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."
Mid-range time in the lab (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if some of the lab students fall into the trap of thinking that they knew enough, and not realizing that their earlier practices were put in place not to protect them as novices, but to protect them at all times.
It seems similar to something that I've read happens to some pilots. In those cases, a pilot with, say, 200 hours still considers himself a novice, and will carefully follow the checklist and be extremely careful to not get overwhelmed. That pilot may reach 800 hours, and think that he's got it down. This is, according to one investigator (Australian, I think) the most dangerous time to be a pilot. Once this stage is passed, usually around 1500 hours, the pilot has had enough close calls to realize that what they learned early on should be applied all throughout their career.
IIRC, this was the conclusion of an inquiry into a crash of an Australian military helicopter that killed most or all aboard when it came down too hard and too fast to the back of a ship, bounced off, and landed in the ocean. The base reason was "pilot error," but there was much more to the psychology of the situation.
common sense prevents injury (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Give me a break! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Pilot Error and Time in Cockpit (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, there are many "plateaus" that pilots need to go through as the learn their craft. When I was getting my private pilots license, I very clearly remember flight instructor Dave telling me that the only thing that flight instructors did was to basically teach us just enough to kill ourselves. The flight instructors hope was that when we inevitably got ourselves into a fix, he/she had taught us enough so that we could get ourselves out of it in one piece. Dave also said that I would, before a 100 hours of "pilot in command" time frame had elapsed, get myself into trouble and he really hoped that I would survive. And he was serious...and he was right. At the 60 hour time frame of piloting, I did the "low altitude, low airspeed, NO place to go" mistake on landing. Nearly killed myself. It made a lasting impression.
Gordon
Good that it is said aloud. (Score:5, Interesting)
I am an experimetal physcist and luckily i am spared from handling biologically active or organic compounds. However, i observe the following
* electrical/fire safety (my father was an electrical engineer, and we installed the electrical outlets in a holiday home together): The most important princiciple i see violated is that the electrical conductor should not carry force. In the lab people regularly attach no additional mounting. An all scales of electrical wire, from nA to 200V*30A
* procedural safety. Are there rules like: just do certain things with two persons? No, after all you have a PHD, masters, or bachelor, so you are more intelligent than the stupid morons and can handle that alone
* instruction: have you ever had to sign of a "sheet which says: yes, i was instrcten on this machine, which potentially releases dangerous gases". Fuck. In industry, to operate a dangerous machine there needs to be some kind of proof you can do it. In research claiming to have seen somebody operating a similar machine is enough.
* Exits. Hey, its resarch. We need this rack here, now. We dont care what you say, what we do is important and no, we dont have time to mount this cable over the door instead of creating a tripwire.
* Gross miseducation in the lab courses (noe spefic instruction, operating devices by general rules of thumb). Instead of: "this is a pump. Dont the fuck operate it outside its operation range. may burn or explode" we hear: "yes, the inlet pressure meter is a little broken. The manual is actuall for another pump type, because we gave the students lab course the smallest pump. No problem it ran the last 5 years in that way". The other part is that if you mention in a lab course something is broken you usually get punished by spending more time there, and no reward at all.
* After all: organizational issues: If student burns his hand, who is responsible? The Professor? he wasn there. The direct Supervisor (maybe also a student)? No, he usually doen not oficially supervise, its the professor. The security responsible of the institute: he has done his job with checking one time per year everything is roughly in order.
Yes. labs are a fucking mess. I was my hands all the time when going out the lab. You never know what the asshole before you left on the desk. I always look for the exits and usually check the safety valves (i work with cryogenics), at least verifyin that no fuck-up blocked them by a clamp (i have seen that, that dewar could have levelled the lab quite efficiently). I check if the ground wire is attached. I make tricky questions to estimate the credibility of the co-workers. I am a pain in the butt if believe sth is dangerous. And i get really annoyed if people exhibit a "i kept the checklist by the letters" approach. Such assholes just make the checklist longer and longer and less comprehensible because they force the one keeping it to add every single part to be checked (i knew people whos task it was to check the marks of the fire exit which lead trouch a small storage room, they walked around up to the door of that room, i said "there is a huge pile blocking the door in this exit and the bulb in the small room is burned out. They just said: "yes but the markers leading there are ok", and put a check mark). I am very willing to bend rules, but everbody should be kept responsible for his safety and the safety of co-workers in the lab.
Re:Give me a break! (Score:5, Interesting)
TFA indicates that she didn't have Ph.D., just a bachelor's degree. It's not clear from the article that anyone ever told her she ought to be wearing protective gear; in fact, a previous inspection (before she worked there) noted the failure of employees to wear lab coats.
I point this failing right at the Secondary Level in High schools with Chemistry labs being removed after those idiots in Colorado. In Washington State they removed most school districts chem labs, bio labs and more. You get shown basic lab safety at that level, long before you enter a University. There is a serious disconnect that they removed the trades from High School, handcuffed the Hard Science labs and created integrated mathematics to shuffle through the herds of lowest common denominator. Challenge the kids and show them the beauty and dangers of Hard Science so they have a respect for it.
Re:School vs Industry (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:School vs Industry (Score:2, Interesting)
But correlationisnotcausation. Don't you ever read the tags?
Re:School vs Industry (Score:2, Interesting)
Do not confuse the liberal arts departments with the science and engineering departments. At my school for instance, whenever there was a strike by the liberal arts students and faculty, you can be sure that none of the science and engineering students or faculty took part in it. We all used to cross the picket lines.
Reporting Biases, other problems (Score:3, Interesting)
First, there is a large reporting bias. People in the private sector have some greater tendency (we can argue about how large) to cover stuff up. In academia, the system of incentives discourages coverups much more thoroughly; also, there's a cultural difference between people who choose to be university professors and those who choose to go private, although obviously individual people vary tremendously.
Second, in the academic sector you do actual experiments. Meaning, you don't know how things are going to work until you try it, and most people are doing different experiments. In most corporate research facilities, everyone does the same experiment on slightly different subjects or whatever. This does have a big impact on safety, industry is somewhat discouraged from having 500 people do the same unsafe experiment, but in a university you could have 500 people doing 300 experiments of which 75 are unsafe.
Finally, there is a culture of disregard for safety precautions at the University level. In Industry, many of the safety rules are stupid - but following stupid rules is 90% of the job so people follow the rules. In the academic sector, when the fire department tells us we can't pour urea and ethanol down the drain because those are *dangerous chemicals*, it breeds resentment against the rules themselves.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:If i look at the replys here... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is really the problem, isn't it? One day, we'll be responsible for these jerks who insist on learning safety the "hard way."
I think we have to stop the total lab turnover. There have to be permanent academic research positions created in the physical sciences similar to what you have in medicine. We need people who are not postdocs, but not faculty. Most PhDs don't want to end up in a technician position, but if we were able to offer long term contracts at salaries competitive with faculty salaries, I think it's possible to retain some good people in the lab longer than just a few years. I don't think tenure is possible, but they do have that for technicians in medicine.
What that gives you is training for new students which is consistent year to year, someone in the lab you can trust to look out for the best interests of the lab long term (not short term in-and-out, look the other way postdocs like us). It should also result in better science.
I've seen a few physical science labs that have technicians like that, and they run better or worse than average depending on the quality of the staff. Use your spouse as your technician? Bad idea. Use someone who's good in the lab, an early student who ends up sticking with you for 20 years? Great lab. Great research. Better planning.
Re:This is what happens whenever... (Score:3, Interesting)
Green or green with yellow aren't auto neutral in communications. Try old 108 pair phone. Any pair or combination can have a constant 24 volts AC between them even if hooked up correctly as far as the outside of the building. If they are carrying pre DTMF era signal sources (like rotary dial phones), ringer current can be 70 volts (on really old gear, this is likely to be AC, but not at anywhere near 60 Hz, depending on how fast someone cranks the little handcrank. 120 Hz. will sometimes go into tissue when 30 Hz. would mostly run across the skin.). And if you get one like I did once, some jerk will be running 440 volts DC on one pair (which just happened to be the green with yellow/yellow with green pair). Not that there can be a lot of sustained amperage on wires that small, but since I was knee deep in mud and miles from medical support, that might not have mattered.
All this stuff is still in use. I've actually been in that situation from the movie "The Abyss", where I needed to tell a yellow and white wire from a solid white one under dim yellow lighting.
So when I'm working power and not signal, there's one rule: red is hot, black is hot, white is hot, green is hot, any other funky colors in the box are probably hotter, and some joker probably routed the whole mess right across 8,500 V. high tension. Assume your significant other just took out a million dollar insurance policy on you, and is sleeping with whoever hooked up the system you are working, and he/she is better in bed than you are.
Re:Give me a break! (Score:2, Interesting)
It's never like that: no one ever tells you to violate safety rules; it is just made clear that X needs to get done. The rest is left up to the student.
The pressure is often self-applied. Everyone on the academic track knows that you need to publish or perish (sorry!). The thing is, that when you go hunting for your next post-doc or your professorial position, all that matters is results. And there are lots of applicants for permanent positions, so it is crucial to get more results than everyone else. I've gotten more than one letter back from some university apologizing for delays in a job application process because "...we had over 100 applicants" or "...we had over 200 applicants."
In that kind of environment, it is amazing that safety gets any attention at all. But it does, even if perhaps not enough.
And, don't forget that in a research environment, everyone is making up procedures as they go along. Industry has the advantage that you can do something again and again, until you figure out the best way to do it. Researchers often don't have that option. Once you've done something a few times, that's the end of it. Either you graduate or you move into another part of the experiment. Or, the technique becomes obsolete, or it needs to be modified for the needs of some other experiment.