UCLA Professor Patrick Harran Charged in Sheri Sangji’s Death
In a news story that is very likely to have serious repercussions for those who work in academic labs, Los Angeles County charged UCLA’s Patrick Harran and the school’s regents with multiple counts of felony crimes stemming from the death of Sheri Sangji in an accident involving t-butyl lithium in 2008. A warrant has been issued for Harran’s arrest, and if convicted, he faces up to four and a half years in prison.
For those of you not familiar with the accident, you can find comprehensive coverage of it in C&EN from Jyllian Kemsley here and in the links on the right sidebar of that page. The accident had already influenced standard operating procedures at Caltech, where the use of lab coats in chemistry labs was emphasized as mandatory in the wake of Sangji’s death. She was not wearing a coat or alternative PPE garment when the accident occurred. Now that her professor must answer to felony charges of “failing to correct unsafe work conditions in a timely manner, to require clothing appropriate for the work being done and to provide proper chemical safety training,” you’d better believe that the faculties of other schools are going to take notice. While Harran will almost certainly never spend 4.5 years behind bars, the fact that it is even a possibility is going to have everyone scrambling in CYA mode.
UCLA responded that it was baffled by yesterday’s accusations, since a California/OSHA investigation found no willful safety violations on the part of the school. By my calculation, the severity of the charges is almost certainly a tactic by the County to scare UCLA and Harran into a plea bargain/settlement. That said, one wonders if this is the shot in the arm that finally forces academia to take safety seriously. One also wonders what sort of chilling effect this will have on the freedom that grad students and postdocs are typically given to decide how they conduct experiments in the lab. I certainly don’t think that it is a bad idea for professors to become more involved in the operational aspects of their research, but one wonders how many of them will overcompensate and stifle or frustrate workers in their laboratories. One might also wonder if professors that are (typically) decades removed from bench work will be useful in the capacity of safety officers.
Follow more discussion on Twitter: #SheriSangji via @Chemjobber
December 28th, 2011 at 5:47 AM
Your last sentence is the most telling.
I seriously doubt that anything will be stifled, and any frustration will be good training for industry – remember, most of them will end up there!
December 28th, 2011 at 6:11 AM
[...] Frightening story from ChemBark.com [...]
December 28th, 2011 at 8:21 AM
“you’d better believe that the faculties of other schools are going to take notice”
“That said, one wonders if this is the shot in the arm that finally forces academia to take safety seriously. ”
No and no. All this scream for reform and scrambling to upgrade safety protocols is unique to the California university system. I’ve been to multiple places since the accident and not one of them has implemented any of the changes that are being enforced in CA. I even sat through a safety training where they pointed to the UCLA incident as a reminder to be cautious, then proceeded to issue us their standard 60/40 polyester/cotton lab coats.
December 28th, 2011 at 10:39 AM
A slippery slope for the DA to go down. I agree academic labs should become much safer places…but to criminally charge an advisor is a significant step that sets a troubling precedent. I will be very interested in how this plays out.
December 28th, 2011 at 12:53 PM
[...] obviously is a huge story in the chemistry blogosphere, with ChemBark, ChemJobber, the Chemistry Blog and of course In The Pipeline posting on the subject today. There [...]
December 28th, 2011 at 12:54 PM
That said, one wonders if this is the shot in the arm that finally forces academia to take safety seriously.
I don’t want to argue that all is safe in our academic labs, but statistically speaking, are these accidents statistically significant to call for an indictment of academic lab safety? Compared to the number of students working in labs over the years and the number of accidents that did not happen, is the current climate of safety a real cause for concern? Just curious. For some reason these debates remind me of the very rare accidents in the nuclear industry. The occasional Chernobyl and Fukushima should not detract from the otherwise admirable safety record in the industry and the fact that thousands of nuclear reactors have been steadily humming along without major incidents for fifty years. As usual the risk needs to be gauged by the benefits.
As for the charges, I feel pretty sure Harran or UCLA will not be indicted. But a healthy lab safety culture needs these kinds of vigorous debates and calls to vigilance (something about Jefferson’s derived quote about the price of democracy being eternal vigilance comes to mind), so if nothing else, these charges will lead to a careful review of existing practices and a greater awareness on the part of professors.
December 28th, 2011 at 1:33 PM
CW:
Sure, ton’s of students work in academic labs without incident. HOWEVER, there are the greenest of green people in these settings so it IS up to the boss to make sure everyone is learning correct techniques. There is a lot of stupid crap that is done in academic labs out of sheer ignorance and inexperience. Fortunately most procedures do not employ pyrophorics. I wasn’t at this incident, however every fellow organometallic chemist I’ve spoken to agrees that the published accounts describe a scenario where the victim was not employing sound techniques. The whole thing is SUCH a shame.
I take my role as a mentor extremely seriously. I’m ALWAYS on my students about safety and frankly terrified of someone being injured.
December 28th, 2011 at 3:02 PM
I take my role as a mentor extremely seriously. I’m ALWAYS on my students about safety and frankly terrified of someone being injured.
Good on you, CWS. May there be more like you, and soon.
December 28th, 2011 at 3:21 PM
The proximate cause of the lab fire was that the student who died was wearing clothing unsuitable for labwork. This wouldn’t happen in my lab, and isn’t because anyone who showed up without cotton labcoat and with a fluffy sweater made from artificial fiber would be sent home straight away.
That said, the lab head is responsible for lab culture – this emphatically includes safety – and the district attorney is justified in filing charges. In my opinion, Professor Harran is guilty, and I hope the court agrees.
What is going to happen is that safety administrators all over the country are going to get all the wrong messages. It starts with the official statement from UCLA, which says that “UCLA has dramatically increased the number of laboratory inspections and established even more rigorous safety standards”. This isn’t how you change culture, you have to set examples for how to act properly.
Another thing: the unpleasant job of safety monitor is often foisted on junior faculty members, who are politically in no position to tell established members of the department what to do and if the situation demands it, issue official warnings or shut a lab down.
December 28th, 2011 at 4:02 PM
So while we are on the topic of lab coats, I am wondering if it would be possible to have an automated system that denies hood access to a student who was not wearing a lab coat (or safety glasses or any other kind of safety equipment). It could be as simple as wearing a coat with a barcode and having a laser on the hood that unlocks the hood only when it can scan the barcode. Otherwise the hood stays locked (I am aware that in case of emergencies we would need a system to override this protocol, but we could work those details in).
December 28th, 2011 at 5:14 PM
I’ve been heartened to notice how few laments there have been about dangerous precedents being set and the like, probably because the facts in this specific case are so egregious. The lab was cited for multiple serious safety violations and given a deadline by which to remedy the situation which they completely blew off, directly resulting in the death of this technician. Whatever effect the prosecution has on lab culture — and the most likely ones are all for the good — it’s hard to argue it has no merit.
December 28th, 2011 at 5:23 PM
[...] @ChemBark – UCLA professor Patrick Harran charged in Sheri Sangji’s death [...]
December 28th, 2011 at 5:50 PM
I wonder about experimental design a bit. It’s hard to say from the C&EN report, but 150 mL of 1.7 M tert-butyllithium is a huge scale by many modern standards unless absolutely necessary. Again, it depends on the project, but using 2 mL of n-butyllithium was about the largest I used when I was a graduate student.
December 28th, 2011 at 6:24 PM
Gordon: Another thing: the unpleasant job of safety monitor is often foisted on junior faculty members, who are politically in no position to tell established members of the department what to do and if the situation demands it, issue official warnings or shut a lab down.
This is an excellent point. Likewise, the situation of a junior graduate student/undergrad/lab tech not being in a position to call out an older student on proper lab technique.
December 29th, 2011 at 6:21 AM
IanR: It’s not just about scale, as a large scale may be desirable for a given reaction. When using this much of an organolithium reagent, a syringe is not the proper way of transferring. Ideally, a glovebox should be used. If the lab doesn’t have a glovebox for this purpose, cannula transfer or similar Schlenk techniques should be used. These are much safer than using a syringe, especially a syringe that is too small for the given procedure.
December 29th, 2011 at 8:29 AM
Since workplace safety is discussed right now – what’s with that incident at Texas Tech, where that dumbass kid cooked up ten grams of explosive and promptly injured himself badly?
Why has the supervisor of that idiot with questionable working habits not been fired, let alone indicted? It’s understandable that departments don’t like to turn the heat up on those who pull in valuable grant money, however that attitude inevitably causes the breakdown of all social controls on behavior.
Scientists like to point fingers at out-of-control athletes, but Texas Tech proves that they are no better that the criminal football players everyone knows so well.
December 29th, 2011 at 9:55 AM
@Gordon – I used to think science had a problem with its culture of silence and lack of accountability for things like this, until the Penn State scandal happened. Now, I think big universities in general have a problem!
December 29th, 2011 at 11:01 AM
[...] [...]
December 29th, 2011 at 2:51 PM
I mean, this is America. Plus attracts minus, we know. But how about minus rejecting minus ? Does it occur in your official world view ?
December 30th, 2011 at 9:00 AM
[...] Bracher, a chemist during a California Institute of Technology who blogs during ChemBark, notes: “one wonders if this is a shot in a arm that finally army academia to take reserve seriously”. Posts Related to Chemist faces criminal charges after researcher's deathAnnual sum of genocide [...]
January 2nd, 2012 at 12:10 PM
Gordon, I would classify TTU and UCLA differently.
What happened at UCLA is symptomatic of most university labs. The safety violations that Harran was cited for apply to nearly every academic organic chemistry lab I’ve ever seen. What happened to Sheri, while awful, could have happened in lots of labs. It’s easy to place blame on her in hindsight, but I can tell you that in my entire tenure as a graduate student I almost never wore a lab coat and neither did anyone else. I constantly badgered my undergrads to ask me questions if they ever felt unsure about something, and they were still nervous to ask me stuff because they thought they were being annoying. Many of the other undergrads felt the same way. In this regard, I consider the incident to be indicative of institutional problems.
On the other hand, TTU I consider to be an individual problem. The person involved in that was a 5th year graduate student. You simply cannot hold that person to the same standard as a BS level scientist. They can and should be held to a higher standard. By all reasonable accounts, that is someone who should be at the pinnacle of their training; the one you can count on to set an example for others. Instead, he violated the professor’s instructions not to make more than 100 mg because he was tired of having to constantly make and re-make it (ie; he was LAZY). Without thinking of the possible reasons for that restriction, he increased the scale. Not by double, or even triple, but by MULTIPLE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE. And because it looked “lumpy”, he decided to grind it in a mortar and pestle after he had taken his goggles OFF, which he assumed would be safe because it was suspended in hexane. Did I mention that he also didn’t keep a detailed lab notebook? Yes, if the PI had been more involved she probably would have sniffed this out and avoided the incident. But how many of those behaviors sound typical of a 5th year graduate student? Most of the ones I knew were tremendous resources of knowledge and experience. I sincerely hope we don’t need to resort to a system where 5th year grad students need to be micromanaged. This wasn’t an institutional failure, it was a personal one.
January 3rd, 2012 at 12:41 PM
One aspect of this that hasn’t been talked about at all is what about the graduate students in the professors lab? Worst case scenario, if Patrick Harran goes to prison, what will happen to them during all of this? And even if that doesn’t happen, I can’t imagine they will be unaffected. Will the lab continue normal operations or will they be suspended? I assume that the school administration won’t penalize Harran or his lab in anyway, as this might be considered some sort of admission of guilt?
January 3rd, 2012 at 1:18 PM
Concerned: That is a darn good hypothetical.
Considering that there are typically contingencies when profs (God forbid) die, I assume that similar routes (transfer to other labs, the chair/department takes care of them specially, letters, etc.) will be used.
January 3rd, 2012 at 2:14 PM
If Harran is convicted of what essentially amounts to negligence in the oversight of operations in his laboratory, I don’t see how UCLA could continue to employ him in the capacity of a lab manager/PI. My guess is that convictions would result in some sort of “cleaning house” where someone (either old or new) in the administration shows Harran the door.
My guess is that the new and relatively new students in Harran’s lab would transfer to someone else and start fresh, while older students might be able to complete their theses in a similar lab. Didn’t Schreiber get to finish his thesis with Kishi after Woodward died? Also, if you were a G1, would you join Harran’s lab while these charges are unsettled? Conviction or no conviction, Harran is going to endure some punishment in this case.
January 3rd, 2012 at 2:17 PM
It’s also interesting to note that Harran has not surrendered yet.
January 3rd, 2012 at 2:54 PM
Doesn’t the quarter start tomorrow at UCLA?
January 3rd, 2012 at 3:01 PM
@skeptical:
The root cause for the incidents at UCLA and Texas Tech were the same – people working in an inappropiate manner, without anyone calling them out. This is cultural, and as I said before, it’s up to the supervisor to set the tone.
I seem to remember that there had been complaints about the working habits of the student at TTU, and no measures were taken.
January 3rd, 2012 at 6:20 PM
@Chemjobber:
Yes, I believe classes start tomorrow and administrative services have started up again today…
January 3rd, 2012 at 6:54 PM
Harran in court today: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/01/fatal-ucla-chemical-fire.html
January 3rd, 2012 at 7:12 PM
Hmmm…this info is not yet up on the LA County Sheriff site. The wording in that story is interesting. My assumption is that he was technically arrested, but the story says the warrant was withdrawn. I guess he also didn’t have to post the $20k bail?
January 3rd, 2012 at 10:26 PM
If he was released ROR, guess not.
January 4th, 2012 at 5:25 PM
This whole issue had me thinking today about the lack of safety training throughout a chemist’s education. I remember doing reactions in college with fuming sulfuric acid, nitric acid, thionyl chloride… We had goggles, but no gloves, no lab coat. In grad school, no one ever said, “You’ll need three lab coats and this is how to order them.” Eye glasses constituted appropriate safety glasses. Gloves were available and we threw them in the trash can when we were done with them (after we’d worn them to the NMR lab and touched three sets of door knobs to get there). I think safety was actually SCORNED where I went to grad school… Once there was a pentane fire and our advisor was pissed that someone pulled a fire alarm. What’s in the flasks was all that mattered. The whole scene needs an overhaul.
January 6th, 2012 at 4:22 PM
This letter from Sheri’s family to the LA District Attorney is heavy stuff.
via The Pump Handle via Jyllian Kemsley/The Safety Zone
January 6th, 2012 at 4:42 PM
Classes at UCLA don’t start until Monday Jan. 9th.
January 6th, 2012 at 8:29 PM
If Harran is convicted of what essentially amounts to negligence in the oversight of operations in his laboratory, I don’t see how UCLA could continue to employ him in the capacity of a lab manager/PI.
True, but what should they do then with the other PIs’ whose labs are also found wanting?
January 6th, 2012 at 8:53 PM
“3 strikes, and you’re out” would be a policy that might seem to follow logically. (Of course, 1) that’s sort of silly and 2) it will never happen. Problem solved!)
January 10th, 2012 at 12:27 AM
[...] 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 [...]
February 8th, 2012 at 8:46 PM
Look at Harran’s safety record at his previous university. See a pattern?