68 The recent death of a UCLA graduate student technician from a t-Butyl lithium fire has made its way around the blogosphere and even the inbox of my personal email account. The news is, of course, shocking and sad, but accidents in academic labs are likely an underrepresented phenomenon. Having been around to different schools and working in a few labs now, both in academia and in industry, the conditions for academics are… well… appalling.
I could get into the problems of waste disposal (while it isn’t legal to dump chemicals down the drain in the South and Mid-West, it might as well be, since no one would know or care), inefficient hoods that are incorrectly or poorly calibrated, insufficient federal or state inspections, but that’s hardly even the first step. The conditions in academic labs are so disparagingly bad, that the first step is fundamentally educational in nature. t-Butyl lithium fires shouldn’t happen in a lab and when one occurs, it shouldn’t cause someone to die. This isn’t necessarily just picking on UCLA, but, even in hyper regulated California, the amount of readiness for an accident compared to a company like Eli Lilly is insignificant.
Here is a little story about something that happened as an undergrad… A post doc was weighing out dry NaH on a balance for some reaction. Instead of putting the NaH directly in the flask after weighing it out (the balances were, of course, not in a hood) he just walked it over with weigh paper. How many times have I seen this done by people? Fuck… lots. Not with dry NaH – admittedly that was just stupid, but I’ve certainly seen people do it with other nasty compounds. Anyway, one of those magical gusts of lab wind took the paper and tossed the powdered NaH into the air and POOF! instant fucking fire. The solid landed on the ground and started to burn the linoleum. The post-doc, in his absence of training, grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wall and pointed and hosed the flaming compound down. . . POOF! instant fucking giant lab fire. The burning metal was broadcast all over the wooden cabinets, sink, hoods…
yikes.
No one was hurt. This could have been prevented with a bit of education. Putting lab balances in a hood is more than a good idea, it should be a law – but I appreciate the tight budgets most of us are in and hoods are expensive. So we compromise and put the balances outside the hoods. Would this fly at Lilly? Fuck no. Hazardous chemicals are measured in hoods. Period. End-of-fucking-story.
A personal pet peeve of mine are the nefarious broken NMR tubes… NMR tubes are pricey and, as such, we are forbidden from disposing of them if they aren’t totally fucked 9 ways from Sunday. Consequently, many of the NMR tubes in our lab have chips missing from the tops (all but mine now). How many times have I stabbed myself while putting an NMR tube cap on and slipping? TWICE. Once was too much. I now throw out the NMR tubes and buy new ones. If my boss wants to fire me, he can, but I’m never stabbing myself with one of those glassy shanks again. If the damage isn’t too bad and it’s a low end tube, I’ll take it to the glass shop and have them cut the top down but I’m never going to shank my fucking hand on those again. I got a free tetanus shot out of it with workman’s comp, however. That bitch stings, too.
There a countless examples of academic labs being cheap. They under prepare their students for the dangers in the lab and tell them nothing about, you know, how to quench sodium metal. It’s like “don’t drop this on your balls” is about as sound safety advice as you’re going to get. It’s pretty much like working in a third world nation. We are paid dick, have ungodly working hours and unsafe conditions… and it’s all supported by federal research dollars.
Where’s my hazmat training? Where’s my class D fire extinguisher? Why aren’t my hoods calibrated to OSHA standards? Why aren’t the people in my lab compelled to wear glasses and lab coats? WTF is up with this?
I’m writing my senator today to tell them that there are no regulations on safety training in acadmic labs. This is probably going to piss people off but, if I had to guess, it may have saved a life had someone done it last year.
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Hey, that’s how I got my tetanus shot too!
I agree, though- there should be more safety training in the lab, and the PIs or senior staff scientists should do it, because every lab is going to have its own set of potential safety hazards. Hoods at our school are checked twice a year to comply with (I think) ANSI standards- OSHA does not have quantitative hood standards.
In the end, the person most responsible for your safety is YOU. If you aren’t vigilant about your safety (which includes being around those who might pose a safety hazard to you), then you will be less prepared for an accident should one happen. And accidents always happen when you don’t expect them to.
I think my dept. has had 1 laboratory inspection since being built (c. 5 years ago). We’ve opted to comply with the voluntary EPA self-auditing program and, thus, have effectively kept them from visiting our campus.
I am well aware that Universities perpetually adopt the “hindsight is always 20/20″ attitude when it comes to accidents. I accidently started an ether fire a few months ago, and I recall several profs saying something like, “well, maybe you should have done things this way.” Thanks for the advice.
How ironic that out of all places–an institution for higher learning–chemical safety training is essentially non-existant. Why is it so hard for Universities to take 3 hours (at bare minimum) to talk about lab safety and not just how to read/access/download a chemical hygiene plan? I know, just like you mentioned, it’s a cost issue. But the cost of proper lab training should pale in comparison to the cost of paying out damages in toxic tort/wrongful death rulings.
Considering that the person in question has been in the ground less than 24 hours, I think it’s a little soon to talk about the specific case, so I won’t.
In general, though:
A great quote from the book “Heat” about the chef Mario Batali and how he runs his restaurants: “Mario knows exactly what he doesn’t want to know.”
That’s how most (~65%?) PIs run their labs, in terms of safety and hazardous waste training. Good groups have PIs that care and senior students/postdocs who lead by example and train others well. Safety is best taught and enforced by your peers.
As for hazardous waste training, I think it’s the responsibility of the department to determine the relevant federal, state and local regulations and disseminate them to their students. Where I went to undergrad, they actually kept track of wastewater emissions from the department. Probably a good idea overall.
What’s ‘acadamia’, anyway?
It’s sort of an open secret that I’m not a very good speller… where by “not a very good” I mean “a horrible” but I’m at least highly inconsistent with my poor spelling as I don’t think I misspelled it anywhere other than the title of the post.
It’s just fun to be pedantic. No harm, no foul. I apologize.
I completely agree about the lack of safety training in academic labs. Just this week a post doc down the hall from my lab was doing a reaction with his flask in LN2. He ended up condensing O2 in the flask, and when he let it warm up it exploded in his face. He didn’t have a blast shield in front of it and wasn’t wearing safely glasses. Amazingly he wasn’t hurt that bad, he was back in lab the next day. After words I heard a lot of people say that they should start to wear eye protection when they work in lab. Something like that (or the UCLA thing) shouldn’t have to happen before people start to think about safety.
Can you imagine what would happen if OSHA actually inspected academic labs?
I have fire extinguisher training every 12 months. Our hoods are calibrated every 12 months. If we alter the pH of the effluent stream, an alarm sounds. We can get shit canned for not pulling the alarm in the event of an incident.
How many people need to die before someone realizes that safety is not taken seriously in the White Tower?
The situation isn’t helped by the “cowboy” take-no-prisoners attitude of much of the synthetic chemistry world.
An analogous problem is non-chemistry groups using chemistry. My chemical engineering group has started to branch in synthesis work, and it’s pretty remarkable to see the difference in behavior between those in my group who have spent time in the chemistry department and those who have not. Still, we all do better than what I saw in one international institution.
Don’t even get me started on the inadequacy of our hoods! About a year ago the sash on mine was broken, so it was propped open by a 2×4 for about a month until it got fixed. It wasn’t the only one in the lab with a problem, either…
I think mandatory safety training in academic labs would be a fantastic idea, but not if it’s given by the EH&S people. I’ve been through theirs. It’s incredibly boring and mostly irrelevant with a touch of paranoia. (Not that it’s a bad thing to be cautious–it’s just better to know when to be extremely cautious.) I think safety training would be more effective coming from an experienced chemist–such people have very memorable stories (*cough*Milkshake*cough*).
By the way, tetanus (and flu!) shots don’t really hurt at all if you take a little ibuprofen about 4 hours before and then for a day or two afterward, by the way.
That’s actually a really good point. Chemists tend not to believe EH&S folks. I’ve never understood why they don’t use retired or much more experienced chemists as inspectors/teachers for EHS issues — they know where the bodies are likely to be buried.
Safety training is useless for teaching newbies how to actually do many different types of dangerous reactions in the right and safe way. They don’t go over techniques of handling tBuLi in safety training or quenching the subsequent reaction and if that’s all you get, you’re better off reading the small slips of paper that come in the box with Aldrich bottles on proper technique. A senior scientist has to show a trainee how it is done, and then supervise them for a few times afterwards for these types of reactions. That wasn’t done here. Also, it is important to teach the trainee how to deal with fires, even by creating one by apparent accident, just to see if they will panic or not. If I don’t manage to create a ’safe’ fire during the ‘training’, I tell them over and over what to do in case of one.
As for ibuprofen and tetanus shots, you can’t drink alcohol and take ibuprofen at the same time. So two days of staying dry is no deal. Just drink and forget the pain.
Ibuprophen and booze is fine. Acetomenophen and alcohol is bad. Easy mistake to make.
well…fine within reason. still not great for you…
you’re right, though, acetaminophen plus alcohol equals serious hardcore liver damage.
That’s what I keep hearing, but the warning on the bottle says otherwise. I try not to drink and take ibuprofen together too often just in case.
We had an unpleasant accident last year – a guy stored a half-kilo bottle of Cbz-Cl under hood for long time, unaware that Cbz-Cl slowly decomposes to benzyl chloride and CO2 at room temp. Another colleague was also unaware of this problem, borrowed the bottle and he opened it on a bench – a fountain of pressurized Cbz-Cl erupted into his face. He had safety glasses so he kept his eyesight but he ended up in ER because of nasty face burn/irritation. Our lab was reeking from Cbz-Cl for few days after the incident. And you have to mop up the floor after using the safety shower – the damned thing has no drain…
I’ve never understood the no-drains-under-safety-showers thing, but every lab I’ve ever seen is like that.
Does anyone know why?
too expensive…
Well, if the situation is bad enough that you have to use a safety shower, then you probably don’t want the stuff you are washing off to go down the drains. I suppose you could plumb it so the wash doesn’t go into the local sewers, but that wouldn’t be practical given how often they are used.
Concentrated sulfuric acid and concentrated lye are both sold in drugstores as drain openers.
The safety shower is very useful when you need to put out the flame but inadequate for decontamination. Although better than diving into the sink – there was a dude in Prague who was taking a large flask full of liquid ammonia, from one hood into another, and he cracked and spilled the thing on himself. With a loud shout he preformed a three-second striptease and then washed his affected parts in the lab sink, in front of the assembled lab…
The reason there are often no drains under the safety showers is to prevent the possible chemical cocktail made when one of them is used from flushing chemicals into the sewage system. The same laws that prevent you from pouring chemicals down the sink apply to the floor drains, since they generally just flow to the same system.
Academic labs have had well-known hazardous waste disposal issues, and the lack of emphasis on safety is consistent with that. Unfortunately, I think EPA exempted academic labs from some of the safety and waste regulations, and it doesn’t seem as if anyone cares to make academic lab safety rules more stringent.
I wonder if pharma companies could cut back on safety by saying it costs too much (kind of like the Republican theory of “environmental protection”). I’m guessing that it wouldn’t fly so well. Why should it be a tolerable excuse from government-funded academic labs, many of which want to generate patents and revenue just like private businesses? It might also be of note that lots of companies use hazardous chemistries and yet still follow safety rules (so that lab safety doesn’t have to come at the expense of reaction breadth, other than the decrease coming from money diverted to safety).
Oh, and UCLA has off for the Christmas holidays? WTF? I took off too much time at Christmas, and my postdoc called me on 12/28 to find out where something was. If the university had closed the labs over the holidays, at least one of the synthesis people would probably have sent students to his company to work, or set them up in his basement.
I interpreted “off for Christmas” as for the undergrads. Anyone else think that?
From the article I got the impression that there weren’t many people in the labs, so I assumed that it didn’t simply mean the undergrads were gone. Also the university saying that only important/necessary work should be going on implied to me that it wasn’t just the undergrads that were gone. I could be wrong though.
I can still see the bus for the synthesis prof in grad school pulling up for his students. That’d be a jolly little bus ride.
The funny part about the press releases and news reports is that the phrase “critical research needs” was used for allowing work during the shutdown. What does that mean?
To me, that means “if I don’t do it now, the experiment will fail and I will have wasted tons of time”, not “my boss would really like me in the lab” or “I’m bored at home” or “I need to do this for my quarterly research report.”
I expect that UCLA will either reassert the true meaning of the phrase or sweep this inconvenience under the rug.
If she was a technician, how was she suppose to not work and still expect to get paid?
Ah. That part (that she was a tech) is not emphasized (doesn’t that mean that she was not a graduate student?). Still, “getting paid” != “critical research needs”.
Having gotten my PhD from UCLA in the past several years, I can say that UCLA completely shuts down for the holidays, i.e. all buildings locked, power turned off, water practically shut off etc.
It took the chemistry department screaming bloody murder before the powers that be relented and “allowed” the department to “stay” open over the break. I guess that the thought of having to replace a number of NMRs and having stills going off left and right once the water was shut down got the bean counters thinking. Of course, they still dialed down the hoods so that they didn’t pull as much. They claimed it was because people were working on the roof. Of course, I never saw any workmen even in the building…
Don’t know when that was the case, but the 3.5 years I’ve been here, UCLA has always been pretty much business as usual during the holiday break. Some people take off during christmas, but there were plenty of people around when Sheri’s accident happened.
The “cost-saving” by UCLA started about 5 years ago. After the department raised a stink, and was left relatively untouched, it was business as usual. Now the rest of the campus is a different story…
This is a very depressing story. As if we graduate students do not deal with enough shit, there is the fear of death as a result of poor safety training.
Does anyone know of a good website or reference one can use for proper disposal/quenching of poisonous or dangerous lab chemicals? Say the two year old bottle of methyl lithium that is all dried up in the freezer (or Grignard reagents, etc.) that everyone at some point has seen before in their lab.
I recently found this in my lab. 1L bottles of dried up flammable metal reagents in the freezer. This pisses me off after reading this story
I can’t say I’m aware of any website that suggests how to dispose of those chemicals. When it comes to disposing of them, for whatever reason, the common knowledge of the lab is where you need to go. There is no compendium of “safe handling practices” for old chemicals.
And if you get the wrong asshole in the lab that just says to “pour it very slowly down the sink” you’re putting your life into the hands of a retard. Nothing good comes of that.
At least she didn’t try to clean her high vacuum pump with it or dispose of the aliquat in a column of Drierite. Another highly trained UCLA graduate student. Too bad for her family.
Yeah I think there should be a “code of conduct” kinda thing written by professors and grad students (or at least the ACS) that is better than the MSDS because those things are like “BEWARE, DO NOT COME IN CONTACT WITH SKIN” on every fucking chemical. Oh gee, don’t let chemicals touch my skin? I didn’t know that! Thanks for the tip, MSDS, now do you have any relevant safety information on this chemical, like its compatibility with other chemicals or God forbid proper disposal procedures? Nope, what you get is “dispose in accordance with local procedures.” Gee, again, great advice MSDS!
I would also like to have more information on how to do work-ups safely. Often, it’s no problem to set up a reaction with dangerous chemicals, but the work-up is often much more problematic in my opinion. If something is very toxic, and you can’t simply quench it, what is the best way to do it? Of course there can be no general answer to this.
Between the Fisher vials and the NMR tubes, it’s a wonder you still have fingers Kyle…
I cut my index finger with a chef’s knife yesterday making risotto and got a sliver of glass in it from cleaning the day before that. I have broken more bones in my fingers than most people break in their body. I figure that everyday I can play the cello is a gift….
They cannot train me to not be a klutz.
This post has encouraged me to discuss this matter with my entire group. I think the training is shit, and the resources to keep us safe nil.
I suppose the best way to handle these situations is to either contact the supplier, or EH&S to determine proper procedure for handling, transferring, and quenching potentially hazardous/deadly materials.
Another note, and one of my personal favorites.
Kyle brings up balances located outside of the hood. This is very commonly observed in academia (including my labs), and poorly regulated industrial firms (my previous job). My personal favorite is seeing OsO4 (which sublimes) weighed in the open for everyone to enjoy the fine metallic/deadly odor. This shit is toxic well below the levels for smell detection! I do not blame the graduate students, however, since what can they do (practically I mean)with no training?! Its up to the PI to ensure safety and not to blame graduate students for improper training.
In this case shit should roll uphill.
“Where’s my hazmat training? Where’s my class D fire extinguisher? Why aren’t my hoods calibrated to OSHA standards? Why aren’t the people in my lab compelled to wear glasses and lab coats? WTF is up with this?”
Quit your bitchin’. I got twenty kids in Pakistan just waiting to get on the boat and replace you.
Graduate school is a legal sweat shop. I’m shocked they let us have breaks to birth our children.
Nah, it’s more like the Soviet Army. They’ll take people from anywhere and as long as you say, “Yes Sir” to your commanding officer, you can go off and do what the hell you like when they are not looking. You wouldn’t be able to surf Ebay 5-8 hours a day like the guy who used to ‘work’ over at the next lab if you were in a sweatshop.
The safety training aspect of it is certainly Soviet Army similar.
“One student gets a beaker, one student gets chemicals. When the student with the beaker falls, the student with the chemicals picks up the beaker and puts his chemicals in it and does the reaction!”
Well, it’s a demanding profession. It’s not grad school per se, but good and bad PIs. Scientists are a breed apart, I think. We’re not auto workers, our profession is entirely different. I think it’s less amenable to regulation than other industries, or at least regulation harms us most. We need maximum freedom and flexibility to do our job effectively.
It should be a (presumably) federal law that all balances are in fume hoods? WTF? For one, you can’t get four decimal places in a(n operating) fume hood. For another, many chemicals are routinely weighed that require essentially no safeguards whatsoever.
Like psi*psi said above, EH&S folks are near enough useless as to make no difference. The idea of having a group of old, experienced hands do some training is a good one, but the other point raised was a valid one – you can’t just have a training session, someone should watch you do the dangerous procedures the first couple of times. That’s the way our lab did it – each newbie was the responsibility of an old hand, and the PI made damn sure they did their job. The first five times I used R-Li compounds, I had a postdoc hovering over my shoulder.
My old undergrad lab had one fume hood shared between 40 people. All phosphate removals involving heating with conc. hydrochloric acid used to be done in the open air outside the hood. At the end of lab, the entire room was full of a HCl smog. That was fun.
I have been disposing lots of old BuLi bottles for our entire lab by pouring them on dry ice. You need a very large bucket of dry ice, and eventually the thing can flame up on you as hexane/pentane accumulates so it is important to have more dry ice on hand to put out the fire.
The safest method really is to throw the bottle against the wall on a school courtyard and let it burn, and sweep the glass and ashes the next morning. But EH&S folks are somehow not supportive about approving it.
I put them in other peoples’ labs under the guise of “returning something we borrowed.”
do you realize it takes just another practitioner in the other group for your old crusty BuLi bottles to begin miraculously re-appearing in your fridge? And then you get a secretary of your boss informing you that she canceled your order of BuLi because according to the inventory there is another 8 bottles of BuLi somewhere in the group…
We buy the 250 mL bottles and use them pretty quickly…I think it’s rare that one lasts more than two weeks. Once they’re empty, it’s just a matter of popping off the cap and waiting a few days, then adding a little water and waiting a few more…your way sounds more fun, though.
The UCLA tragedy is such a horrible story and I extend my condolences to the friends and family.
Our department has a very involved safety head that has a PhD in synthetic organic chemistry. This person is incredibly qualified to not only act as a resource when one is unsure about an unsafe reaction but will even roll up the sleeves and help should someone be uncomfortable. I realize just how uncommon this is and, furthermore, how many people aren’t really experienced enough to even know what is particularly dangerous.
Going with the ‘each PI runs their own show’ model, I put the responsibility on each PI to train or arrange training of their researchers. For example, in a synthetic group: “For the first X weeks you will work with Experienced Person. New person will work on Z and should should Z work out Experienced Person will be second author.” EP gets a shot an authorship, new person gets trained, and you help acclimate new person to the lab. It is imperative that the boss makes it clear that 1) X=reasonable amount of time for EP and 2) training new people is a REQUIRED function in the group. Such a culture of safety (and information transfer!) takes vigilance and excellent management skills to build and maintain, though.
Hey! You take your newfangled good ideas like “mentorship” and “teamwork” and you GET THE HELL
OFF MY LAWNOUT OF MY LAB!Oh, I’m very aware of how far my hypothetical scenario is from real life in most of academia. It’s just what I’ve been working on fostering and will demand in my independent lab.
Academics don’t give a hoot if you die of chemical burns. The whole graduate school process is legalized slavery. If you’re not working alone at 9:00pm to get that reaction done the next day, I can assure you most PI’s will bash you for it. And yes, if you don’t do it, they’ll get some guy from India to do it.
There is no accountability because a tenured faculty member can’t be fired.
Hell, kill off the whole lab and he’ll (or She’ll) just strike it up to bad luck and start over. Most academics are narcissistic slime.
Uhhh….. would you like a warm, soothing cup of peppermint tea mayhaps?
A grad student died because of exactly what Afid said, and you just condescendingly brushed him off. Now that I’m working in industry I’m amazed at what was considered acceptable in grad school, and I hope OSHA starts looking more closely at academic labs in the future.
Don’t you think Afid is exaggerating just a little bit?
While I do think that professors know what they don’t want to know about, suggesting malice or indifference to serious bodily harm is a little bit silly. They’re mean, sure, but they’re not evil.
What, Afid said that all academics are self-serving psychos and ‘narcissistic slime’ and a grad student died because it was all true? As opposed to poor safety standards and training?
Ooooooohkay…… Looks like we have another candidate in line for a warm cup of soothing and relaxing herbal tea.
You ever been to grad school, Sam? I have, and unfortunately, Afid is right on.
Where the hell did you and afid go to gradschool!? Because I want to avoid that place now. I heard that the City of Dis University chemistry program wasn’t all it was made out to be, but man, I never would have thought it got that bad over the years.
Sure, the place I went to wasn’t all roses all the time, but I don’t hate it with a passion and the profs generally weren’t a bunch of psychos as far as I could tell.
Maybe you just need to wait another year or more until the negative emotions fade away…
I went to UIUC, and would wholeheartedly recommend avoiding the place. This is also based on what happened to my friends (several had worse experiences in grad school than I did). I’ve been out long enough not to hate it with passion anymore, but I’ve also been working in industry (with much higher safety standards) long enough that the story about the kid at UCLA really pissed me off – if these profs cared about safety and not just publications and professional accomplishments, this might not have happened.
I don’t think professors are evil enough to intentionally kill a kid, but I do think they’re evil enough to not give a crap about the safety of grad students. I can’t speak for the individual involved in this incident, but that’s my assessment based on what I’ve seen.
There is also a significant amount of responsibility that falls upon research laboratories to publish hazardous procedures. I ended up in the hospital for 3 weeks with 3rd degree burns from boiling fuming nitric and sulfuric acid. Skins grafts and scars are not what I wanted to have happen. I was being very safe, however, the reaction I was doing had exploded on a post-doc in another lab and THE RESEARCH GROUP NEVER REPORTED THAT. The group always just referenced a paper from 1975 even though it was a reaction they did all the time and because of said explosion had a greatly modified procedure which involved 3-necked flasks and 6-8 condensers.
I’m still mad at that lab. F*ck them.
“It’s pretty much like working in a third world nation. We are paid dick, have ungodly working hours and unsafe conditions… and it’s all supported by federal research dollars.”
…which third world nations have research programs funded by feds?
I suppose it depends upon what you mean by third world. Limited to what is generally considered “poor” by American or Western European standards, Iran, Pakistan and India have federally funded research programs that don’t involve making shit that melts the skin off babies. BUT that was obviously hyperbole…
The problem I have is everyone around me is unsafe! I’m paranoid to the bone about everything, so I read the MSDS sheet, transfer dangerous shit to tared flasks in the hood. We don’t have a balance in the hood because the boss said the air flow would give incorrect readings. I’m not sure if that’s true, but being off a few milligrams is much less a big deal then someone breathing in toxic fumes! Just today someone wanted to show me the “pretty” color of some toxic volatile osmium compound. Red toxic fumes in an uncaped flask right in my face. OK! The people around me are going to kill me!!!!!!!
Safety in a lab is not a matter for senators. It is a personal matter. If you feel unsafe, fix it. Either make yourself safe, talk to the person who is making you unsafe, or take it up with your boss. Then take it up with his boss if need be.
All crying to senators will do is give us yet another law that won’t be enforced consistently.
Let me tell you something from personal experience.
If you report unsafe conditions to your PI, or even your university and nothing is done, then NEVER EVER EVER call OSHA. If you think someone will show up on a white horse I can assure you that is not the case. OSHA works hand in hand with university administrators and local county officials to ‘keep things quiet’. OSHA is a do-nothing organization.
Should you witness large numbers (or even several) unlabled bottles, unrefrigerated reactives or large amounts of chemicals outside of flame-proof cabinets then CONTACT THE EPA. EPA prosecutes and fines on a regular basis under a mandate called RCRA. Most academic labs fail at least one RCRA requirement. Even generally hazardous conditions (not fitting specific criteria can be fined and prosecuted). Note only the Professor and administrators will be fined.
http://www.epa.gov/epahome/violations.htm
It’s funny that all this is done under the aegis of protecting the trees and snails.
labor? that comes and goes. Snails is forever.
I’ve put some of my thoughts down about this incident here, after the interesting LA Times article from the weekend about the incident:
http://chemjobber.blogspot.com.....angji.html