Somebody get busy on a steel guitar so we can all sing:

Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be
technicians in an academic lab

That went through my head after I read this article claiming that accidents and injuries happen in academic labs hundreds of times more than in industrial labs. It says that safety regulations often don’t apply to student workers in academic labs, that academic lab chiefs are held less accountable for accidents, and that improvement will come only if it’s tied to research funding.

Eye-opening. I’d want to have this information if I were a student lab worker or had a child working in a college lab.

Image © elemental imaging - Fotolia.com

I also found healthy discussion about that article, some dissenting with it, at this blog post. The blogger recalls working in an industrial lab with intense safety procedures, yet “we still had explosions, due to varying amounts of cluelessness, stupidity, and just plain bad luck.”

One comment: “Very true … no matter how many times you remind people of appropriate safety measures, some fraction choose to ignore it.”

Another commenter mentions a professor who illustrated the need for safety by giving each new student lab worker instructions that would CAUSE a explosion (presumably benign), because it: “made the students treat all their compounds, regardless of scale, with the utmost care and respect, including personal safety.”

Ya gotta love voices of experience and practice. It would be great to hear from scientists and other lab workers who use PIG® HAZ-MAT Absorbents in laboratories:

PIG® HAZ-MAT Mat Pads & Rolls
PIG® HAZ-MAT Socks, Dikes, Pillows, & Loose
PIG® Acid Encapsulating/Neutralizing Mat Pads & Rolls

Give us a comment on them. Tell us how they do or do not come into play in your work. Give practical user tips. You might save someone time or money or even prevent an injury.

By Keith

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Our products, Safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.