ChemBark

It’s time for another edition of WWWTP?, which in this case, could just as easily stand for “What’s Wrong with these People?”

This image was kindly forwarded to ChemBark by a concerned reader and patron of Phenomenex. The company ships their products in these sexually suggestive cardboard boxes. The innuendo would make sense and qualify as mildly clever double entendre if the company dealt with genomics, but Phenomenex sells chromatography supplies. I guess someone thought they had a good idea and decided to roll with it:

Inside the box, a colorful brochure contained less disguised innuendo: the words “unzip me” and what appears to be anthropomorphic female genitalia with legs and a cane. Closer inspection of the Phenomenex Web site reveals that these characters are based on an astonishingly yonic logo for Kinetex (R), the company’s core-shell adsorbent materials for chromatography. Hmmm.

I feel it necessary to warn any of you who might be (i) charged with purchasing HPLC supplies and (ii) perverted, that I hear the customer service at Phenomenex is awful.

I’m just going to assume this happened in a biology lab:

No gloves? Check.
No safety glasses? Check.
No lab coat? Check.
No sense? Check.
No fingers? Soon enough.

I mentioned in last year’s periodic table of cupcakes post that I go to a local high school about once a week to serve as a mentor for a program associated with Caltech’s NSF “Powering the Planet” center. A team of five students at the school synthesizes metal-oxide semiconductors on FTO-coated glass electrodes and screens these materials for catalytic activity in the photoelectrolysis of water. What makes the program so cool is that it’s not just a lab demo, it’s “real” research. There is a chance—albeit small—that we could happen across a great catalyst that will help solve the global energy problem.

When I started in the program, we used a scanning station assembled by a team at the University of Wyoming. They called the instrument “SHArK” for Solar Hydrogen Activity Research Kit and it had a cool shark logo and everything. Later on, one of the PIs at Caltech improved on the idea and built a second-generation scanning station that allowed for faster and more reliable screening. As with any new instrument, it came with a new name…the Solar Materials Discovery kit.

The benefits of the new kit were more-than-fair compensation for losing the cool shark mascot. At the beginning of this academic year, we discussed renaming the kit, but my suggestion of ORCA (Oxidation-Reduction Catalyst Assessment) was shot down. We ended up sticking with Solar Materials Discovery, or “SMD” for short. We have two SMD kits, SMD-1 and SMD-2, which my fellow mentors and I sign up to take to local schools for our weekly SMD activities.

So, that has been going on all year. Two days ago, I had lunch on campus with three former students who participated in the program when it was SHArK. These guys are back home from college and looking for trouble. Halfway into my meal of beef flautas, one of the students commented that the new name was weird and asked why we’d make such a ridiculous change.

“Why?” I asked.

“Ummm…because SMD stands for….ummm…suck my….”

Uh oh. I whipped out my phone to consult the Urban Dictionary, and sure enough, SMD is an accepted acronym for that vulgar phrase. And it’s not like this is an obscure, unpopular term—it has two thousand “thumbs up” votes for accuracy.

How on Earth did we all miss this? How did I—someone tuned into the worlds of technology and ribald humor—miss this?

For the past four months, I’ve been sending e-mails to sixteen-year olds asking the best time for me to come over for SMD. Caltech also has a Web site devoted to SMD, and we regularly give presentations discussing SMD and our SMD kits. I even designed that logo at the top of the post.

Ugh. Never have I felt so old…or dirty.

Just like there is large subset of the Christian population that proclaims faith to be of deep personal importance but rarely finds time to attend weekly church services, there is a large contingent in academic chemistry that proclaims safety as the “top priority” but rarely finds time to participate in proper training. Where there are Christians who only make it to church once a year for Easter services, there are chemists who only bother with training during a 30-min annual refresher course. And just how calamitous personal events (e.g., life-threatening medical diagnoses) are often the only effective means of driving people to experience meaningful spiritual rebirth, it usually takes a tragic event to befall a chemist for an academic department to change the way it approaches safety.

In matters where science and religion clash, I will always side with science, but let’s not pretend scientists are immune to the hypocrisy of compromising their core values out of apathy or laziness. For the slogan “safety first” to carry any weight, it must be backed with action. Such action is generally missing from academic labs, where the slogans “papers first” or “money first” would probably be more suitable. If safety truly ranked first, we would spend more time on it than a few perfunctory lab inspections scattered around an annual refresher course.

If the importance of safety is genuinely held in such high regard—nobody will openly assert that safety is unimportant—then why aren’t training and compliance a bigger deal in academia? Sadly, the laxity of safety is so ingrained in our culture that the deficient system is perceived as normal. It wasn’t too long ago that R.B. Woodward proudly posed for photographs while smoking in his laboratory. In order to achieve meaningful improvement, someone is going to have to counteract this tremendous inertia and change the system.

There is probably a reluctance on the part of professors to institute any significant change because it will “eat up” valuable time. Every minute spent on safety training is a minute not spent running experiments. This fact I will concede, but there is one grand tradition of academic chemistry that manages to weather this criticism: the weekly group meeting. Practically every research group in the world abandons the lab to discuss their experimental results on a weekly basis. A significant fraction of these groups also invest time formally reviewing papers from the recent literature. The tacit implication of holding these meetings is clear: (i) results are important and (ii) keeping up with the literature is important. I see no reason why safety training should not be incorporated into weekly group meetings to emphasize that safety is also important.

How would such a plan be implemented? Professors could either devote an entire meeting (at some regular interval) to safety, or they could make safety a small part of every meeting. For instance, each time a student presents her research results, she could also include one slide devoted to safety. The lesson could deal with a hazard related to one of her experiments, or it could be something more general. The weekly emphasis on safety will help to reinforce the material by repetition and build a perceivable commitment to safety. From the standpoint of risk management, an ancillary benefit of having formal presentations is the creation of a paper trail (i.e., slides) that affirms training is conducted regularly.

The death of Sheri Sangji could have sparked a born-again devotion to safety in academia, but unfortunately, the progress seems largely limited to UCLA. Three years removed from Sangji’s death, many of the circumstances that led to her demise are still common problems in academic chemistry: there are many lab workers who don’t know when to use a cannula or that being contaminated with a pyrophoric material does not mean you must avoid the safety shower.  There are still people who fail to wear lab coats when working with nasty reagents—or who use lab coats made of polyester or cotton in blissful ignorance of their flammability. As with Sheri Sangji’s death, the news of the draconian charges leveled against Patrick Harran represents another opportunity for we, as chemists, to reassess our values and how we conduct research. While weaving safety into the “traditional” group meeting will not replace the need for hands-on training or enforcement of compliance, even if only in small amounts, it will be beneficial for safety to be included within this sacrosanct ritual. For any value to take hold, it must be practiced religiously.

The results have been tabulated, and it is time to announce the recipients of the Chemmy Awards for 2011! Following our centuries-old tradition, we begin by bestowing the statuettes on the winners of accident, hero(ine), and villain of the year.

Accident of the Year
The Boston College Thionyl Chloride Explosion

Yes, the tsunami-induced disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant was a much bigger story, but like the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill of 2010, it had more to do with engineering than chemistry. And while the fatal lathe accident at Yale occurred in the chemistry department’s machine shop, that horrific story also seemed not to have much to do with chemistry; the deceased student wasn’t even a chemistry major. The nitric acid explosion at Maryland was certainly a chemistry accident, but it did not measure up to what transpired at Boston College last summer. It was at BC that a grad student injured herself in a minor explosion while working with thionyl chloride. Rather than call the authorities, she inexplicably fled the blood-spattered scene and drove home. Concerned labmates later discovered and reported the accident, and emergency crews were dispatched to the student’s apartment to decontaminate her and treat her wounds. The accident—and its needlessly convoluted/expensive/disruptive aftermath—made the local TV news in Boston (1 2) and led to a thoughtful discussion in the blogosphere about the safety of working alone (1 2). Unfortunately, I don’t believe a final post mortem (including the cause of the accident) was ever released, but the major lesson was clear: report accidents promptly so they can be dealt with in an efficient manner.

Hero of the Year
Dan Shechtman

I don’t want to fall into a trap of continually granting the award to the most recent Nobel laureate, but in the case of Dan Shechtman, the Chemmy for Hero of the Year is richly deserved. The story of Shechtman and quasicrystals is one of perseverance and vindication. Shechtman’s peculiar discovery of a material with ten-fold symmetry was roundly ridiculed by experts in the field of crystallography—including the venerable Linus Pauling—but in the face of this immense pressure, Shechtman stuck by his analysis and waited for the field to come around. Under this intense pressure, the director of Shechtman’s research group wanted him to leave for bringing disgrace to the team, and it took two years to finally get the seminal quasicrystal work published. It was then that the really intense pressure started, but Shechtman held firm to his ostensibly counterintuitive analysis, which ultimately withstood the scrutiny of the community.

Also in the running for hero of the year were John Schwab (a champion of organic-chemistry funding at the NIH who retired this year), Rosie Redfield (who took it upon herself to do some of the “arsenic life” experimentation that Felisa Wolfe-Simon should have done), and Ahmed Zewail (who assisted with the political revolution in his native Egypt).

Villain of the Year
Linus Pauling

Linus Pauling remained dead in 2011, but the Nobel Prize announcement certainly raised several skeletons from his past. Before I lambast the man, let me start by calling attention to the fact that I rank Pauling as the greatest chemist of all-time. That said, he had his share of spectacular failures. Pauling missed the structure of DNA, his work with vitamin C was pure medical quackery, and his unrelenting dismissal of Shechtman’s discovery of quasicrystals was outright wrong. What was so villainous with regard to Pauling’s behavior in the last case was that he used his bully pulpit in the crystallography community to personally disparage Shechtman alongside the idea of quasicrystals. Pauling famously said, ”There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists,” and he mounted a relentless, vocal crusade against the idea until his death. Shechtman’s idea would ultimately prevail, and he summed up the situation quite nicely to the RSC: “At first I was alone against the world. In the end, Linus Pauling was alone against the world.”

There were a number of other contenders for this award. In 2011, the release of the results of Columbia’s investigation into the misconduct of Bengu Sezen finally verified the egregious nature of her conduct, first reported (here) in 2005. The actions of Felicia Wolfe-Simon in the wake of the “arsenic life” story were also worthy of reproach. Finally, Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent link of MMR vaccination to autism also came to light last year.

Next up: the Chemmy Awards for the biggest news story and best papers of 2011.

Jyllian Kemsley has a post that summarizes all of the coverage and commentary on the UCLA/Harran news. Her blog is undoubtedly the best place to follow developments in this story. The case has so many component issues that one could easily write 20,000 words and still not feel the subject has been properly analyzed. Instead of doing that, let me start off with some preliminary thoughts:

I am not a lawyer. I am almost completely unfamiliar with California labor law and OSHA requirements for how employers must ensure safe laboratory conditions for their employees. Harran may have broken the law; he may not have. I can’t render a reliable opinion of his prospective guilt with regard to the charges.

Severity of charges. While I’m not a lawyer, I think I’m entitled to a loose opinion of what makes sense in this case. The idea that Harran faces up to 4.5 years in prison seems excessive to me, especially when you consider that Harran probably oversaw the safety of his lab in a manner typical of most top-flight professors. Is the state of California going to attempt to imprison every professor whose students don’t wear lab coats, or just the professors who happen to be at the helm when an accidental death occurs?

Punishment. While I believe that a prison term would not be warranted for a conviction in this case, there must be some serious punishment for failing to maintain a safe laboratory work environment. Lack of holding management responsible for running unsafe labs is probably one major reason the culture of academic safety is broken. For the most part, states have left schools to police themselves with regard to safety, and guess what…schools (id est, faculties…id est, professors) don’t impose any meaningful punishments on themselves. With respect to Harran, I think the charges should be “wobbled” down to misdemeanors that can draw smaller fines (in the thousands, not millions) and a shorter suspended sentence (if Harran is convicted). The (seemingly) most appropriate and meaningful punishment for a manager/PI who runs an unsafe lab is termination. While I don’t think a court could force the university to fire a professor, if the university retains a PI known for running an unsafe lab, it is sending a rotten message. At present, UCLA seems to be standing by Harran.

Prospective jurors won’t be chemists. Most of us have worked around academic labs for several years and are familiar with the element of laxity in these environments. While we accept this culture as normal, I think it will be easy for an experienced lawyer to highlight some of the aspects of life in an academic lab in a way that members of the public (including jurors) will find appalling.

Nonsensical laws. I lack the experience of a lawyer or legislator, but there are certain aspects of the law that seem silly to me. For instance, Sheri was a lab tech, and apparently, the law treats lab techs differently from grad students. Here, Sheri was doing the exact same type of work as a grad student. This disparity doesn’t make any sense to me and just illustrates that academic scientists have not been very effective at lobbying to change silly laws. You see it all the time in safety. Why does 1 gallon of isopropanol/KOH in a 5-gallon container “count” as 5 gallons of flammable solvent during fire inspections (against a 10-gallon-per-room limit)? The 1 gallon is “safer” to use in a 5-gallon container than a 1-gallon container (i.e., no splashing out of the bucket). Also, why can’t safety showers be hooked into the drainage system of a building? What, exactly, is being protected there?

Who gets the blame when everyone is to blame? This case seems headed for a tort, which means that someone is going to have to figure out how to apportion blame for Sangji’s death. While it looks like Harran didn’t have his responsibilities under control, neither did Sangji. It was her responsibility to wear a lab coat (assuming one was available), and my feeling is that even though she wasn’t a Ph.D. chemist, she most likely knew that she was working with a dangerous material in an iffy way (3 x full syringe vs. cannula). Sheri paid the ultimate price for her negligence. Now, how much will UCLA and Harran have to pay (if anything)? I have no idea how one begins to address this issue quantitatively.

Will this case result in constructive change? The culture of safety in academic labs is broken. The tragic accident that occurred at UCLA could have easily happened at hundreds of other schools around the country, because the extent to which lab workers are trained—and monitored for compliance—in academia is a joke. My dissatisfaction centers on two main issues: (i) the actual safety knowledge of lab workers in academia is poor and (ii) safety programs at universities seem focused on limiting liability rather than actually improving worker safety. I imagine there are a few exceptional departments in the United States, but I challenge anyone to mount a tenable argument against this assessment. I really don’t see the Harran charges doing much to improve the first point, and I think the second issue will be severely exacerbated by this case. It would be nice if safety officers at schools could focus more on actually training students than devising vapid PowerPoint slides that “cover all the bases”.