ChemBark

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.

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

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.

Today’s edition of What’s Wrong with this Picture? was sent in by an astute reader from Atlanta:

I’ve been a reader for a while, and when I saw these doors and signs on all of the chemistry labs at the new Undergraduate Learning Commons at Georgia Tech today, I immediately thought of your blog.

Incidentally, the missing “T” in the first picture is not the answer (the theft of “T”s from campus signs is a tradition at Georgia Tech). The problem, of course, is the myriad of Texas carbons in these Lewis structures. While I love the H₂C= groups bonded directly to the benzene rings, what really gets me going are the triple bonds at the bridgeheads of the fused ring systems. Brilliant.

I think I’ll have to retire the WWWTP genre, because I can’t think of a worse place to post fakakta Lewis structures than the entrance of an orgo lab designed to teach undergrads to learn chemistry. This is the Sgt. Pepper’s of chemistry mistakes. Game over.

Photo credit: Mark E. Brady, PGFD

Earlier this week, something went wrong in the sophomore orgo lab (CHEM 242 class) at the University of Maryland, and two students were injured in an explosion+fire. The details (and pictures) were almost immediately posted to the PG County Fire Department’s Web site.

The fire department announced that the cause of the accident was the addition of a nitric/sulfuric acid mixture into an (organic?) waste container. Jyllian Kemsley^[1] of C&EN interviewed UMD chemistry department chairman Michael Doyle, who had a slightly different story. He believes the accident was the result of adding the nitric acid to a bottle with an organic reagent in it (not necessarily a waste container).

Mitch has raised this issue before, but it is worth repeating…If you are teaching orgo lab and your students are using nitric acid in high concentrations, you must Must MUST tell them to be careful that the HNO₃ does not come into contact with the acetone or other oxidizable solvents you’ve given them to wash their glassware. You had also better label the organic waste bottles that day with a warning that adding HNO₃ will cause the bottle to explode.

[1] Incidentally, I am a huge Jyllian Kemsley fan. C&EN‘s safety beat writer has done a phenomenal job covering safety issues in academic research, including the tragic case of Sheri Sangji at UCLA and the jaw-dropping idiocy of Preston Brown at Texas Tech. Kemsley runs a blog, the Safety Zone, on C&EN‘s Web site. It is the place to go for news pertinent to chemical safety.