lab safety

There is one PhD student in my lab whose job is to be safety hardass. This means she's constantly yelling at me to wear goggles--something I can never remember to do unless I'm working with something that will light on fire if it's exposed to air or if the pressurized air is being really strange and popping the top off my column and it's freaking me out. The thing is, most days I wear very large-framed hipster nerd glasses anyway and as far as I can tell, they protect my eyes just as well as any of the lab glasses--perhaps better than the ones that don't look freakishly nerdy. In order to find goggles that actually fit over my hipster nerd glasses I need to get the huge ass glasses that fall off my face and are a huge nuisance because I'm always pushing them back up and I really don't like having my gloves that near my face when I'm, uh, working with shit that might be toxic. Furthermore, for 90% of the things I do, I really can't understand what could possibly go wrong. Okay, so maybe I'll get some ethyl acetate in my eye one day. Big fucking deal.

I understand that I'm much more lax about saftey much of the time than is entirely wise, and I'm trying to get better about it. I mean, I'm not hella old school like this one very old PhD chemist research assistant at my school who says "gloves are for pussies" and refuses to run columns containing chloroform under the hood and turns off the hoods when he feels like that lab is getting too cold. That type of shit freaks me the fuck out, and I rather like fume hoods because I dislike feeling woozy. When I TA sophomore organic lab I'm always yelling at people to keep chemicals under the hood because when 20 people are keeping beakers of ether on the bench it makes me feel quite ill. But occasionally I'll forget to wear gloves when I really shouldn't and I've spilled far more chlorinated solvents on my hands than is probably ideal. I also work with natural products quite a bit, and while my streptomyces aren't pathogenic and the compounds I'm trying to isolate are not accutely toxic as far as we know, you never know for sure, I really should always do those extractions with gloves. OOPS. It's all pretty dilute, but still. There are some people in the lab who work with very very toxic natural products and they need to be hella careful. But I'm also 21 and in that phase where I don't really understand the long-term consequences of my actions at all and feel like death is far and I am immortal. And as far as I can tell, a little bit of methylene chloride stinging my hands every now and then, while unpleasant, is not going to kill me. The other thing is, I've gotten into the biologist mode of thinking that being careful is not to protect my health, but rather it's to protect my experiments from getting fucked up, like working sterilely and shit.

But anyway, I digress. Today I was cleaning up after a prep HPLC I did on Tuesday of a synthetic compound I made recently. After finishing evaporating down fractions and making up an NMR spectra and such I needed to dispose of the rest of my fractions. I came in, asking where the waste for re-distilling acetonitrile went. I touched the top of my test tubes from my fractions (not, did not get liquid on myself, just touched the upper rim, where anything that was ever there would have evaporated off anyway). Immediately, this PhD student yells at me "DON'T TOUCH THAT IT MIGHT BE TOXIC!!!!"

This took me aback for a second because, well, it was said in an exceedingly aggressive tone. And even thought I'm just a baby undergrad, I really dislike when people condescend to me. It's one thing if you're like "hey dude, it would be a really good idea to wear gloves while you're working with that, because, you know, DCC is pretty toxic or whatever," but this was different. The thing that seemed really illogical to me was that the fractions I had were almost entirely acetonitrile and water. My compound was not in those fractions, and the only toxic things that may have been there was trace amounts of DCC (which was primarily removed in the workup anyway) and other side product junk that might have been present in very trace amounts. And my compound was not exceptionally toxic either. I mean, I certainly wouldn't eat it, but it's not something that would make me pass out if I spilled less than a miligram of it on my hand. Ironically enough, the student who was yelling at me was a smoker, which is far more carcinogenic than trace amounts of standard synthetic materials getting on your hands as far as I know.

And so, yeah, the explanation I get for such aggressive lab-saftey seriousness is that the lab is liable for anything that occurs there. But the lab is not responsible for a stochaistic effect that may happen 30 years from now for reasons that are entirely untraceable to one day of carelessness in discarding some prep HPLC samples. So I wish people would chill the fuck out about shit like that. It's my body to abuse as I choose.

I guess I just don't understand. For example, in the chemistry lab I handle carbiimides all the time on the normal scale weighing them out, which are pretty frickin' toxic. Yet when I'm visualizing a gel, there is a lot of paranoia about getting ethidium bromide anywhere. Like, special hoods and you can't bring plastic epi-holders from the EtBr hood to the rest of the lab. It just seems to me that the way lab safety is handled generally is completely absurd, and while it is definitely important, it's also not worth flipping out about to the degree that most people do.

Unless you're working with something that is seriously accutely toxic. Then it's well deserved. But if you treat everything like you're going to die if you touch it, it kind of undermines how careful you need to be with some things, I think.