ChemBark

A hearty “thank you” goes out to Alex, a concerned reader from the East Coast who sent a link to this interesting video. It is an investigative report about unlocked chemistry labs and the ease with which a terrorist could steal hazardous materials:

The concerns of the report are valid and important, even if the presentation is a bit sensationalistic and uninformed at times. (NITROGEN, OMG!)

In grad school in Massachusetts, one thing that struck me as weird was how we were required to keep our hazardous waste cabinet locked at all times, while the labs and stockrooms could be left wide open. What magically happened when the 4L jug of mixed organic solvents moved from the hood in my (unlocked) bay to the cabinet in the hallway such that a lock was now required?

We always thought the rule was designed to stymie terrorists searching for materials to make a “dirty bomb”, but the fact of the matter is that most of the nastiest reagents have already been quenched once they make their way into a waste container. The stockrooms and hoods are what I’d be concerned about. I can recall a number of lab cleanups where people reported finding particularly nasty things that nobody knew were there, and hence, nobody would have reported as missing. These included radioactive salts and a small quantity of ricin in an unlocked freezer.

Keeping all doors locked shut will be a major inconvenience for some labs, but it is probably just a matter of time until everyone is required to do so. The current situation is a time bomb.

Link to original site.

This delightful cover of The Band Perry’s “If I Die Young” is hopelessly stuck in my head:

While listening to this song play on repeat for the 368th time, I was particularly taken by the stanza:

A penny for my thoughts, oh no, I’ll sell ‘em for a dollar
They’re worth so much more after I’m a goner
And maybe then you’ll hear the words I been singin’
Funny when you’re dead how people start listenin’

It is interesting how it can take the death of someone young to make us address a problem that we all knew existed. In chemistry, Sheri Sangji’s accident made many people stop and think about certain specific subjects concerning lab safety. Her death sparked considerable discussion online, in print, and in person regarding procedures for dispensing pyrophoric compounds, and as I’ve stated here before, the accident had a direct impact on Caltech’s reinforcement of a policy that lab coats are mandatory for bench work. If there is any consolation to be found in the death of Ms. Sangji, it will rest with the awareness her story created about issues of safety training.

Of course, what is sad about these deaths is that we—as a community—almost always forget any “lessons learned” with the passage of time. Sangji died three years ago, and the level of attention paid to safety in academia is still atrocious. You don’t need to search far in most academic labs to find someone working with hazardous compounds without a lab coat. I was really impressed when in 2010, Caltech’s chemistry division held what it billed as its “first annual Safety Day”. Perhaps in response to the Sangji accident, the program included a breakout demonstration on “Working with Pyrophorics: Syringe, canula, quenching techniques”. Unfortunately, 2011 has come and gone and a “second annual” session never materialized. It would be nice if we could get to a place where our community didn’t need a constant stream of fresh corpses to remind it how to behave.

I have little doubt that when the Harran/UCLA case is finally resolved—most likely with a settlement that includes little more than a slap on the wrist as punishment—that the academic community will forget the episode and revert to its usual ways. This has already happened once in the Sangji story, which was an afterthought before the arrest warrant was issued for Harran.

But the world of chemistry has seen this before. When I was a freshman at NYU, my organic professor brought in an article from the New York Times titled “Lethal Chemistry at Harvard”. The story detailed the death of Jason Altom, a graduate student who committed suicide and blamed his death on pressures of graduate school specific to Harvard and his advisor. After Altom’s death, the chemistry department at Harvard vowed to improve the environment it fostered for grad students. They expanded the mental health services available, paid attention to recommendations of the students’ “Quality of Life” committee, and revamped the thesis committee structure so that students would interact with professors other than just their advisors.

I enrolled at Harvard for grad school several years later, and in my time there, the department (i) rolled back many of the mental health benefits, (ii) changed the “Quality of Life” committee to the “GPC” (Graduate student and Postdoc Committee?) and paid minimal attention to it, and (iii) did little to correct the culture of isolation. At Harvard, each research group was/is more-or-less an island physically and socially. The architecture sequesters each lab group to its own area, while the institutional culture does the same socially. The opportunities to interact with professors other than your advisor are few and far between. There are few, if any, joint students among labs, and interlab interactions are commonly limited to people who’ve met in first-year classes. The “student center” so highly touted in 1999 (actually known as the Department Center) serves not as a place for students to unwind so much as a neutral location for standard departmental events. While positive changes did come out of the Altom tragedy, they were largely ornamental and did nothing to change the culture of the organization.

And that’s the problem. Changing the culture of an institution—especially one as intractable as chemical academia—is extraordinarily difficult. But so long as we forgo meaningful changes in favor of cosmetic ones that we don’t even bother to sustain anyway, we will continue to experience frustration and tragedy. One wonders what magnitude of disruption is necessary for our community to commit itself to improvement. Apparently, it is much greater than the death of a twenty-something student.

It always surprises me how companies will happily spend thousands of dollars to run printed ads with inventories of chemical structures. These structures are unsearchable by computer, and is there anyone out there who thumbs through science magazines on the lookout for fine chemicals?

“Wow! That 1-bromo-3-methylbutane looks fantastic. I’m calling these guys right away!”

Maybe such a response has occurred once or twice in the past decade, but this approach seems like a shot in the dark. I imagine most people who find themselves in need of 1-bromo-3-methylbutane turn to the catalog of their favorite vendor, the Available Chemicals Directory, or Google.

While the following ad certainly fits the profile (C&EN, 1/23/2012, p. 31), it bothered me for a different reason:

I can’t understand why you would go through the trouble of paying thousands of dollars to run an ad and not bother to proofread the thing. Let’s start from the bottom right corner and move clockwise, shall we?

1. Coumarin. Great. I have no problems here.

2. O-Anisaldehyde. This is a rather common error in style, but it is still an error. If the “O” is meant to signify “ortho,” then it should be written as a lowercase letter, even if it begins a sentence. It should also be italicized. A capital “O” written like that in a name usually signifies substitution on oxygen.

3. 2-Hydroxy-benzaldehyde. There are two problems here. First, you don’t need a hyphen after “Hydroxy.” Second, if you are going to use common names like o-anisaldehyde, then why not call salicylaldehyde by its common name? Alternately, you could have called the previous compound “2-methoxybenzaldehyde.” Basically, why not be consistent?

4. 5-Helo-salicylic aldehyde. <Facepalm> Now I guess it’s OK to use a common name? More importantly, what the hell is a “helo” group? The period after the “Cl” is also a nice touch.

Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. If I were in the advertising department at GPhS, I’d take $200 from the budget to buy a copy of the ACS Style Guide and pay for an eye exam.

When the quality of your advertisements is this poor, do you think people might question the quality of your other products?

Just a thought.

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.

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.

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”.