Lab Safety Violations - A collection

The post today is not a fictional short story

Appropriate behavior in a laboratory is important to not hurt yourself and others. But the more you work in a lab, the less anybody cares. After a while, even the most basic safety rules are ignored.

It is not just small things, like not wearing a lab coat anymore. I’ve barely ever seen anybody but the new students wear lab goggles. But there are some rather outrageous violations of lab safety out there!

I once witnessed a couple of researchers come into the chemical storage during their coffee break, get out the 5 kg bucket of pure glucose and put some of it into their coffee. The reason? Sugar was empty. The fact that the glucose was stored next to toxic chemicals and that it was more likely contaminated with something than it was not ... bothered nobody.

Then again, those guys weren’t the first to ingest something with the potential to cause harm. In the contrary.

Nobel prize holder Dr. Barry Marshall intentionally swallowed the bacteria Helicobacter pylori after findings suggested that this microorganism was responsible for stomach ulcers, not stress and a bad lifestyle, as it was previously thought. As he was able to cure the resulting stomach ulcers with antibiotics, his experiment had been successful.

Another Nobel prize went to Marie Curie who developed a way to measure radioactivity, which had been a rather new discovery made by Henri Becquerel. The novelty of radiation research was probably the reason why she didn’t take enough precautions and died in 1934, likely because of the radiation damage.

Her husband died when he was run over by a horse-drawn carriage. You just can’t win.

Sometimes though, breaking protocol and basically messing up in the lab can lead to unexpected discoveries.

When Alexander Fleming first discovered that he had left a petri dish next to a window, he was probably annoyed because it got contaminated. But upon closer inspection, he observed something that later lead to the discovery of penicillin.

So what are you supposed to do? Follow lab safety and don’t make any discoveries? Break it and maybe die because of the consequences? Choose for yourself, as long as you don’t endanger others.

And remember follow the one rule they always told us, when we were about to enter a new lab:

Don’t pipette with your mouth.

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Sources:

Nobel for stomach ulcer discovery
Marie Curie
Alexander Fleming

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