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.

A concerned labmate brought my attention to a chemical abomination on last week’s episode of the increasingly unpopular television show House, M.D.

Thanks to a very special friend of mine, we can all enjoy video footage of what Hollywood writers believe constitutes a realistic demonstration for a high school chemistry class:

Marvelous, isn’t it? Notice how the teacher isn’t wearing a single piece of personal protective equipment—no gloves, no goggles, no lab coat—whilst working in front of a poster that reads “LAB SAFETY RULES”.

Who knows what this demonstration was supposed to be, but the last time I checked, HF wasn’t combustible. In fact, its NFPA 704 flammability rating is zero. Oh well, I doubt the flame coming out of the Bunsen burner is real anyway, seeing as how the dude just picked up the metal with his bare hands. The limp gas line and the fact that the blue flame doesn’t deflect upward when it is tilted are also nice pieces of laziness on the part of the production staff.

If you plan to replicate this experiment at home, I suggest that you work with hydrofluoric acid in plastic containers instead of glass ones. HF is a great etchant for glass and many other materials that contain silicon. Furthermore, if you have an accident and get HF on your skin or in your lungs, you are going to be in a world of hurt. That stuff is nasty and goes right for the calcium in your body. In the event of an accident, you should apply calcium gluconate gel to the affected areas of your skin and seek medical attention immediately. Preferably, not from Dr. Gregory House.

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.

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.

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.