Safety Is Worth The Worry

Perhaps it's just my style, but when I first agreed to hire a high school student as a lab assistant, I spent several uneasy nights wondering how I could possibly make the lab safe enough so that I would not find myself at some future point explaining to her parents that she had been seriously injured or killed while working for me.

My past experiences with fires and explosions reminded me that a working organic lab is never a safe environment. I came up with some policy guidelines for myself: never allowing assistants to work alone; developing an overengineered, multitiered safety system of shields and barriers for running reactions; installing a heavy-duty fire extinguisher right next to the hood; and so forth. But I also realized that I was unable to guarantee everything, and as a result, I was very honest with that student and all the subsequent students who came to work for me.

I told them all that safety was as much their responsibility as it was mine, and that the very nature of what they would be doing precluded absolute foreknowledge of the safety risks. I generally started out their time in the lab by reminding them that all the explosives and toxins out in the world are chemicals, and most are organic chemicals.

I tried to include everything I knew about the reagents' dangers in the prep for any experiment and explained the safety measures we would be using in the setup. I also encouraged them to think about containment if problems developed. I still worried excessively over their presence, but it was manageable, and I'm glad to say we never had an incident that wasn't well contained by our precautions.

I realize a fair amount of luck was involved, but I think the worrying beforehand led to some good defensive measures that contributed to the unblemished safety record. It may be more difficult to implement in a large research group, but designating someone to act as an overseer for any younger members of a lab is what I would suggest. It is good training for the overseer (it certainly was for me), and it may make an unsafe environment just a little less unsafe.

Bill Glassco
Tiverton, R.I.