Low pay, long hours, meager prospects for advancement - these are the reasons academic lab workers often wonder how much they're valued. Well, now it's possible to put a dollar value on the life of a lab technician - $31,000. That's the amount UCLA was fined after the death of a 23-year old technician in an academic lab accident last December. Just to call it a "fatal accident", though, does not capture the reality of what happened. The technician, Sheri Sangji, was handling a syringe of a highly dangerous and spontaneously combusting chemical. She spilled it on her sweater, which burst into flames covering nearly half her body with burns. After what must have been 18 agonizing days in the hospital, she died of her injuries.
Naturally this incident has sparked a lot of chatter about safety in academic laboratories. In his statement, Patrick Harran, the professor in charge of the lab where the accident occurred, mentioned something about establishing a "culture of safety". Presumably, this means a culture that is proactive about minimizing hazards, foreseeing risks, and taking safety issues seriously. Most scientists will agree to these things in principle, but do we in fact have such a culture in academic science? Please. A culture of lip-service to safety, maybe, but when is the last time you have seen anyone in academic science (other than Sangji) suffer any kind of real consequence as a result of a safety issue? Let's take, for an example, myself: as a graduate student, I forgot about a warm water bath in which I was heating a plastic tray. The water evaporated and the plastic melted, filling the building with fumes. And what was the consequence to me? A few people made jokes about it in the hallways for the next week. Another time, I forgot about a bunsen burner I had left ignited on a lab bench that was cluttered with paper. Again, no consequence beyond a verbal reprimand.
My advisors have not exactly been safety zealots, either. Over the years I've seen them get irritated when people spend time cleaning and organizing, dodge questions about hazards, and complain about the expense of buying latex gloves. In general I haven't found that people in academic science take safety very seriously. My "X-ray safety training" consisted largely of a guy telling me not to stick my finger in the beam. More than once, I've noticed how scientists think safety precautions are funny, i.e. "hey, look at Mr. safety dork in the lab goggles!" There is pressure to cut corners, a distaste for formal procedures, and a tendency towards workaholism; if anything, these things make for a culture of un-safety.
So should I be worried? Could I be the next victim? Yes, I could, but no, I am not worried. Despite the lack of a culture of safety, and even with occasional accidents like Sangji's, the truth is that academic science remains one of the safer occupations. From a quick glance at the CDC database , I get the impression that accidents- though they do happen in science- are much more common in blue-collar professions. The reason we have a low fatality rate in academic science has nothing to do with a "culture of safety"- it is because what we do is just not that inherently dangerous. We generally don't work with heavy machinery or climb in high places. We sometimes work with dangerous chemicals, but in limited amounts (Sangji was killed by a spill of two ounces of t-butyl lithium; imagine an industrial operation involving two tonnes of the stuff.)
Saying that academic science is low-risk, though, is different from saying that it is no-risk. The risk will never go all the way to zero, but could we push it any closer? If currently our accidental-death rate is one every five years, could we push it to, say, one death every twenty years? I think we could- in fact I think it would be relatively straightforward. It's done routinely in other industries that are more inherently dangerous (think of air travel, for example). We could put better procedures in place, and make sure they are followed (Sangji's death would almost certainly have been prevented by wearing a lab coat). We could institute both positive and negative incentives, e.g. rewards for pro-active minimization of risks, and real consequences for negligence. So why don't we do more of these things in academic science? The reason, I think, is simple- we don't want to. The cost is too high. Safety, on the whole, is a trade-off, and despite our penchant for win-win solutions, making our labs substantially safer would involve substantial inconveniences and would mean less productivity in terms of gathering data and writing grants. I think we've collectively made the calculation that the trade-offs that could have prevented an accident like Sangji's are not worth the cost.
So instead of a real culture of safety, we have something similar to what computer security expert Bruce Schneier calls 'security theatre'- practices that give the appearance of going to great lengths to mitigate risks, but that in reality do little. One tell-tale sign that a proclaimed security measure is really security theatre is when it involves little cost to the person putting it in place. For example, in the years after 9/11 the Department of Homeland security put up signs everywhere promoting vigilance against terrorism ("if you see something, say something"). This certainly gave the appearance that the government had made counter-terrorism a high priority, but did anybody ever really demonstrate that these signs (which must have been a minor expense, considering the size of the federal budget) actually made anybody safer? How about the "safety division" at your University? Its existence gives the impression that your University cares about safety, without costing much (perhaps five salaries in an institution that employs thousands.) But does the safety division really make you safer? As with the terrorism signs, it's very hard to know, because the risk is small to begin with. Such situations encourage security theatre, because it's difficult to prove or disprove the effectiveness of any approach. If a bad thing happens, say, only once every five years at worst, it's difficult to prove that you've made it even more rare.
When security theater fails (as it always does), and an accident happens, and we're not willing to admit that we took a calculated risk, then we need somebody to blame. The most telling part of Harran's statement is where he points out Sangji's role in causing the accident: "I underestimated her abilities in handling such materials", he says. But this is the paradox of safety: individual accidents are always the result of individual actions, but overall accident rates are the result of environments and policies. This point was made humbly and elegantly in the autobiography of General Omar Bradley, a commander in World War II. If you looked at any one casualty, he said, there was always some way it might have been prevented- if the soldier had been wearing his helmet, if he had been more alert, etc. But on a large scale these things always averaged out, and though individual casualties could always be blamed on individual soldiers, overall casualty rates for whole armies never could; these were solely the result of the decisions of the highest-level commanders. I think scientists have a hard time understanding this, because of their tendency to see things in terms of a Darwinian struggle for survival of the fittest. For despite their well-known tendency to vote Democratic, scientists have at least one thing in common with the right-wing crowd: a reluctance to acknowledge systemic causes for individual problems. Newt Gingrich looks at a woman receiving welfare to support her children, and concludes that she must be lazy. Never mind that her city hasn't nearly enough jobs to meet the demand for employment. A professor looks at a postdoc who can't find a tenure-track job, and concludes that it must be because he's not trying hard enough or is not smart enough. Never mind that an overwhelming majority of postdocs today will not find tenure-track jobs. So is it a surprise that a professor looks at a technician who died in a fatal lab accident, and concludes that she must have been careless?
I'm afraid the accident at UCLA will bring on little more than a surge in security theatre, but let me suggest something else. Maybe it's unrealistic to think that we'll ever have a real culture of safety in science, but at least we could spread the blame and consequences around a bit more fairly. The accident, after all, was not entirely Sangji's fault. Professor Harran states that she did this kind of experiment all the time, without incident. Perhaps he hopes this will exculpate him, but rather, it demonstrates that a fatal accident could have happened in his lab at any time. So it seems unfair that Sangji should bear the blame and consequences alone. After all, at the time of this writing, Sangji remains dead, while Harran's career seems to have continued with little more than a hiccup- a recent article about the accident said that Harran was "at a conference and unavailable for comment". I'm guessing it wasn't a conference on lab safety. I think it would be appropriate for Harran to suffer a serious career setback as a result of this accident. That may sound harsh, and it is. I don't think Harran sounds like such a bad guy. His shortcomings in safety precautions don't sound any worse than those of the average scientist. But the same could be said of the technician who died in his lab. Without a true culture of safety, every so often, awful things are going to happen to people who don't deserve it. Just ask Sherri Sangji.
