After writing about the dilution of those “dangerous” kids’ chemistry sets, I find that Nature has just published a news article wondering how dangerous chemistry actually is.
Something that felt like an earthquake hit the French town of Mulhouse on 24 March. The explosion at the National Institution of Higher Learning in Chemistry (ENSCMu) killed Dominique Burget, a 41-year-old photochemist. It also sent ripples of concern around the world.
Although official investigations are expected to last until the end of the year, it appears that residues of the flammable gas ethene in a pressure vessel were responsible. Burget was working in the lab above the explosion and had nothing to do with the experiment, which also severely injured a 19 year-old student in the room next door. “She is now out of danger and comes back to the school next week,” Serge Neunlist, director of ENSCMu, said on 23 May. The explosion caused roughly €10 million (US$13 million) of damage and destroyed about 4,000 m2 of the building, which will take at least three years to rebuild.
It has other little anecdotes scattered throughout.
“The thing that radicalized me on safety was when I got a job with a small company in Philadelphia,” he [Professor Edward Arnett of Duke] recalls. “I took over my job a couple of days after they buried my predecessor, who died of hydrofluoric acid poisoning. It was my job to make sure nothing like that ever happened again.”
Ultimately, though, it doesn’t come to any strong conclusions. Chem labs may be risky, but the statistics are difficult to come by, and the most common sort of injury is getting cut on broken glassware. They also mention that there are greater numbers of serious injuries from college sports than from college chemistry classes.
But wait…
“I don’t feel that there is a significant difference between chemistry labs and other labs,” agrees Gibbs, pointing out that biology, for example, carries its own set of risks, namely infection.
Others agree that the risk of infection is often underplayed compared with that of chemical accidents. “People’s risk perception is skewed by the drama of an explosion,” says Firn. Gillett adds that the most serious lab accidents at Imperial have involved accidental infections with hepatitis A and vaccinia virus. “Pathogens are where I would be more anxious about what’s going on,” he says.
Hey, now! None of that! We’re criticizing chemists, and they’re trying to change the subject and put us biologists on the spot!
Peplow M, Marris E (2006) How dangerous is chemistry? Nature 441:560-561.
But isn’t it the case that Organic Chemists (yes, yes, go ahead and joke) tend to have shorter lifespans than average owing to chemical exposure, or is that a myth?
But isn’t it the case that Organic Chemists (yes, yes, go ahead and joke) tend to have shorter lifespans than average owing to chemical exposure, or is that a myth?
They do have shorter lifespans, but it’s because they turn into hideous monsters, and have to be destroyed by the National Guard*.
*In Japan, read Godzilla.
But isn’t it the case that Organic Chemists (yes, yes, go ahead and joke) tend to have shorter lifespans than average owing to chemical exposure, or is that a myth?
I think it’s because after working in an organic chem lab long enough their noses become suicidal from the odors and subconciously plot their demise.
As a physics student, I find chemistry dangerous – because in the rare instances when I need to use some sort of chemical, I know nothing about it. This has led to some improper safety situations in the past…
Well, of course it’s dangerous. That’s what attracted us kids to it in the first place. Not that we thought we were going to poison ourselves, but the idea of making bangs, stinks, and green fumes was half the fun.
So here I am, a 66-year-old Ph.D. organic chemist. I guess I’m supposed to be dead, but most of my dead friends are humanities majors and mathematicians, rather than chemists.
So, physics, more dangerous or less dangerous than chemistry? I mean, lasers, and so on.
Hey, biologists can make pretty good explosions too. A few years before I started my doctoral work in microbiology at the University of Illinois, a methanogen lab there was gutted by a graduate student induced explosion. Methanogens are organisms, that, as their name implies, create methane. They use carbon dioxide and hydrogen to do that. Added to this, many methanogens are extremophiles that like to live around 80C and at high pressure simulating their native thermal vents at the bottom of the sea. Hmm, hydrogen, high pressure, and grad students — a disaster waiting to happen. Fortunately when it did, everyone in the lab was out having lunch.
When I came along, I decided to study methanogens at the level of genomics and bioinformatics — much less dangerous.
Wnen I was a grad student in molecular biology at Northwestern, one of my labmates set his (long) hair on fire with a Bunsen burner. Does that count as a biology disaster? (He was fine- hair doesn’t burn quite as well as you might think.)
As a sythetic materials chemist, I think “poisoning” is such a strong word; I prefer to think of it as “pickling” myself. Mmm, acetonitrile… breakfast of champions!
The old guard of organic synthesis used to taste and smell everything they made, now we have things like NMR, GC-MS, and TOF-MS, so our livers’ only take a hit from the pickling that we do to ourselves in our spare time.
And, yeah! Hey, look over there… those biologists are way more dangerous than us! What? That’s only a mixture of rust and aluminum shavings, nothing to worry about at all.
The disaster in that case was probably the odor. While hair that hasn’t been treated with too many flammables doesn’t burn very well, the hair that does burn makes you want to get the heck out of the lab.
(Teaching freshman and intro chem gets you exposed to that smell a lot…)
I should have hit preview. The quote in my last post should have ended before “Which reminds me … how did people figure out that hydrogen cyanide smells like almonds?”
“Hmm. Smells like almonds…”
[thud]
Accompanied, of course, by the sound of luckier labmates fleeing to safety and reporting their unfortunate colleague’s analysis.
Ever since I mentioned to my girlfriend that cyanide smells like almonds, she has refused to eat almonds, no matter how many I buy for her.
My first post above was of course partly out of envy. As a linguist, I get hope from scenes like the talking-Miggs-into-suicide one in _Silence of the Lambs_, and the Sumerian-as-assembly-code-for-the-human-mind one from _Snow Crash_, but no luck as yet. Someday, maybe . . . .
It is just a matter of time till they outlaw knowledge, because, you know, knowledge makes you, well… dangerous… someone smart can for example commit a crime and avoid being caught, but if you are stupid like a brick, you can’t… And, moreover docile and ignorant are the best sort of citizen for them…
“(He was fine- hair doesn’t burn quite as well as you might think.)”
Says you – I caught my hair on fire from candles on my birthday cake when I was 12, and it wasn’t fun. And as for the smell… it didn’t come out for MONTHS, even after cutting off the singed hair.
Oh, I see. Hassle the chemists, is it?
And I suppose you biologists never breathe any stray fumes in the lab either, eh? I used to get hits of MTBE when we did this old LC method for analyzing coprostanol in sediments. But YOU guys get hits of formaldehyde, don’t ya? So which one rots your brain faster? ;-)
Jake B. Cool wrote:
My first post above was of course partly out of envy. As a linguist, I get hope from scenes like the talking-Miggs-into-suicide one in _Silence of the Lambs_, and the Sumerian-as-assembly-code-for-the-human-mind one from _Snow Crash_, but no luck as yet. Someday, maybe . . . .
That reminds me of a post from Tenser said the Tensor.
When fully pressurized, gentlemen, this hyperverbal chamber will contain the highest density of lexical items ever observed.
After parsing this quintuply-nested onion sentence, Broca’s area in the subject’s brain will achieve a temperature nine times hotter than the surface of the sun.
The submicrosecond collapse of this precise mixture of passive and antipassive verb forms produces mutual annihilation and a burst of hard gamma rays.
Chemists do not have shorter lifespans than others. In fact, they are remarkably long-lived. It’s total bull that chemists die young. I agree sometimes scientists do dangerous things, but we have a respect for the dangers we are working with and adjust accordingly. A chemist who doesn’t do that will find him/herself without lab space, since none of us particularly want to be endangered by some moron in the lab. I’ve seen people do remarkably moronic things regarding power tools, ladders and electricity. They are much more likely to have accidents. All you biologists, remember that DNA is just one big molecule, so you really need us!
When I was in school, the statistic was that laboratory chemists had life expectancies that were about 5 years shorter than average, and radiochemists had about 10 years taken off their lives. That was 35 years ago, and, given the time lag for mortality statistics, would have been applicable to chemists in the first half of the 20th century. Health and safety standards have improved a lot since then, so I assume that the discrepancy has been reduced.
I”l also grant that this may have been macho posturing by my teachers, who were chemists and radiochemists, because it was from them that I heard the stats. Where did you go for information to back your assertion, Unstable Isotope?
Oh, and theoretical chemists weren’t affected at all, being generally assumed to live forever, as were all university professors.
I was recently moved to reminisce a bit about my old Gilbert Chemistry Set, circa 1958. The strongest acid was sodium bisulfate and the most toxic component was probably copper chloride. Not really a risk-a-thon, actually.
James, I heard this from my grad school advisor. Doing a quick Google search, I found this reference:
http://list.uvm.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0003b&L=safety&D=1&P=13611
I also meant to say that it is not surprising for chemists to have a lower mortality rate, since they are generally well-educated and white, which are very highly correlated with health. The only risk factor as a group is maleness, which takes off about 4 yrs.
We can pick on physicists, too. One of the applied physics labs here at Maryland had a small, contained sodium fire, and research was effectively halted for more than two months while safety people crawled over the entire lab surface, insisting on things like new electrical outlets and forms in triplicate stapled to other forms in triplicate before any work could proceed.
Meanwhile, the school paper reported it as an accident with “sodium chloride, a chemical that reacts violently with water.” No wonder the non-science world is so paranoid about chemistry.
Chemistry certainly can become dangerous when it makes the transition to industry, where it is tended by less-knowledgeable people and in far larger quantities. In my wife’s heavily industrialized hometown, they only started seeing people over 75 after the mills closed – everybody died in their mid sixties. And one of my former employees grew up near Bophal and had a few stories to tell.
Someone blew up a lab station and destroyed a vent system here at our university, mishandling a (aptly named) bomb calorimiter.
mmmm…thermite
Re Almonds: I carried a little bottle containing KCN in gel caps for a few years. (I guess I must have been depressed). Moisture + KCN = HCN and it does sort of smell like almonds. I opened the bottle a few times, and caught a whiff. Not fatal,I’m here to tell you.
re Danger: as a 12yr old I bought concentrated hydrochloric acid (40 years ago schoolboys could buy such stuff), added it to bleach. Now the correct way to sniff is to cup your hand and waft it towards you. I put my nose into the beaker and inhaled. My GP father got his heart specialist friend to race over and hit me up with adrenaline. 40 years later my lung capacity is below average. (general aerobics are ok, I bicycle to work).
re chemists vs biochemists: As biochem undergrads we did a couple of experiments using radioactive tracers. The precautions involved covering the lab bench with brown paper. [I kid u not] Disposal of radioactivity is actually best done by haphazard dumping in the rubbish. If there is a schedule, then a big lot would get dumped at one time.
In the late 70s when I was wondering whether to be a biologist, chemist or physicist (though I actually ended up none of the above) I saw an article in Scientific American which had chemists dying in their early sixties, biologists in their middle sixties and physicists isn their late sixties. Given what chemistry students and teachers got up to, compared to the others (accidents with thermite, hydrogen sulphide gas and explosive accidents with hydrogen), it didn’t surprise me about the chemists.
Combined with my chemistry teachers completely nonchalant response to me pointing out an article indicating the carcinogenic properties of benzene, which we had been playing around with in class the previous week, convinced me that chemistry was not for me :-)
In the late 70s when I was wondering whether to be a biologist, chemist or physicist (though I actually ended up none of the above) I saw an article in Scientific American which had chemists dying in their early sixties, biologists in their middle sixties and physicists isn their late sixties. Given what chemistry students and teachers got up to, compared to the others (accidents with thermite, hydrogen sulphide gas and explosive accidents with hydrogen), it didn’t surprise me about the chemists.
Combined with my chemistry teachers completely nonchalant response to me pointing out an article indicating the carcinogenic properties of benzene, which we had been playing around with in class the previous week, convinced me that chemistry was not for me :-)
I also heard that statistics about the lower life expectancies of chemists, but in fact that was the average in the chemical industry, including the workers in the plant. I guess most of the PhD chemists are mainly sitting at their desks with the danger being too much caffeine…
And also the time plays are role: Nowadays cancerogenics are no-no and the times when you cleaned your hands with tetra are over. As for biologists: In “microbe hunters” (I think) the author describes the safety precautions underway in Koch´s lab when they where looking for Toby, the Tuberkel. They included “washing” their hands with mercury chloride, rendering their hands black. And physics? Well, how did Mme. Curie die?
The times they are a-changing…
May I recommend:
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with/
I was among the chemically inclined boys, so you want hassle? We started with matchstick head rocketeering and noisy exploding keys, and soon developed small caliber cannons and short arms. But our career was cut short by an unfortunate incident. One afternoon we were having fun shooting at pigeons (the brainless birds dont escape but continue to circling over our head), when a very angry neighbor called our attention to the fact that those were his favourite champion messenger pigeons. each worth more than all of us together (verbatim). I dont want to give offense, but we rather despised the microscope boys, as they were always observing their own sperm, which they stored in the family frigidaire.
Any chemists that specialize in fluorine around? I can’t imagine that would be terribly pleasant.
I’ve met a few fluorine chemists. Some missing a digit or two.
Part of the allure of chemistry as a kid was being able to start fires and cause explosions. I made explosive mixtures, and given that I was young, I think I was pretty careful. I’d flip if my own kid were doing it, though.
To do chemistry safely, I think you have to be taught to have ample respect for what you are doing. A good mentor will teach students to think about what they are doing- my PhD advisor was very good about fussing at us to know why we were doing everything, and to understand equipment thoroughly before fiddling with it. I bug the hell out of engineers where I work asking everything I can think of about how processes work, largely out of force of habit.
Isotope,
You would need to find out what percentage of the Royal Society of Chemists are laboratory chemists. If it is anything like the American Chemical Society, the fraction of lab guys in the mix is pretty small.
San Francisco columnist Jon Carroll has a fairly interesting piece today on this subject:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/06/02/DDGS0INI811.DTL
I also know that the wife of SF writer Kim Stanley Robinson is an organic chemist who gave up lab work for six months before trying to have a child, because of worries about laboratory mutagens. There are sensible ways of dealing with risk, but ignoring it isn’t one of them.
One of my inorganic chemistry lecturers (Small world check- this was at St Andrews 10 years ago) claimed to be one of the few people in the world to know what some kind of organomettallic compound smelt like, all the others who had smelt it died. He was working on it with a malfunctioning fume cupboard, and like the stereotype, was just thinking “Whats that odd smell?”
when he collapsed. Fortunately someone else at the other end of the lab got help.