By: Kate Allen Science and Technology reporter, Published on Sun Mar 30 2014

LOS ANGELESUntil Sheri Sangjis screams split the calm, Dec. 29, 2008, was a
subdued day in the UCLA Molecular Sciences Building. Campus was mostly deserted
for Christmas break.
Sangji was working on a reaction involving tert-Butyllithium. She was 23 and had
earned her bachelors degree that spring. Two older postdoctoral fellows were
engrossed in their own work nearby. Patrick Harran, the chemistry professor who
had hired Sangji as a research associate two months earlier, was in his office one
floor up.
Tert-Butyllithium, or t-BuLi for short, is whats known as pyrophoric: it ignites
spontaneously in air. Sangji picked up a plastic syringe and began drawing up 54
millilitre quantities.
One of the postdocs heard Sangji scream. He looked up and saw her on fire. He tried
wrapping his lab coat around her, but that caught fire too. The other postdoc called
911 and ran to find Harran. When Harran arrived, Sangji was sitting on the floor with
her arms outstretched, shaking. Her synthetic sweatshirt had burned away, and large
blisters were beginning to form on her abdomen. The skin was separating from her
hands. She had not been wearing a lab coat.
At the specialized burn centre where she was treated for the next 18 days, Sangji was
at first conscious and in great pain. She worried that she would lose use of her hands.
Then her organs began to fail, and on Jan. 16, she died. A doctor later testified she
had suffered second- and third-degree burns to nearly half her body. Sangji was
buried in Toronto, a short drive from her parents house.
Nobody involved in Sangjis story claims her death was anything other than tragic.
But lawyers for Harran, the professor, say that tragedy was rooted in Sangjis own
actions: she was an experienced chemist who had botched a basic experiment she
had completed successfully before. Her death was an accident, not a crime.
Prosecutors for the Los Angeles County District Attorneys Office disagree.
The systemic failures that led to Sangjis death began accumulating well before the
day a young, inexperienced woman was permitted to undertake a dangerous
experiment alone, California workplace safety investigators concluded in a 2009
report. She was never properly trained or even issued a lab coat. Harrans lab had
been cited for safety problems but given an extension on the cleanup date. And in
earlier incidents, two other students were seriously burned at UCLA labs, but nothing
at the school changed.
The D.A. charged Harran with four felony labour code violations, and if convicted he
could go to prison for four years. The case, currently on holdwhile Harrans lawyers
seek to get it dismissed in appeals court, is the first criminal prosecution of an
American academic for a lab accident.
The trial has startled the scientific community, prompting debate over whether
Harran was grossly negligent or following standard protocol for academia, where
free-ranging intellectual curiosity trumps bureaucratic strictures.
But nobody disputes that safety culture at universities is widely divergent from safety
culture in private, industrial labs.
What happened there is unacceptable, but what happened there could have
happened to other professors too, says Wayne Wood, associate director of university
safety at McGill. In 2010, a graduate chemistry student in Texas lost three fingers
and damaged an eye during a dangerous experiment. In 2011, a Yale undergraduate
working late at night was asphyxiated when her hair caught in a chemistry lab lathe.
There are no good statistics on the differences between academic and industrial
safety, however, and oversight varies by state and province.
I think a lot of people are running scared. But the problem is how to run, says Bill
Tolman, chair of the chemistry department at the University of Minnesota.
The most difficult thing to do is change a culture.
From Karachi to L.A.
Sheharbano Sangji Sheri for short was born in Karachi, Pakistan, to a
comfortable middle-class family whose biggest conflict seems to have been who
would get to read the newest issue of Time magazine first. Sangji and her siblings, an
older sister and a younger brother, would fight to get in the door and monopolize it
for the rest of the afternoon.
Naveen Sangji, the eldest, said her sister was shy as a child. That changed with
adolescence.
I will tell you, she was not shy anymore, Naveen said. She was very confident. She
knew what she wanted out of life.
The children were encouraged to strive academically. They were all accepted to
Karachi Grammar School, an elite institute whose alumni include Benazir Bhutto, the
former prime minister of Pakistan, and a long roster of international whos who.
In her final year there, Sangji discovered that the schools timetable was arranged so
that she couldnt enroll in history, her favourite subject, along with the full
complement of sciences. She wrote a petition explaining why history and science
were important to study together, gathered signatures from her classmates, and
marched into the headmasters office.
She got it done, said Zahra Khan, one of Sangjis closest friends. Most people
would have just been like, Oh, I cant take this, Ill just take something else.
Sangji was keenly alert to inequality and disinclined to sit back and accept it, her
friends say.
Sangji followed her older sister to Pomona College, a well-regarded liberal arts school
in California; her parents moved to Toronto the same month. She majored in
chemistry and by all accounts she excelled, earning outstanding grades and working
in the lab of a professor.
But inequality was what tugged at her. She had a big presence on campus, especially
for social issues, said Prashant Kotwani, who first met Sangji when Sangji
volunteered to mentor incoming international students. Sangji chose social justice
over science, and decided to apply to law school.
While working on her applications, she took a job at Norac Pharma in Azusa, just
east of Los Angeles. But she wanted to be in the city, so when she saw an opening at
UCLA, she applied and was hired. She started work in Harrans lab on Oct. 13, 2008.
Harran was still a newcomer to Los Angeles too. In July, he left a tenured position in
Texas to take up a newly minted endowed chair in organic chemistry.
Details of Patrick Harrans personal life are hard to come by, thanks to the trial. His
colleagues declined to comment or didnt respond to inquiries.
His professional life followed a clear trajectory. After earning a PhD from Yale,
Harran did a postdoctoral stint at Stanford, and then joined the faculty at the
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in 1997.
For the next decade, Harran worked to create molecules that mimic those found in
nature and that might be effective in fighting diseases, particularly cancer and
obesity. One project involved synthesizing diazonamide A, a toxin discovered in sea
squirts. Harran and colleagues demonstrated that one of the compounds kills cancer
cells with few side effects when given to mice.
UCLA recruited him for the new chair. When Harran accepted, the professor leading
the search committee said Harrans arrival will immediately raise the prole of
UCLA organic chemistry in the U.S.
The chair was endowed by the family of a chemistry Nobel laureate. Expectations for
Harran were not middling. When UCLA fire marshals wrapped up their interview
with him three weeks after Sangjis death, they asked if he had anything else to
discuss.
I uh, again just to say that this is not how I wanted to start at UCLA, a transcript of
the interview quotes him as saying.
As a junior staffer with a bachelors degree, Sangjis primary responsibility was
setting up instruments; a third of her time was spent on chemistry.
The day after she began work, Harran watched her complete a reaction with a
reagent called Grubbs Catalyst, which is air-sensitive, but not pyrophoric, so not at
risk of spontaneously igniting. Sangji completed the syringe transfer within a glove
bag, an enclosed area that prevents any part of the reaction from coming in contact
with air. Harran later told workplace safety investigators that she executed the
transfer without difficulty.
A few days later, Sangji completed her first reaction with t-BuLi. The plan was to
combine t-BuLi with vinyl bromide to create vinyllithium, the first part of a multi-
stage process. She emailed a postdoc for help, but the postdoc said he doesnt
remember what he told her, if anything. In any case, Sangji managed to complete the
reaction.
The morning of Dec. 29, Sangji told Harran she was going to scale up the reaction,
according to evidence presented at a preliminary hearing for Harran.
During her short time at Norac Pharma, the company president later told
investigators, Sangji was closely supervised because of her limited laboratory
experience. She never performed experimental work without direct guidance from
her superiors. She never worked with t-BuLi or any other pyrophorics.
The prosecution said that all Harran gave Sangji in the way of direction that morning
was to be careful. There is no evidence she was ever ordered a standard cotton lab
coat, not to mention a fire-resistant one, which experts testified would be the
minimum protection required at a private laboratory.
Harrans lawyers said Sangji had been issued five lab coats at Norac Pharma, and
that her experience there, at school, and in her earlier t-BuLi reactions provided her
with the necessary training to undertake the experiment alone. Whats more, there is
no guarantee that what happened next could have been prevented with a lab coat.
The company that manufactures the t-BuLi that Sangji was using, Sigma-Aldrich,
provides a bulletin for the safe handling of pyrophoric and air-sensitive chemicals.
The bulletin states that up to 50 millilitres may be transferred with a one- to two-foot
needle. Sangji was transferring 54 millilitres with a two-inch needle. She would have
had to hold the bottle by hand and tip it toward herself so the short needle could
reach the top of the t-BuLi.
The bulletin indicated the syringe should be glass and should only be used for a
single transfer, or else the syringe might freeze up or become plugged. Sangji was
using the same syringe, a plastic one with plastic locks, for all three transfers she
needed to make.
Its not known whether Sangji ever saw that bulletin, or whether anyone ever told her
it was available. Its also not known where she came up with the flawed transfer
method.
Whether her syringe became plugged or not cant be determined it was found
melted in her fume hood. The plunger was lying two metres away, where she had
thrown it.
At the hospital, she told firefighters who took her statement that she had pulled the
plunger of the syringe too far. She also said she spilled a flask of pentane, a
flammable chemical that fed the fireball.
Systemic safety failures
Naveen Sangji was getting ready to go out for dinner in Boston, where she was a
medical student at Harvard, when her cellphone rang. Her little sisters name
appeared on call display. Naveen assumed it was more news about law school.
The last few times I had heard from her, in very quick succession it was, Hey, I just
got accepted at USC. Hey, I just got accepted at the University of Michigan.
Instead, it was a hospital social worker.
As the Sangji familys de facto spokesperson, Naveen speaks in practised messages.
She never bothers to hide her anger at Harran and UCLA, but she rarely reveals the
depth of her sorrow or that of her family; before all this, she said, she was a private
person.
All she will say about that phone call is that friends came to help her. She waited until
she and an uncle from Toronto had booked seats on the next flights to California
before phoning her parents, who were on a trip to the United Arab Emirates. She
doesnt want to say how her parents reacted, only that breaking the news to them was
one of the hardest things she has ever done.
Naveen, now a surgical resident at Massachusetts General Hospital, knew without
being told how devastating her sisters injuries were. Yet doctors thought Sheri Sangji
would survive, and so did her family. Trying to stay positive, they didnt talk much
about what had happened in Harrans lab.
But the burns deepened, and Sangji spiralled into multiple organ failure. During a
third operation to scrape away dead tissue, her heart stopped. Doctors declared her
brain-dead. Eighteen days after the fire, her family took her off life support.
Californias Division of Occupational Safety and Health, better known as Cal/OSHA,
began an investigation. Investigators interviewed Harran, Harrans staff, Sangjis
employers at Norac Pharma, her college chemistry mentor and UCLAs health and
safety unit, and subpoenaed numerous records.
A year after Sangjis death, Cal/OSHA completed its report, which painted a damning
picture of systemic safety failures at UCLA.
Harrans endowed chair came with $3.2 million to set up laboratories on the fifth
floor of the molecular science building, the report said. But until those renovations
were complete, his team occupied rooms on the fourth floor, which were a third the
size and lacked storage space.
During a routine, pre-announced inspection of the labs in October, a UCLA chemical
safety officer noted a long list of problems in the fourth-floor labs, from improper
storage of flammable materials to numerous staffers working without lab coats or
other protective equipment. Harran was given 30 days to comply, the standard
timeframe, though there were no penalties for missing the deadline.
In early November, he asked for an extension since they were soon to be moving to
the spacious fifth floor. He was given it. Harran appears to have received no safety
training from UCLA either, investigators pointed out, or any help setting up his lab to
comply with university policy or state law.
In addition, investigators discovered two other laboratory accidents that had
occurred within 14 months before the one that killed Sangji. In November 2007, a
chemistry graduate who wasnt wearing a lab coat spilled ethanol on himself near a
Bunsen burner and caught fire; he was hospitalized for a week. Just seven days
before Sangji died, another graduate student, also not wearing a lab coat, was burned
and cut when a reaction pot exploded. Neither incident was reported to Cal/OSHA.
It was kind of common knowledge that laboratory people dont use the proper
(protective equipment) when they are in the lab it was hard to convince the
professors that they needed to, UCLAs manager of laboratory safety told the
Cal/OSHA interviewers.
The Los Angeles County District Attorneys Office, acting on Cal/OSHAs
recommendations, charged Harran and the governing body of the University of
California with four felony labour code violations. (The DAs office did not, however,
pursue a recommended charge of involuntary manslaughter.)
The university and the DA reached a settlement. In return for admitting
responsibility for the laboratory conditions when Sangji died, for promising to
maintain a comprehensive lab safety program, and for setting up a $500,000
environmental law scholarship at Berkeley in Sangjis name, prosecutors dropped the
charges.
The case against Harran continued, and last August, a judge ruled there was
sufficient evidence to send him to trial.
Case sets off debate
The news that a chemistry professor was actually going to trial for a lab accident
jolted the academic community to attention.
Writers for the Chemical & Engineering News used freedom of information laws to
access many of the reports that form the basis of this story, and they have attended
all of Harrans key court dates. Their detailed accounts of the proceedings are
dissected by a secondary ecosystem of bloggers, where raging debates over the merits
of the case take place.
Im an industrial chemist, and if I did what he did, Id be in as much trouble as him,
and my company sure as heck wouldn't have gotten off with a wrist-slap like UCLA
did! one anonymous commenter on the Chemjobber blog commented. I agree if
someone under my supervision were killed on the job, I would at a minimum be
unemployed, another added.
Others bristled that Harran was being railroaded.
Did she have the proper training for t-BuLi. Nope. Do 90 per cent of grad students
get any better training from their advisor? Nope. So I guess the plan is to martyr
Professor Harran in the name of saving accidents in the future?
The people paying closest attention have been those directly responsible for
laboratory safety on campus: university safety professionals like McGills Wayne
Wood.
It has sent shockwaves through the university campuses really right across the
continent, he said. For us, were acutely aware of it, because Sangji is one of ours
Sangjis younger brother studies biophysics at McGill.
Before Sangjis death, Wood said, safety managers like him were viewed as an
unwelcome layer of bureaucracy.
Academics are so focused on their research. Theyre really intense individuals who
really devote all their time and attention to trying to unravel the mysteries of
science, he said. They dont necessarily have the personality profile of managers.
Many are extremely intellectual, but maybe not the personality type who like to
supervise people.
Since Sangjis death, Wood said he has been given more leeway to enforce sanctions
when labs dont pass muster. His administration, once hesitant, now fully supports
him, he says.
Another problem is the decentralized structure of universities. Industrial labs have
one front door for new hires, and commands can be issued by executives. Professors
are dispersed across departments and see huge turnover in students and staff a
constant influx of rookies, says University of Minnesotas Tolman.
Tolman, the chair of the chemistry department, was spurred into action by a video
about Sangjis death. With help from Dow, the multinational chemical company, the
chemistry and chemical engineering department created a new system that saw
students running a parallel safety board to the universitys professional one.
Its been an amazing story, said Tolman. Theyve been changing the culture. The
system helps enforce safety by empowering students rather than dictating it from on
high.
When the Star visited UCLA in October, the university declined requests for a tour of
safety improvements on campus, saying no one was available.
A spokesperson also said the director of Environmental Health and Safety was too
busy to meet for an interview, and instead sent an email with statistics about UCLAs
beefed-up enforcement achieving 95-per-cent compliance with the personal
protective equipment policy, for example, through a steep increase in unannounced
safety inspections and a list of links to press releases about safety improvements.
A voicemail left for chemistry department faculty and staff instructed them not to
speak to the Star. But employees on the ground, who agreed to be interviewed
anyway, said the problem is not yet fixed.
UCLA is playing catch-up at a fierce pace, said Rita Kern, who sat on the safety
committee struck after Sangjis death and belongs to the union that represents
research associates and lab technicians. But while there have been improvements, a
pervasive safety culture has not taken hold. The message hasnt gotten through.
Judy Sweeney, a long-time administrative assistant for the department, told the Star
during that October visit that she was still seeing kids wearing flip-flops and shorts
working in labs on Saturdays.
Kern was shocked to learn that a graduate student had been injured in a lab fire the
year before the one that killed Sangji, and no one heard anything about it. There was
no wide-scale retraining in light of that accident.
If they had done their job, Sheri might be alive.
Harrans defence team petitioned the California Court of Appeal to dismiss the case,
on the grounds that UCLA, not Harran, was Sangjis ultimate employer.
The felony prosecution spells ruin for the promising academic career of Professor
Harran in a profession that depends on government research grants, the defence
team argues. The case is on holdwhile the matter is argued.
We maintain that the laboratory fire which resulted in Ms. Sangjis passing was a
terrible accident, but not a crime, Harrans lawyer, Thomas OBrien, said in emailed
comments to the Star. Professor Harran mourns Ms. Sangjis loss and has the
deepest sympathies for her family and friends. This tragic accident has led to a
revolutionary change in laboratory safety practices, and now academic laboratories
throughout the United States have a new focus on safety that simply did not exist in
the normal course of business during and before 2008.
For Sangjis family, the judicial process has been excruciating. They chose not to sue
UCLA or Harran in civil court, saying they dont want money, only justice.
But they also care deeply about developments beyond the courthouse.
The only thing my mom wants to see which the rest of us want to see too, but for
her, its the only thing is that this shouldnt happen again to anyone else, says
Naveen.
Sangji was going to have an impact on the world. That was just something that if
you knew Sheri, it was obvious to see, said Kotwani, her friend from Pomona.
That person and that impact is not going to come back. Its hard to say what justice
will look like.
On the day of Sangjis funeral in Los Angeles, a fat envelope arrived at her apartment.
She had been accepted to Berkeley law school, her top choice.


http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/03/30/a_young_lab_worker_a_professor_and_a_deadl
y_accident.html










Two postdocs were working in the glovebox next to me. They spilled some MeLi
and were mopping it up with kimwipes. They knew it would be dangerous when
they pulled it out of the antechamber, so they prepared an EtOH bath (which, to
be fair would safely neutralize a small amount of MeLi, iPrOH would have been
better). One postdoc opens the antechamber and, as quickly as possible, took
the kimwipes out and dunked them in the EtOH bath, only problem was, the
kimwipes burst into flames as soon as the kimwipes were exposed to air, setting
the bath on fire. In the panic, one of the postdocs went to get MORE ETOH and
poured it on the fire. The bath overflowed, she started yelling for liquid nitrogen, I
got out of my box and started running towards the liquid nitrogen. The next thing I
know, i hear screaming, the postdoc walks out of the lab (right under a safety
shower, without pulling the water release) with her entire pantleg on fire. I cant
find LN2 so I take off her labcoat and snuff out the fire on her leg. The other
postdoc managed to put out the EtOH fire, but he didnt remember how he did it.
They both went to the hospital, one of them stayed for 2 weeks. That was my first
summer in a lab, right before sophomore year.
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Fatality adds further momentum to calls for a shake-up in academic safety
culture.
Richard Van Noorden
Fellow students hold a vigil for Yale undergraduate Michele Dufault.THE YALE DAILY NEWS
In the early hours of 13 April, undergraduate students working at Yale University's
Sterling Chemistry Laboratory made a shocking discovery. There in the lab's machine
shop was the dead body of 22-year-old undergraduate student Michele Dufault, her hair
tangled in a lathe. She had apparently died of asphyxiation in an accident described by
Richard Levin, president of Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, as a "true tragedy".
Within days, federal health and safety officials had started to investigate. Details are
scarce, but it is already clear that Dufault was not inexperienced with the equipment;
she had taken a training course and had used the lathe safely many times before,
according to fellow physics student Joe O'Rourke. She was, however, working late at
night and probably alone (a speculation that Yale would not confirm) circumstances
that were not unusual at the machine shop, says O'Rourke.
Around the United States, laboratory directors and safety officers immediately checked
their own policies on working practices in machine shops. But the accident has also
heightened wider concerns about the ever-present tension between research freedom
and safe working conditions in academia. And it underscores the slow pace of change
since another high-profile laboratory fatality led to similar soul-searching less than three
years ago.
In late 2008, 23-year-old research assistant Sheharbano Sangji sustained horrific burns
in a lab fire at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and died of her injuries
18 days later. Sangji's death in very different circumstances from Dufault's resulted
in federal fines for the university and a rapid toughening of safety policies there. On 30
March, UCLA unveiled its latest safety initiative: a new Center for Laboratory Safety,
which is billed as the first in the United States to measure the effectiveness of safety
policies and develop ways to improve scientists' approach to safety. More widely,
Sangji's accident acted as a lightning rod for demands to improve standards across the
United States.
Sheharbano Sangji (left) and Michele Dufault.FACEBOOK
Yet for all this attention, health and safety experts say that they have not seen a
significant shift in the behaviour of bench scientists or the attitudes of lab heads, who
are in the best position to improve safety culture. "It's very difficult to change principal
investigators' attitudes," says James Gibson, UCLA's director of environmental health
and safety. All too often, researchers in laboratories around the country still work alone,
and without proper supervision or protection. "In many cases, academic freedom is more
important than safety," says Jim Kaufman, president of the Laboratory Safety Institute
in Natick, Massachusetts.
Chemical focus
Although such concerns apply across academia, accidents in chemistry laboratories have
drawn the most scrutiny in recent years. A year after Sangji's death, Preston Brown, a
graduate student in chemistry at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, lost three fingers of
his left hand during a dangerous experiment. Brown was grinding up chunks of nickel
hydrazine perchlorate using a hundred times the recommended amount when it
detonated.
Unusually, the US Chemical Safety Board (CSB) a body that usually investigates large
industrial accidents such as refinery explosions stepped in. For the first time ever, it
said it would review academic laboratory safety. At an August 2010 meeting of the
American Chemical Society in Boston, Massachusetts, CSB chairman Rafael Moure-Eraso
said that the board had gathered media reports of around 120 university chemistry
laboratory accidents since 2001, and concluded that "safety practices at US universities
leave a lot to be desired".
Chemistry labs have been a particular focus of concern because the most dangerous
procedures in other sciences tend to have more detailed safety protocols, says Peter
Reinhardt, head of environmental health and safety at Yale University. "Using radioactive
materials or biological materials is much more stringently regulated," he
told Nature (speaking before Dufault's accident). "The big gap is hazardous chemicals in
laboratories."
Rick Danheiser, an organic chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in
Cambridge who chairs the chemistry department's health and safety committee, agrees
that some labs' safety standards are too lax. But "there are chemistry departments with
very strong safety programmes, and there's a whole range of laboratories in between",
he says.
Neal Langerman, who runs the consulting company Advanced Chemical Safety, based in
San Diego, California, is more strident about the extent of the problem. "I have come to
the conclusion that most academic laboratories are unsafe venues for work or study," he
wrote in a 2009 opinion column in the Journal of Chemical Health and Safety. He now
says that, despite the recent accidents, he has not noticed a significant change in
chemists' attitude to safety.
US scientists are undeniably much safer today than before swathes of occupational
health legislation arrived in the 1970s, along with a new watchdog agency, the federal
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Further improvements came in
1991, when OSHA stipulated that each chemistry lab should prepare a 'chemical hygiene
plan' effectively a handbook detailing safety protocols and emergency procedures
although these requirements are rarely enforced by inspections.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the rate of recordable incidents in scientific
research and development services has fallen from 2.1 per 100 full-time employees in
2003 to 1.2 in 2009. But the government does not track major accidents or near misses
specifically in academic laboratories. "Anecdotally, most people agree that university labs
have more frequent and more frequently serious accidents than industry," says Dorothy
Zolandz, director of the National Academies Board on Chemical Sciences and
Technology.
Researchers often point out that industry is in a better position than academia to keep
safety standards high because it has a clear hierarchy of power, fewer inexperienced
students, and accountability to management. One of the clearest difference lies in lone
working: surveys by the American Chemical Society last year suggest that 70.5% of
faculty and 52.1% of graduate students often or occasionally work alone in laboratories,
something that is forbidden in industry.
Safety officers and experienced chemists say that good laboratory safety relies on far
more than regular inspections. What's key, says Tom Welton of Imperial College London,
is that the group's research leader accepts unequivocal responsibility for the safety of
everyone doing science in the laboratory, building a culture where researchers
instinctively have safety foremost in their minds.
Evidence presented at a US National Research Council meeting on laboratory safety in
November 2010 backs up Welton's point. Ron Zanoni, manager of occupational safety at
international chemicals giant Arkema, based in Colombes, France, showed a 2004 survey
that found case injury rates ranging from 7.8 to 0.8 per year at Arkema's various US
sites. The differences correlated well with working relationships and top-down leadership
engagement at different sites, Zanoni says. Improving safety leadership at labs with
poor records had reduced injury rates by 2007.
Changing the culture is really going to be a long-term challenge.
As UCLA has found, it can be hard to change researchers' mindsets, even after a death
on campus. Over the past two years, the university has ramped up laboratory safety
regulations, training and inspections. But Nancy Wayne, a physiology professor on the
board of the new laboratory safety centre, says researchers at UCLA do not always
appreciate the tougher regime, sometimes seeing environmental inspectors as 'police',
rather than partners in improving standards. "Changing the culture is really going to be
a long-term challenge," says Gibson. Some professors, he says, have even questioned
the need for flame-resistant lab coats a bitter irony given the circumstances of
Sangji's accident.
She was using a syringe to draw reactive t-butyl lithium from a bottle when it burst into
flames, setting her clothes alight. She was not wearing a lab coat. Since then, the
California Division of Occupational Safety and Health has agreed fines with UCLA of
around US$70,000 for safety violations. Sangji's supervisor, Patrick Harran,
declinedNature 's request for an interview. The Los Angeles district attorney is still
reviewing Sangji's case, and has not yet decided whether to press criminal charges
against either Harran or UCLA. If this resulted in a conviction, "the rules change
completely right then and there", says Langerman. "All of a sudden, if you hurt
somebody badly, you may face felony charges."
In the United Kingdom, the threat of legal action has proved to be a powerful incentive
for change. Around 25 years ago, an explosion in a chemistry laboratory at Sussex
University in Brighton shot a piece of metal into a student's abdomen. The student
eventually recovered, but the government's Health and Safety Executive prosecuted
Sussex University for negligence. The episode had a profound effect on safety standards
in Britain, says Welton. Today, British researchers are required to write down risk
assessments before every experiment, something that is not required in the United
States.
ADVERTISEMENT
"I think that it will take a professor being punished, perhaps unfairly, to really engender
change on the part of academia overall," says chemical-safety blogger Chemjobber, an
industrial synthetic organic chemist in the United States. But funding agencies could also
play a part. The CSB, for example, is considering recommending that grant applications
should contain specific safety-training requirements.
"I think in the long run, the CSB recommendations, a possible new OSHA lab standard,
and input from the American Chemical Society will result in a modification of the
regulatory climate," says Langerman. But scientists should not wait for those changes
before taking the initiative on safety, he adds.
"Members of the academic community have unique freedoms that are denied to
industry," he says. "They then have a unique responsibility to behave in a manner that
supports the freedom they are given."
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110418/full/472270a.html