Dumb Things Grad Students Do in Lab

A USA Today piece reports that college laboratories have a poor safety record, specifically, somewhere between 10-50 times worse than the chemical industry. That sounds bad, but having done plenty of research both as an undergrad and graduate student, I'm not convinced that college labs are inherently unsafe.

Most universities already have plenty of rules to make sure accidents don't happen. For instance, a lot of labs have a strict no food/drink policy (which all of us violated by hiding candy and coffee under our desks). The real problem, most likely, is not a lack of rules, but (1) inexperienced students doing semi-dangerous things; (2) the strange hours typical of grad student life; and (3) boredom.

Let me explain.

Your humble correspondent had some mishaps during his 10-odd years of laboratory experience. None of them were due to a lack of rules; instead, all of them could be explained by some combination of the alternative reasons given. For example:

1) I once reached over a Bunsen burner and singed off some of my arm hair. (Burnt hair smells awful, by the way.)

2) In the same lab, after a long day (in the middle of the night, when no one was around and boredom had set in), I decided to entertain myself by burning away a Petri plate full of ethanol. (We regularly use ethanol to clean microbiology equipment.) Unfortunately, the Petri plate was made of plastic, so it started to melt. That's when I panicked, grabbed some paper towels, and attempted to put out the fire. As you might have guessed, the paper towels caught on fire, too, so that's when I swept everything on the floor and stomped on it. It wasn't graceful, but it worked.

3) In a different lab, students performed "old school" microbiology-- and they used "old school" techniques, like mouth-pipetting bacteria. (Imagine trying to suck water only part-way up a straw. That's what we were doing, and it's a very big no-no.) But, I gave it a try. That resulted in a salty mouthful of E. coli.

There's far more where that came from (e.g., burning paper towels with sulfuric acid and a bizarre occurrence cryptically referred to as the "bleach incident"), but those will have to wait for another post.

For now, suffice it to say that there are plenty of rules to keep students safe. The trick is getting them to follow those rules.