific labor. Meanwhile, there is so much labor available to academic research labs that they are often getting people to work for them for free. It is absurd that postdocs working in commercially relevant fields of physics make less money than a construction worker or fast food manager. Why is that? It's not because there's a shortage of labor. At least the postdocs are employees.
Why are we basing our research infrastructure on a rotation of untrained students? Why do we force those who are best at labwork to immediately move on to desk jobs? It certainly does nothing to promote safety, as people who know what they're doing are very quickly replaced (that's kind of the idea) and labs are structured and encouraged to keep the average level of competance low (it's education, right?). The whole thing makes no sense to me.
Re:Give me a break! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Give me a break! (Score:5, Insightful)
She was an undergraduate, not a graduate student, let alone a PhD. She wasn't even a science major.
Why did she have a key? Why was she allowed in the lab alone? Why was she told to work with lithium?
If this was a mistake made by an experienced researcher, I would agree with you wholeheartedly, but letting her in the lab was a serious mistake in judgment on the part of the PI.
Re:Give me a break! (Score:5, Insightful)
It wasn't a question of someone ignoring the protocols she'd been taught--it was a case of someone never being trained in those protocols in the first place and nothing being done to correct this known problem.
Re:Mid-range time in the lab (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I don't know if it's overconfidence so much as getting lazy. I worked in a lab that was classified biohazard level 2 (I think) when I was a lab noob. Always wore gloves for one thing. I'm somewhat less of a noob now in a different lab. When I first started in my current lab, I would wear gloves for everything, even, say, when cutting chicken embryos out of their eggs. Clearly nothing in that which is going to hurt me.
Now I've probably swung too far the other direction. I've caught myself doing stupid things like not putting gloves on when carrying a test tube full of toxins because I would have had to walk 10 feet to the gloves and was in a hurry. I guess there was a little "I probably didn't get any outside the test tube" but it was mostly just laziness and bad habits. And I think that's probably where most of the dangers in academic labs come from.
Experienced researchers are often just as cavalier about dangers as anyone else in my experience, I think because a close call with lab safety, in some labs anyway, is much less dramatic than with a pilot. If you almost spill something bad on yourself, you might know it's something you want to avoid, but that's kind of academic. "Oh, a carcinogen almost landed on me, that would have been bad." You might laugh about it with your labmates next week, hopefully tell yourself you won't do that particular mistake again.
If you almost crash a helicopter on the other hand, you probably nearly wet your pants, and the reaction isn't "Oh, that would have been bad," it's more "OHMIGOD I CAN'T BELIEVE I'M STILL ALIVE!" A much more viceral experience that probably causes you to be more careful with -everything- rather than just that one mistake. At least, I would guess that's the case.
Re:Give me a break! (Score:5, Insightful)
we needs to get back to the whole
play science for the munchkins (where vinegar and baking soda are the worst chemicals they use)
get more real as they get bigger (when they can add a chemical to a half full beaker of water correctly they can go beyond play stuff)
by the time they are old enough for a "wand" they should be using fire and the more nasty stuff
and by the time they are in high school they should be working with 3 liter kegs of Hydroflouric acid and other "fun stuff"
by the time they are of legal age they should be able to work out how to brew a keg and make their own fireworks
(and know that combining these is a bad thing)
Re:unethical use of students (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with you. Unfortunately the solution to the problem would more then likely quadruple the cost of a collage education. GSI's teach, they grade, they do all the stuff the professor should be doing instead of having to publish, write grants and beg for money to fund relevant research so the department will stay afloat.
Why do you think lecture halls have 200 students in them? I know four tenured professors at UC Berkeley, two in the chemistry department, two in the Anthropology Department, those 4 people would LOVE to teach more, but they have to be rainmakers instead of teachers.
And when I say rain makers I don't mean just money, that also means luring people into their programs so the departments stay afloat.
Re:Give me a break! (Score:3, Insightful)
recommended...
there's the issue summed up in one word
Re:This is what happens whenever... (Score:1, Insightful)
Did Ted Kaczynski wire your house to try and electrocute you? There's no way a US house in the 1970's should have been wired that way.
You couldn't even buy Romex with red and black wires then, and I doubt someone wired a house with conduit. The house is probably much older than you are guessing, or something else is going on.
Why salaries are lower in science (Score:4, Insightful)
Basic economics. Quite simply, it is because nearly every postdoc would much, much rather be doing science than working in the construction or fast food industries. And in general, people are willing to accept a lower salary for doing something that they like doing than they will accept for doing something that they don't like doing.
Re:School vs Industry (Score:1, Insightful)
You mean, your CS teachers were a bunch of idiots who DIDN'T shout at you for having insufficient test cases, bad design and terrible implementation?
The only reason the ME guys shouted is because people could get hurt. CS bugs hurt people too, google for Therac-25 to find out why.
Re:meh (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm a graduate student. I was forced to sit through three hours of safety training on proper handling of hazardous chemicals. But I'm an astrophysicist - I spend all my time in front of a computer! The most hazardous chemical I deal with is the ethyl alcohol in my friday night beer!
With such bureaucratic stupidity, it's hard to take any of the safety requirements seriously.
Re:School vs Industry (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't as much of a left v right as it is a look ma no hands-do as i say not as I do situation.
It isn't no mystery that the left is big ob regulating industry and about everything else. It's also no mystery that the left primarily dominates the colleges. What is a mystery is how the left seems to want to say pay attention to what I say not what happened when I do something about what I say. The parent was pointing that out. It's like welfare in which it's actually more difficult to get off of it then it is to stay on. You need to land a job earning around 25 to 30 percent above minimum wage in order to replace the assistance you get. Yet when you get a minimum wage job, you lose almost all assistance right off the bat and are worse off then when on assistance. Well if it is there to help people in need, then it shouldn't be doing that, it should be giving a hand up not a hand out. But the way it is presented as is a compasionate system to help those in need when the reality is that it's designed to create a dependency that can be used to entice people to perpetually vote for a certain party and depend on them being in power.
Long story short, this is another prime example of saying one thing when the reality is quite different. As long as someone employed is supervising the students, then OSHA rules apply. Consumer protection rules apply outside that which pretty much imply OSHA rules yet we are being told that it simple isn't the case in the left controlled bastion of hope.
Re:School vs Industry (Score:5, Insightful)
At risk of drifting somewhat off-topic, this is actually a big problem. Political discourse has becomes so polarized that we're unable to actually work out solutions to our problems.
You'll never get the conservatives to reform the welfare system, because they don't want it to exist. Unfortunately, however, they also don't have the power to abolish it. In the end, you end up with a lot of petty arguments and underhanded political tactics, and the problem grows larger and larger.
These sort of polarizing arguments occur quite frequently in university politics, and can result in safety standards not being properly implemented. Tenured professors can be very hot-headed.
Re:School vs Industry (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Emphasis is on the students (Score:1, Insightful)
I am a grad student and guess what, I WRITE the safety procedure used to handle the radioactive waste produced during my process. If I fucked up in any of my calculations I personal or one of my friends will die since the information about the isotope I produce is almost nil.
And people wonder why sometimes grad students die... its because we are looking at the unknown
Re:Why salaries are lower in science (Score:3, Insightful)
Or alternatively, because you HAVE TO follow a certain career path if you're in certain fields. First basic degree, then PhD, then postdoc. You don't get to choose this, if you want to be accepted as a competent researcher, and what's important, you have no leverage to complain about the wages, management, terms of contract or even safety. This is all pretty much at the discretion of the lab and professor. That argument of "they like the job so much" is applicable only up to a point.
Money is the root of all evil (Score:2, Insightful)
the whole lefty money is the root of all evil
I thought the Bible said, "The love of money is the root of all evil." And you're whining about this being a "lefty" thing? Idiot.
Re:This is what happens whenever... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that there are several reasons you don't see this kind of stuff in industry:
1. Liability. As a result of liability everybody has their job and that is all that you do. If an electrical device fails in the lab, the chemist asks for it to be fixed and somebody qualified to perform the repair does so. Nobody just opens up an instrument and starts soldering wires. Liability also means that if an employer fails to provide proper equipment they face serious consequences.
2. Funding. Since there is a profit motive for using the instrument there is money available to get it fixed properly, and right away. Employees don't have to do without, and so they are not tempted to do their own repairs.
3. Enforcement. OSHA requires that employers strictly enforce safety rules. If an inspector comes in and finds 10 employees doing something unsafe, the employer can't just point to the rulebook and training and say that they are "rogue employees." Employers are actually expected to discipline and even terminate employees who do not follow safety rules. The reason is simple - otherwise rules just become legal cover and employers will say that rules should be followed, but fire the slowest people in the operation until everybody figures out that they are expected to cut corners.
4. Inspections. Most industrial labs have routine safety inspections and clear chains of responsibility. Sure, academic labs have occasional inspections, but very little accountability. Where I work every lab has a designated safety officer, who is accountable for any safety violations in their lab. The formalized inspections are essentially designed to make sure they are doing their job. Lab safety officers are expected to police their labs and keep them in order. Safety violations are reported to senior management and there are serious consequences for a lax attitude towards safety. Failure to comply with instructions of a Lab Safety Officer would result in fairly swift discipline, and failure of a safety officer to catch safety problems would subject them to discipline (or at least replacement in the role).
Academic labs should be inspected, and when violations are found the university should be fined - plain and simple. If the university claims that students aren't obeying the rules, then the university should still be fined and advised to start enforcing the rules if they don't want to be fined again. Safety is serious business.