Another Reason to Wear Safety Glasses
December 5th, 2011
One overlooked aspect of the importance of wearing safety glasses in lab is the protection they afford to UV light. A report in today’s Harvard Crimson reminds us of this fact:
On Tuesday afternoon, about 60 LPSA students headed to Science Center 117 to complete the last lab of the semester, which involved observing DNA samples placed on a transilluminator that emitted ultraviolet light.
Although a protective shield is supposed to cover the device whenever students make observations, some students did not use the shield correctly while viewing their samples. Some were also not wearing safety goggles, resulting in temporary injury to their eyes that caused irritation and blurry vision a number of hours later, according to students in the course.
A number of students were sent to the hospital, although no one is expected to suffer permanent damage. This incident should serve as yet another reminder that you can’t get lazy about personal-protective equipment in lab just because “oh, we’re not working with fire or chemicals, so it should be okay”. Also, while it sucks to have to be the bad guy, when you are a TF (or TA, in non-Hahvahd speak), you must continually pester students who fail to wear their safety gear.
While almost all laboratory safety glasses sold nowadays have a UV-protective coating, one easy way to tell if yours do is to use your set-up for running TLCs. When you put your glasses in between your UV lamp and a fluorescent TLC plate, the fluorescent green color should go away.
December 5th, 2011 at 2:17 PM
In other news, undergrads these days are pussies.
December 5th, 2011 at 2:33 PM
Had a EH&S person tell me once that they had a student who lost a retina from a laser; when asked why no goggles, he said “I didn’t think it would be my unlucky day.”
December 5th, 2011 at 2:34 PM
Do we know that it was the UV light that actually caused the eye irritation?
December 5th, 2011 at 2:44 PM
The second article (Friday’s) makes it seem like they have the problem pinned to UV-light exposure.
December 5th, 2011 at 3:01 PM
Are glass goggles verboten? Maybe we should whip them out during UV experiments. I remember Dick Feynman telling the story of how he looked at the first nuclear explosion through a truck windshield because he was sure the UV light couldn’t get in through the glass.
December 5th, 2011 at 4:58 PM
Richard Feynman died of cancer.
I had a friend in grad school who thought that he was getting pink eye over and over. It was actually a sunburn on his cornea from not using eye protection when examining gels under UV. So I completely believe this story.
December 5th, 2011 at 5:19 PM
Feynman died of cancer of the colon 40 something years after the Trinity test. I doubt there is a connection. Regular glass lets through longer wave UV light, but blocks shorter wave UV light (I just did the test with a borosilicate test tube and our TLC lamp at 365 and 254 nm, I am too lazy to look up the exact cutoff). If I was Feynman I would have only had one eye open to hedge my bets. Most prescription glasses are polycarbonate, rather than glass, and polycarbonate blocks both short and long wave UV, even without the UV coatings. I sunburned my corneas while boating all day without shades one time, and I wouldn’t recommend it.
December 5th, 2011 at 5:22 PM
*Correction, not colon. So maybe the Manhattan project is to blame. Yay wikipedia. Still too lazy to look up the UV transmissions of glass.
December 5th, 2011 at 7:03 PM
Not all UV boxes are equal. The one I dealt with as a grad student would only burn you if you tried. The one in my current lab, though roasted me after about three minutes total exposure spaced out over several hours. I didn’t get it as bad as most though – turns on my contacts have some UV-blocking so only the whites of my eyes were toasted. But then the burn got infected and I had to see a doc without actually explaining what happened (didn’t want get my superiors involved in any way, shape, or form – the injury was absolutely a result of my own very poor judgment and I paid the price in pain). To throw some more proverbial salt in the wound, the first antibiotic the doc gave me didn’t work. Not sure if it was the wrong drug for the bug or if it was an issue with the formulation – every time I put the drops in, my eyes hurt more. Anyway, the infection did clear, the burns did heal, and by all indications I walked away form the whole thing with nothing more intense than a marginally lighter wallet and a lesson learned. I am much more careful with the UV box now. Shame that had to happen to me at all, really.
I am, however, very diligent with my laser goggles. You can’t get complacent around a Class IV 1064.
December 6th, 2011 at 7:13 AM
It’s never occurred to me to wonder if my various pairs of goggles and safety glasses over the years have had UV protection. But I’ve never noticed a difference when doing the hundreds, if not thousands, of TLCs over the years, so I guess they haven’t.
December 6th, 2011 at 12:24 PM
The cancer – one minute UV exposure correlation seems wildly uncertain at best (the baseline probability of dying from cancer is pretty high). Let’s not awaken the alarmists.
My question was a statistical one. I don’t doubt that UV can cause eye burn, but a good scientific explanation would eliminate other causes (other pollutants in the lab, transmission of infection from an individual affected with something else) and estimate the odds of 5 people out of 60 getting eye burn by chance alone.
December 7th, 2011 at 1:45 PM
Two more articles in today’s Crimson:
This one talks about how the injuries are relatively minor corneal burns that will heal completely.
This one talks about potential legal issues involving the liability of the university for the incident. The comment thread is interesting. No students, so far, seem to have come forward on a legal warpath. The students who have spoken up just want the hazards of the lab exercise to be stated more explicitly.
December 8th, 2011 at 11:09 AM
I’m fond of lampwork, i.e., making glass goodies from soda-lime glass and a torch. Lampworkers use didymium glasses to filter out the yellow flare (sodium D-line, ca. 590 nm) so that the glass object can be seen clearly. But that’s not all… there’s a good deal of UV radiation coming out of there, which the glasses also block.
December 9th, 2011 at 11:31 AM
Have to agree with #1, excimer, and the article about lawsuits just confirms it.
December 9th, 2011 at 4:30 PM
[...] Via ChemBark, students at Harvard were exposed to ultraviolet light when they didn’t wear protective goggles to view DNA gels: “the exposure caused some superficial dermal and ocular irritation and/or inflammation in some students. Some students also experienced discomfort from mild corneal abrasions.” [...]
December 16th, 2011 at 1:31 AM
Current Boss, nobel laureate, approximately 80 years old and going strong, likes to talk about how he used to do sanger sequencing and was using hot nucleotide triphosphates so hot he could feel the radiation tingling in his fingers.
Also, if you’re using a short wavelength DNA box, you’re doing it wrong. Go long wavelength. Yes, you have to wear goofy-looking goggles to see anything, but you won’t accrue mutations (2+2 cycloadditions!) and your cloning will probably actually work. Boss also likes to tell a story from the 70s where a distinguished researcher kept banging his head (for a year) trying to clone a gene, and he walked in the lab, and said, oh, you’re using short wavelength. The gene was cloned within a few weeks (really fast in those days).
December 16th, 2011 at 1:36 AM
Use this instead:
http://www.clarechemical.com/transilluminator.htm
December 19th, 2011 at 4:01 PM
In my own career as a chemist or as a wannabee chemist, I only once had to rely on safety goggles. It was when I felt really angry on a stupid graduate student, and tried to tell him for the fourteenth time how to do chemistry, and how not. Finally, I got back to my own hot reaction, opened it, and got a splash of hot KOH in methanol into my face. Goddammed that I wore glasses and only had to wash my ears with the safety shower.