Yesterday’s Global Security Newswire has a hilarious story about a Laboratory Preparedness Survey in 2007 (an exercise in which labs are required to identify an unknown pathogen). Obviously, it’s funny for all the wrong reasons. Here’s a taster (or should that be a sniff):
Written instructions included with the testing kits directed laboratory personnel to handle the samples using safety cabinets inside the confines of a Biosafety Level 3 facility. However, not all workers handled the material safely, some going so far as to smell open culture plates while trying to identify the unknown material, according to documents.
Smelling culture plates is probably against SOPs, but, I’m sorry, we chemists and biologists are very concrete people. I’ve gotten myself into trouble smelling stuff, but the easiest way to identify certain kinds of things is by our senses. Forbidding us to use them is stupid in its own way.
My qual professor thought she was giving me a difficult unknown, but as soon as I opened the envelope, I knew it was magnesium sulfate, from what it looked like. The ions would be hard to test for, but knowing what it was from the start made the sequence a lot easier.
It’s a conundrum that I suspect desk-sitters can’t fully appreciate. We know that sniffing at stuff can be dangerous, but it’s been part of the chemist’s analytical armamentarium since forever.
Giving it up entirely would be a great loss.
They’re not talking about never using sense of smell in science…just not when attempting to identify an unknown pathogen.
What if it had been anthrax instead of magnesium sulfate?
CKR—I think the real question from an employer’s point of view, much less the government, is whether the chemist in question would be eligible to sue them if they got injured on the job in such a fashion. There are lots of professions where anyone “in the know” knows that you do things not-by-the-book when it comes to day-to-day experience, but the book was written by lawyers, not practitioners. (I say this as someone who once had a job working on technical manuals that everyone at the job knew would never be read by the engineers in question, and that were only being created should something go wrong and the company needed to blame some engineers.)
(As a side, nuclear-wonk note, one of the major bureaucratic issues the University of California faced in working out the details of its contract to manage Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project was in fact getting an insurance company to insure an unknown project with unknown effects in an unknown place; unknown not only to the insurers, but to most of the management administration as well.)
If you’re going to be stupid, you’ve got to be tough!
i think it’s quite honorable to put one’s life on the line instead of waiting for pesky, expensive, time consuming “empirical” testing. 😉
Responses from desksitters!
I’ll admit I was a bit cavalier in my tone. But there is a difference between getting things done and worrying about lawsuits, which was my point.
When I know that something is likely to be dangerous, I suppress my natural impulse to sniff at it and treat it accordingly.
But I do think we’ve gotten too far from actually doing things. And yes, I knew when I became a chemist that it entailed certain dangers.
It’s the fiction that life can be made totally riskless that is impeding our science, diplomacy, business, you name it! Like everyone having to take off their shoes for x-ray because one dumb guy made up some “explosive” shoes that didn’t even work!
And, er, I think it’s all “empirical,” at least as I understand that word.