Image: Martin Shields/Photo Researchers, Inc.
On a late afternoon in December 2008, the experiment Sheharbano “Sheri” Sangji was working on went up in flames. The 23-year-old laboratory assistant at the University of California, Los Angeles, suffered second and third degree burns over 43 percent of her body and died almost three weeks later in a hospital burn unit.
Now the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office has brought felony charges against U.C.L.A. chemistry professor Patrick Harran, the head of Sangji’s lab, and the Regents of the University of California for violations of safety regulations resulting in her death. If convicted on all three counts, Harran faces up to four and a half years in prison, and U.C.L.A. faces $4.5 million in fines. The university terms the charges “outrageous” and Sangji’s death a “tragic accident.” It is planning a vigorous defense.
The charges, apparently the first to be brought in an academic safety incident, raise the widely neglected issue of safety standards at university labs. A scathing report issued last October by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) brought additional attention to
the problem. The investigation, launched after a January 2010 explosion at Texas Tech University maimed a graduate student, mentions 120 mishaps, including the one involving Sangji. The report outlines systemic problems common on many campuses, such as failure to report accidents, and a lack of proper safety training for students and staff. Many university labs operate as quasi-independent “fiefdoms,” according to the report; lab chiefs have great authority to observe or ignore safety standards and often see outside safety checks as “infringing upon their academic freedom.”
The California criminal charges arise from citations and fines that the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health leveled against U.C.L.A. in May 2009 for “serious” violations, among them failing to make timely corrections of unsafe conditions or to provide required training and personal protective gear. (Not only was Sangji not wearing a lab coat, but her synthetic sweatshirt may have “caught fire,” according to the citation.)
The rate of serious mishaps in industrial labs is lower than that in academic labs, in part because industrial labs are more tightly regulated, according to experts, including James Kaufman, president of the Laboratory Safety Institute in Natick, Mass. Some experts believe that attaching criminal responsibility to preventable mishaps may encourage greater accountability.
This article was published in print as "Are University Labs Criminally Dangerous?"
This article was originally published with the title Are University Labs Criminally Dangerous?.
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11 Comments
Add CommentWorkplace safety rules have not been applied in places such as the historically elite bastions of the bourgeoisie because there's been no political hay to be made. Hopefully this will change, since universities have long since become social experiment laboratories chock-full of lesser intellects, due to government edict.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd there was also the student at Yale who died in a lathe accident where a basic rule of lab safety was violated. never work alone in lab.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat is quite a bunch of hyperbole. I think it is more basic than that. People get tenure based on performance, not following safety standards. L ab safety MUST be a part of tenure and promotion in academic labs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat something might be dangerous in a school is intolerable. No endeavor is worth danger to oneself, mainly because it might be of great cost to others.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo person is an island. That's why swimming pool high dives, bicycling without a helmet and NASA's manned space program are being scrapped. Danger is costly, and is frequently caused by exploiters.
When danger is actively sought out by a person, it often is due to their wish to demonstrate their own superiority over others. This itself is a form of exploitation, and is a hate activity.
These "kids" are under the impression that nothing will ever happen to them - it's the adolescent immortality syndrome and it's exacerbated by a lack of real concern by their academic supervisors.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy do universities still have labs ful of dangerous chemicals anyway? Shouldn't molecular reactions be modeled on computers, as nuclear explosions are?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLab Chiefs do not have the authority to ignore safety rules, at least here in California. If UCLA thinks they do because the fall under the 29 CFR 1910 exemptions for State entities, they might want to read a little further and investigate what incorporation by reference means and then go look at CALOSH rules. I think they will find that they are going to lose. As to the charges against the professor, I am a little conflicted. There definitely need to be consequences for ignoring safety rules, but putting a man in prison for 5 years for practicing what has become institutionalized stupidity is a slippery slope I am not sure we are ready to run on.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn reply to lnquiringConstructivist, you can model something on a computer 1000 times, and still have no idea how to actually do it in the real world when your job may depend on it. I'm pretty good at landing an F-16 on a computer.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWith what little laboratory experience I've had being a grad student, PIs are generally not expected to manage graduate students (though some do). At that level, students are expected to use other resources, such as literature for experimental methods and precautions. However, the most important resource for direction would be senior/ more experienced members of the lab, who might have performed similar experiments, if they are of a peculiar nature. And this is what happens in most laboratories, and their safety record cannot be cast under a shadow owing to a few incidents.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn the academic lab, researchers generally explore the unknown. The industrial lab (with the possible exception of R&D) deals with what has been tried and tested- and thus, the 'better' safety record.
The UCLA case, however, is slightly different. Asking a new lab member to perform a very dangerous reaction is a bit over the top, especially when she did not seem to have adequate training in handling organometallic reactions. The responsibility for the accident will have to be shared by the student (for not taking adequate protective measures, reading up on the subject of such reactions and asking for directions from other lab members/ advisor) and the PI himself for probably being a bit too lax in supervising a new lab member. However, asking the PI to be convicted for this seems way over the top, especially when this is quite the 'norm' at many labs, and the responsibility is more of a personal expectation- an unwritten rule.
I've never heard anyone argue against safety inspections as hindering academic freedom. If they did, I'd advocate for closing their lab down entirely. Lab safety doesn't impact just the lab in question, but potentially everyone in the same building. Having worked at multiple academic institutions in multiple states, and been through the plethora of lab safety trainings they all require, I think the problem isn't so much with willingness to have personnel trained or attempts to comply, but rather the actual content of these training sessions. They often focus on regulatory statutes, paperwork to fill out, mandated inspection schedules, and hazardous material disposal regulations, and are held in a lecture room or conference room. They lack practical training in the labs themselves. Only one institution had a secondary training by a designated lab safety rep required for specific procedures in the lab itself before someone was allowed to work in the lab doing more than observation. Worse, the people responsible for the safety training often don't have a clue themselves. A colleague at another institution had a minor spill of a chemical classified to make it a reportable incident. When that colleague called the chemical safety officers at that institution, they had no idea how to handle the spill. It wasn't an uncommon chemical either. You'd find it in most biomedical labs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnother issue is the lax enforcement of violations. Violations get cited, but it often takes a lot accumulating before a lab is shut down or prohibited from ordering certain materials. Often the only followup is a written report and checking for correction of the deficiency at the next monthly or quarterly inspection.
I also wonder if the injured tech was a petite woman. Nobody ever addresses the problem that most PPE is sized for men or tall people. Lab coats get left off and substituted with long-sleeved shirts because overly long, droopy sleeves also CAUSE accidents. I've had to modify my lab coats to avoid this by putting snap closures on the cuffs so they don't dangle into things. Simple things get ignored, like putting a height adjustable stool by fume hoods so everyone can keep the sash at the correct operating height, still reach their arms in to work, yet keep their face above the opening and protected by the shield.
Anyone working in a lab also needs the sense to ask for help if they are doing something unfamiliar and hazardous. It's not a place for arrogance. I do think there is a lot of room for improvement in many places.
Well i guess hazard comes out as cost for a certain benefit. It is hard to eliminate it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMedula
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