Estimate: Academic Labs 11 Times More Dangerous Than Industrial Counterparts 153
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."
Depends on what they are doing (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:2)
I've never seen microwave popcorn burned by accident. It's always been intentional to cover up the smell of smoking pot.
Re:Depends on what they are doing (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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..."
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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...
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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, fir
Free STAR-LITE simulation of lab safety training (Score:2)
http://www.starlite.nih.gov/ [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
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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
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Nah - there's a process called a hazard analysis [osha.gov] 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
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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.
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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.
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Possibly valid, but.. (Score:4, Informative)
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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 a
Convenient Memory Lapse (Score:3)
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 proce
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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 environme
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Really? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re: Really? (Score:1)
Q: How do you know if a knife is sharp or dull?
A: After you've lost a finger.
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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 ou
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.)
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The only guy I know who elec
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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 ques
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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.
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My point was, to NOT exempt them.
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DOW (Score:1)
No no no not more "Health And Safety" please... (Score:3, Insightful)
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... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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"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 safe
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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.
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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 manageme
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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. A
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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 leve
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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.
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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.
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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 w
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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:
Working hours (Score:2)
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Max Planck Leipzig? I hear similar stories from there.
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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.
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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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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"]
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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.
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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.
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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...
Shrug. (Score:2)
Eggs. Omelets.
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[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
Not surprising at all. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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For those that don't know, phosgene has been reported to smell like a freshly-cut field.
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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?
+This (Score:2)
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.
Please, editors, do some editing (Score:5, Informative)
A group of grad students and postdocs in Minnesota decided to address the issue had-on.
Well, that typo could've been worse.
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Portal: The cake is a lie
Slashdot: The editors is a lie
There are liars...and statisticians (Score:1)
The results might be somewhat different, of course, if industrial labs didn't conduct most of their investigations "in-house". (snicker)
Presumably they're not 11 times more productive? (Score:1)
I was hurt at university... (Score:1)
A: Because it breaks the flow of a message (Score:2)
Not really a problem (Score:3)
There are no bad experimental chemists.
Not for long anyhow....
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No surprise there (Score:1)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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... [youtube.com]
In my university (in the Netherlands), this is already common for at least 15 years.
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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
Not factual (Score:1)
Academia is a different environment (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Editors - learn to type (Score:2)
... address the issue had-on.
Had-on? Really?
Been there, done that, got the lung condition... (Score:2)
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 res
We should not discourage this trend. (Score:2)
Where will the next Spider-man com from if not an academic lab?
Duh (Score:1)
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Putting some damn goggles on does not require experience.
Not surprising, and acknowledged by chemists (Score:3)
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" (Score:2)
Of course! (Score:2)
Of course more accidents happen there. Safety is hard! Why bother when you have an endless supply of easily replaceable grad assistants?
Had-on eh? (Score:1)
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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 (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re:I must have taken the wrong courses (Score:5, Funny)
I sure as hell hope that's a natural number of boxes, otherwise my whole world is a lie...
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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 backu