Go over and read Jyllian Kemsley's post on the ACS Council on chemical safety. Her concluding thoughts:
I came away from the Council discussion with three main thoughts: First, no one stood up either to defend academic laboratory safety culture or to say ACS shouldn’t get involved (rather, one councilor noted that “There is no college laboratory that I want to work in because they’re so unsafe”), and the flow of suggestions had to be cut off when time ran out. Clearly, the prevailing opinion is that there’s a role here for ACS. [snip]
Third, I also thought that there was too much emphasis on training students and not enough on the role of faculty and administration (a comment left on a post last week said the same thing). Trying to marshal student chapters isn’t going to get very far if the students’ teachers/advisers/mentors aren’t on board. (Re-)training faculty is, of course, a much harder problem than creating safety videos, but if the goal is to change culture, that will happen faster if you include the people with the power. [Emphasis CJ's.]As I'm never tired of saying (and I believe it quotes Harry Elston), safety is a top-down function. Changing the hearts and minds of the faculty to (re)emphasize safety culture is the best way of preventing more tragedies.
In grad school.... I ran a reaction that involved refluxing bromine in carbon tet with Hg(II) salts; after a modest yield, advisor says:
ReplyDelete"Well, just scale it up- you only need 20+ grams!"
I wonder how much money the ACS spent coming up with suggestions like:
ReplyDelete"Somehow “marshal the forces” of undergraduate members and student chapters to promote good safety culture, and give an award for chapter activities in this area"
"work with TV and movie producers about showing appropriate personal protective equipment"
Further reinforces what a waste of resources the ACS is.
As an aside, are there actual data on differences in chemical safety of academic versus "industrial" (in which I include little biotechs) on a per capita basis? My perception is that indeed academic labs are less safe, but I don't know this to be true: most accidents at universities (though tragic) tend to involve only 1 or 2 people, while industrial accidents can be bigger in scope.
I have heard of bad accidents at schools, but never on the scale of:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45y1lSnlrH8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KuGizBjDXo
bbooooooya, I don't think the appropriate comparison is academia to manufacturing. The appropriate comparison is research laboratories in academia, industry, or government. But as far as I'm aware, there are no hard numbers available for comparing research labs across the different types of institutions. Companies and government labs likely have near-miss and incident statistics, but it would be hard to extract them (possibly doable for government labs with FOIA). Reporting in academic institutions is probably weak.
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