54 As new details emerge in the fatal UCLA lab fire that killed Sheri Sangji, a research assistant in Patrick Harran’s lab, it becomes more evident that UCLA is a dysfunctional department in an environment where the burden of responsibility is placed upon everyone and everything other than that of the university or the department. The slow decline of UCLA and recent high profile departures suggest a department of infighting and low morale. From the LA Times:
In electronic missives to university colleagues, Harran complained that UCLA had all but hung him out to dry in the press. In one e-mail, he said that reports in two chemical industry publications “read like an indictment, without having the facts.”
In another, he took issue with a UCLA investigator’s report, which was detailed in a March 1 story in The Times. The report, citing previous lab deficiencies that had gone unfixed, made it “sound like I deliberately did not adhere to policy” and was part of a “culture of neglect,” he wrote.
According to the same article a similar, though non-lethal, incident occurred at the school not but a few weeks ago.
While I pick on UCLA (rightly so) the issue is far more systematic and, as anyone who has gone through graduate school knows, safety training is almost non existent. I rarely see lab coats on in my own lab, though it’s hypothetically required. I generally never wore a lab coat until I got an asskickity one as a gift from my boss for making a website for him. If custom lab coats get people to wear them, then that’s what schools should offer!
I contacted my senator about this issue. I’ve had good relations with his office and am a strong supporter, but he was unreceptive to the idea. If you could, for just a moment, pull your cell phone out and call these senators and reference the LA Times article above about the need for universities, who receive federal research grants for science, to provide comprehensive training to all laboratory workers. You may well do something to help prevent this shit from happening again. Indeed, maybe even to yourself:
| Boxer, Barbara – (D – CA) | Senator of CA |
| 112 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510 | |
| (202) 224-3553 | |
| Feinstein, Dianne – (D – CA) | Senator of CA |
| 331 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510 | |
| (202) 224-3841 | |
| The Following are members of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation |
|
| Hutchison, Kay Bailey – (R – TX) | Ranking Member |
| 284 RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510 | |
| (202) 224-5922 | |
| Rockefeller, John D., IV – (D – WV) | Chairman |
| 531 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510 | |
| (202) 224-6472 | |
The first time you contact an “almighty” senator, you will likely hear the voice of one of his or her staff members. This is quite fine, they’ll dutifully report to the senator any grievances you have so long as they aren’t too grandpa Simpson.
For tips, you would start like you were calling an insurance office asking for information. Introduce yourself, tell them what you do and how you are relevant and then, quite politely, say something like:
I’m not sure if you’re aware of the recent laboratory fire that killed a 23 year old UCLA lab assistant, but having gone/been/are in graduate school I can attest that the safety measures that surrounded this death are all too common. I feel as though because these schools all receive federal funding, it should be within the purview of the senate to require, as a condition of receiving federal funding, to provide life saving training to students and employees. You can read the latest in a recent LA Times article…
Hutchison’s people will likely ponder if that’s really within the purview of the feds and wonder if it’s even worth considering (such is the stalwart nature of Republicans). I would anticipate little to no static from any of the other Democratic senators. You will likely not hear back, but you will still be heard, I assure you. I have spoken with the offices of my senators many times.
NOW DO IT! Or I’ll give you swine flu.
UPDATE: Answer this poll question!
Tetrabutylammonium acetate is a(n)
- base (80%, 288 Votes)
- acid (20%, 72 Votes)
Total Voters: 360
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So I stroll into my new lab one day and see that my hoodmate is boiling a bigass flask filled with 100 grams of sodium cyanide and a bunch of other shit that would have to wait in line to kill you, and I think, “Hmm, I believe that there must be some kind of kit available in the event that my hoodmate is a complete incompetent and manages to fill our little lab with the nutty goodness of HCN”. And of course, there is such a beast, containing nitrite poppers and a horse syringe full of thiosulfate or some such. I don’t remember, because WE WERE REFUSED PERMISSION TO POSSESS ONE.
(goddamn add comment button)
Rest of story follows:
Yeah, we were allowed to have ten heavy dessicators filled with an armory of glass syringes and scary needles, and we were allowed to purchase kilograms of the most vile and poisonous chemicals known to man, but God forbid we have a syringe readyfilled with a solution designed to be injected into a human. That was some kind of crime, or led to some kind of crime, or some shit. The administration’s reply to my question: OK, so what do we do if God forbid my hoodmate’s reaction fucking explodes all over him? The official advice was that we were to transport him to the infirmary – ten blocks and nine lives down the street. I pointed out that there was a funeral home just three blocks in the other direction as a way to minimize travel and save energy. A green solution.
So, you know, I have a problem with places like UCLA and people like Harran who will gladly screw the lab monkeys and then claim ignorance.
um, why don’t you just use a canary like people in 19th century mines did? dead canary = run
works every time.
We too are denied this kit. The reason for us was that people have thought that they had cyanide poisoning but did not, and the injection itself will kill you if you are not poisoned. Also, people need to be trained to administer the big ass needle correctly or they often miss.
Aha! We asked for the kit and the training, but we could have neither. They would not train anyone in the building. No, you had to hail a cab and go down to the infirmary. Personally, I just left a sealed envelope on which was written: “To be delivered to my lawyer in the event of my death by cyanide poisoning.”
From an MSDS (Baker): “IN CASE OF CYANIDE POISONING, start first aid treatment immediately, then get medical attention. A cyanide antidote kit (amyl nitrite, sodium nitrite and sodium thiosulfate) should be available in any cyanide work area. Actions to be taken in case of cyanide poisoning should be planned and practiced before beginning work with cyanides.”
They do have interesting squirrel adventures though:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jByfWOLmjo
When sucking a humongous volume of tert-butyllithium into a syringe, 1) Do NOT pull the plunger out the other end (more than half full is stooopid); 2) Do NOT have a loose hub connection – snugged luer lock; 3) Do NOT neglect to inject argon to roughly balance suck pressure when the liquid is removed (or first vent if there is pressure buildup – the plunger tells you things); 4) Do NOT put the needle into the septum! Take a 3/4″ length of narrow glass tubing, purge with argon, tightly insert a tiny serum cap into each end, and run the needle through that into the bottle of pyrophoric death. Then, withdraw the needle into the chamber. The worst that can happen is you squirt a few drops of pyrophoric death into the inert chamber until pressures balance.
Don’t pop the cap and pour tert-butyllithium into an addition funnel. Don’t work with things that can kill you unless backed up by somebody male and less stupid than you are (even if you must walk down the hall and grab a tot syn git).
Lab poltroon, “HELP!”
Female backup, “Don’t you dare yell at me!”
Sheharbano Sangji was fired for cause – incompetence. “Sangji was wearing nitrile gloves, safety glasses rather than goggles, and a synthetic sweater with no lab coat.” (What about contact lenses, open-toed shoes, big hair…) Carpenter or chemist, you learn your trade real world or you lose pieces.
Gee Al, maybe if you weren’t quite such a dick more people would be willing to put you out when you’re on fire.
The Leidenfrost effect spares underlying tissue if you burn hot enough. Scrape off eschar and allow the stuff underneath to grow upward. Takes a couple of months. Nose job and face lift are FOB. Ignore doctors, listen to nurses, and pee on the Burn Psychologist’s desk. Immortality has no impetus to improve.
Do you know how sloths protect themselves from the bush fires?
They evolved to burn very slowly.
There is huge amount of lab safety regulation already in place, which – if observed by the book – would make everyone completely safe because all lab work would be completely prevented.
It is much more desirable to have personal injury lawyers suing the university for fifty millions in compensation and punitive damages – and bankrupting one unlucky chemistry department (and setting a horrifying precedent for the rest of the academia) rather than having yet another government agency trying to organize our lab work.
I agree. We need at least one big group to be ruined by a personal injury lawsuit, then all the rest will realize the safety is in fact important.
The Upton Sinclare model: Wait until conditions are so bad that you can write a full book about it… then do something.
I like it.
I agree that the lack of training and precautions were appalling. If Sangji was trained and still failed to act properly, I would be doubly skeptical of those responsible for her employ.
Oh please, t-BuLi? Is that the worst you can think of?!? Neat trimethylaluminum…. only for the baddest of the bad.
diethyl zinc is also a bottle o’fun
UCLA was fined a little under $32,000, highest ever and the report found that Ms. Sangji had received inadequate training. Talking of incompetence, Mr. Harran couldn’t find any documents or report supporting the claim of giving her any training. This amounts to criminal negligence. And thank you for your compassion… you dick wad. Were you there when it happened? Do you know any facts? There was only one other person when the accident happened, couldn’t speak english and didn’t know the protocol. You’re a first class douche bag, sir. And my bet is that you’re probably a repuke (Republican).
My comment was in response to Uncle Al aka DB aka repuke.
KSR — are you a synthetic chemist? If so, have you EVER had your synthetic training of any sort documented?
P.S. the article that KSR is referring to is here:
link
Listen kid. I’ve been hearing that crap ever since I was at UCLA. I’m out there busting my buns every night. Tell your old man to drag Walton and Lanier up and down the court for 48 minutes.
Here’s a quick but unrelated question:
Why does my 300 mM solution of Tetrabutylammonium acetate have a pH of 6.5 on both pH meters (using different buffers to calibrate them) I tested it on? (I also sparge with argon, degas in sonicator…)
I mean… this is driving me crazy. TBA acetate should be a fucking base, no?
isn’t TBAAc made from acetic acid? Might be an impurity… *shrug*
Litmus paper says ph of 8?
sounds like your pH meter sucks then. big surprise. I hate pH meters.
probably wrong, but i’ll give it a shot–sometimes other cations (Na+ in particular) can cause interference problems in pH probes. i’d think tetrabutylammonium would be too large, but…perhaps not.
See… I think it’s the cation. Sodium acetate solution is nice and basic, like it should be, both on the pH meter (8.5) and on the pH paper (about 8).
Just today I calibrated two different pH probes and tested a solution of tetrabutylammonium chloride… according to both pH meters, it had a pH of 2.1, according to the pH paper – about 7.
Another possibility is that fairly concentrated quat. ammonium salt solutions can make the pH meter probe go cuckoo. Electrodes are only human, too.
Is it neat or in solution?
TBA acetate is a solid, so it’s in an aqueous solution.
Sorry, I should have looked in the lab.
TBAF can be weird depending upon whether it’s in aqueous or organic solution.
Is it maybe the pseudo-organic nature of the cation that’s confusing the probe?
I’m going to go with this. No matter what I do, I cannot make TBA chloride read anything above 2.1 on a pH meter… and it clearly isn’t an acid – dripping it on pH paper causes no color change.
Do greasy tetraalkylammonium salts stick to the probe? I don’t know how they (pH probes) work, but if the electrode is somehow covered in grease, that’s probably going to fiddle the output some.
I distinctly recall one of my undergrad Phys Chem lecturers telling me that Na interference kicks in at highly alkaline pH values (over 11 or 12).
No, TBA acetate is not a base! learn to respect your results over your initial prejudices
If you’ve made your solutions yourself using DI water, have you checked the pH of the DI water? I had a similar problem once with some organic acids having pHs of 8, and, to make a long story short, it turned out that a repairman had made a big booboo to our school’s water deionizer.
This happened (another similar event) again? What?
Kyle, all due respect, do you really think this (federally mandated safety training) would actually do any good?
Have you ever once called out one of your lab mates on something they were doing that was unsafe? If no, what makes you think that safety training would do any good?
I have, on numerous occasions, called people out for unsafe practices. For instance, I admonished my own group’s administrative assistant for grabbing a bottle out of my hands without gloves. My chemical hygiene is not up to industry standards (I admit), but certain aspects of the lab must be respected. We work in a field that can kill us, if given an appropriate amount of ignorance.
Safety training may not, in itself, ultimately teach people where every danger in the lab lives, but it might change the atmosphere from one of cavalier disregard to active vigilance. A small bit of information and preparedness goes a very long way.
I think it’s peer pressure from folks like you (and me!) that will have a far stronger effect than any safety training, no matter how horrific the pictures in the Powerpoint are. Doubtless when you are a PI, safety will be a watchword in your lab.
Until safety or lack thereof becomes a fire-able offense, nothing will change.
You should be commended on being one of the few investigational journalists* bringing attention to the general absence of safety standards in university labs. Everyone knows how bad it gets and how it’s all done with the full knowledge and support of the principle investigators and university officials. They’re all technically responsible agents of the incident (did they train the professor? Did he get his required by law RCRA training?—probably not). Was there the required chemical inventory of everything in the lab for TSCA standards? Etc.
You have to understand the cozy relationships that exist between OSHA and the universities (particularly UC- CAL/OSHA) to understand that none of these entities really desire that standards be enforced. That costs money and time and for goodness sake that’s less money for OSHA and University officials! It’s really as base as all that having witnessed such matters up close. And of course it’s not in a Professor’s best interest to limit a student’s work hours or bother with real oversight.
Think about this- if you’re not trained in safety matters you can’t complain about safety matters to anyone.
The tragic things is that had she been a post-doc and survived horribly burned she wouldn’t have been able to sue for a dime (since that’s what worker’s compensation is for). So try not to get horribly mutilated in your post-doc, because they’ll treat you as a full time real world worker with regard to any on-the-job accident/ injuries.
*- I was going to say pseudo-investigational journalist by realized you’re actually getting paid now.
So I’m issuing a virtual press pass:
I understand the sentiment. This is where I favor the lawyers approach. In industry, I received numerous safety training sessions that I had to sign I attended. Pardon my cynicism, but no one believed this was for our safety. It was to protect the company in case of an accident.
If you read safety reports, they generally had nothing to do with safety training. Accidents were most frequently due to a lack of knowledge and planning for a task. I argued that safety training should emphasize risk and risk aversion.
Here, I favor the old top down company approach. I don’t want a committee designing sets of rules for how to do things and handle a boat load of chemicals. As unfortunate as it may seem, I would fire Harran for failing to properly train and oversee the people working for him. This shakeup could envelope other university personnel up to and including the university president.
Rules and regulations have a habit of protecting everyone but the injured. If you are subjected to an OSHA inspection, you would know they aren’t there to protect you. The inspectors are there to cover their rears about the regulations. The last thing they would ever think of doing is to ask you, the person doing the work, “Is there anything here that is dangerous? How might that danger be reduced?” The last person anyone thinks about in occupational safety and hazards inspection is you.
PS, never pressurize a gas in a chromatography column, use a liquid pump. If a column breaks, with a liquid, there isn’t any flying glass.
I had a safety discussion with my PI a few months ago about lab safety and we decided that they really need to have an experienced chemist in the safety department.
My project had ventured into an area neither of us had any experience with. I needed very dry THF and a lot of LAH for a reaction. This was a pretty big reaction. Around 2 L of THF and 25g of LAH. When it was over I had to quench the rest of the un-reacted LAH. Neither of us knew how to safely do this.
I asked one of the safety people if they knew of the proper procedure for doing this or if they had an experienced person that could help out. They were useless. They even tried to tell me it was too dangerous and tried to call the fire department.
So thanks a lot lab safety department! They are more concerned with making sure I wrote the IUPAC names on every single vial in the lab.
Kyle, I think this is where your intended website (or places like NotVoodoo) would come in. Am I correct?
I’d like to think so, yes.
If you didn’t know how to properly quench the LAH, then why would you even set it up in the first place?? Not too smart in my opinion.
I had done it on smaller scales which were a lot less dangerous and if those went bad it wouldn’t have been a big deal. The 2 L scale worried me a lot more. T
Well, 25g of LAH in 2L of THF will dry it pretty well!
the UCLA situation is symptomatic of academia in general – everyone keeps their head in the sand until something horrible happens. while the PI bears final responsibility for what occurs in their lab, the individual is ultimately responsible for their safety, and i feel holds the most responsibility.
the UCLA situation is a tragedy, a 23 year old scientist was killed doing something she loved. to place blame on the PI or EHS is misdirected. however, this should illustrate that PI’s and EHS should be more pro-active in maintaining a safe environment. the individual should always be aware, however, that it is their own safety that they have to be responsible for.
1) If students were entirely competent, they wouldn’t need to be taught in the first place. The teaching of the appropriate and safe conduct of research is one of the PI’s main jobs – if you can’t do your research safely, then everything else is a nonstarter. If supervision of some sort were not required for students, then neither would working for 5+ years for crap be required. While everyone is responsible for themselves, your job as a PI is help them to figure out how to do that – their inability to do so is not only their failure (for not doing so well enough) but yours (for not having taught them well enough) – unless it’s a Darwinian case of extreme stupidity or a desire to commit suicide (which this doesn’t appear to be), there is blame to be placed on the PI.
2) Safety in academic labs has been well-known to be crap for a long time – reagents are poorly maintained and (often) not monitored, safety equipment is about but training is limited if available, and safe ways to do things aren’t propagated. This speaks loud and clear to anyone listening that safety is not a priority – results are. Yet, obviously, industry can bother (with even more necessity to get things done and results obtained) to do at least some research safely, so the “if we had to submit to OSHA/EPA/etc. regulations we couldn’t get anything done” is a load of fetid stinking wet crap. Some safety can be taught in the lab, and the universities (who are being paid 20-40% overhead on all the research grants to, in part, take care of these tasks) ought to have some basic safety infrastructure in place – monitoring and disposal of reagents, physical security, and the like. Allowing schools and PI’s to avoid these responsibilities subjects both their students and their subsequent employers to significant risks – “get the research and run” shouldn’t be an acceptable motto.
agreed on both counts.
I definitely agree with you Hap, and disagree with stork naked.
According to someone I’m working with now: as a PI, you should really either leave your office and teach a student how to do synthetic chemistry, or pair them up with a willing post-doc or senior grad student for a year at the least. That is the only good way of learning how to do synthetic organic chemistry fast. At least a year of solid synthesis work with you closely supervising the person and helping them out when and where needed. Anything less and you have a crippled Ph.D. student graduating after five years most of the time. Some manage to teach themselves pretty well after a lot of trial and error, but most choose the path of least resistance. These people have a very hard time doing real chemistry on their own despite having a Ph.D. Never mind the lack of any safety training. You don’t learn how to drive a car by reading a book about driving and then doing it, and neither do you learn good synthetic chemistry by being thrown into a lab on your own. I guess those that survive after wrapping themselves around a lightpole a few times will become good chemists. In America neglect of teaching practical chemistry works because it’s easy to import cannon fodder from all over the world and even if the attrition rate is rather high, you still get results. A lot of the imports were actually taught properly in their countries and are particularly good for a PI that wants to focus on grants and articles even if there is no other senior personnel in the labs. The art of teaching practical chemistry is becoming a lost one in American chemistry departments.
I’m starting to agree with that viewpoint (of my lab neighbor) more and more lately. I feel bad about training the new grad students in my previous lab for only 3-6 months now… There really should be a well paid permanent senior technician in most organic groups. You would get more useful work done that way too.
Interesting article (and timely for this discussion) in the link below. States that the average OSHA fine for a fatality due to lax safety is $5800 dollars!
So if UCLA avoids all safety standards and kills one person a year, then that make perfect business sense.
http://counterpunch.org/wypijewski04292009.html
Every year every lab worker will be required to sign an extended document listing in punctilious but incomplete detail (extended but unstated liabilities in a codicile including unknown hazards) every aspect of its own liability for insufficient safety awareness and material failures of professionalism (isn’t that a lovely phrase?).
Management gains from others’ losses. Management is trained to maximize gains. Wouldn’t you buy a Detroit $40K electric car with a 40 mile range? You should – you’ve already paid for all of them before legislation that requires you to buy two more.