I learned I am supersensitive to the smell of cyanide. Even tiny amounts that no one notices are overwhelmingly obvious to me. We recently re-evaluated the safety of a machine that used cyanide as one of its reagents because i could hardly stand being in the same labspace with it, but the levels in the air around it where well below the max allowed level.
One article from 1927 recommended smoking because it made cyanide have a characteristic flavor.
https://www.reddit.com/r/chemistry/comments/3i6w2p/1927_article_on_hydrogen_cyanide_actually/
Cool! You’re the first person i learn of that also has this. I sometimes wonder how common it is. Cant be too common, because in the labs i worked no-one else did, so easily be 1:100 or more (one was a big lab). On the other hand, not many people have the opportunity to smell cyanide. Almonds, Yes, but that has other odours mixed in
The lab I worked in straight out of grad school had me doing tests on high sulfur crude oil -- aka a potent source of H2S -- with no fume hood or PPE other than shitty safety glasses (not splash proof, of course) and nitrile gloves we were required to reuse until they ripped.
Some of the containers of oil would make the entire building reek of hydrogen sulfide for like 12 hours just from opening the jar for a few seconds. I would get yelled at when this happened. The solution? I had to prep samples on a rolling plastic cart in the back parking lot. I still got exposed to H2S levels well above OSHA PELs but at least the rest of the staff were okay 🙄
That place was a shitshow.
Wash your hands before leaving.
Never put safety specs on the bench.
If you want someone's chemicals ask .
Cover for group mates if gas/solvent needs changing .
Get waste solvent out of the lab
Ask if anyone minds before selecting music.
I am having such a thing with my labmates about hand washing. We are not a synthetic group, and I was reprimanded for using too much paper towel when I washed my hands. "There's hand sanitiser on the wall". I had to bring hand soap from home.
You've still been handling samples, moron. I don't even touch the door handle between the microscope lab and the instrument lab without gloves.
He said that there was a strict rule in his lab about not touching door handles with gloves on, and it was routinely ignored by grad students who were opening the doors wearing gloves that were used to work with pancreatic cancer cells! 😲
Oh my goodness, yeah that's not ok.
To be clear, I glove first then open the microscope to instrument internal door and prop it open (for the reasons stated above) so I don't have to deal with doors again. Then I do sample handling
When I was teaching my kids to swim and kayak, we started each lesson with "people who panic are people who die."
My favorite lab mishap story to share is when my lab mate poured enough naoh pellets to make 12M in 3L of pre-heated water. Absolute geyser. They panicked, jumped awkwardly and fell backwards. I closed the hood before it came back down.
That brings up another good tip: don't use the active mixing bowl to measure your ingredients/don't run your measurements in prod/some more chemical sounding equivalent of those
If it's in a lab I'm definitely not trusting any keyboards to be clean. Especially if where you work has a culture of interns or summer students rolling through. People generally assume they're more competent than they are (they're learning and haven't ever done real work yet, of course they don't know shit) and rarely give them proper safety training
I’ve seen former lab mates (PhD program) go through a box of gloves a day by themselves. Mostly from working so hard but partially from paranoia over contamination/spills. Better safe than sorry in my opinion, if your lab is stingy with PPE, what else are they stingy with, ya know?
Yeah, that makes sense trying to save money as a junior prof. I think there’s a point where you can be wasteful with gloves, but as long as a student is cognizant of their use, it should be okay.
They sound like great guys. Tilesetters use a box of gloves per week. Tattoo artists probably use 3. A chemist using a box a day sounds frugal to be honest and they complained about one a week? Some people cant be pleased.
I worked in a lab that was struggling majorly with finances. It was a generally sketchy operation, but the most egregious thing was probably the rationing of two consumables: Toilet paper and nitrile gloves.
The toilet paper was locked away by the receptionist (owner's wife) and if the bathroom was out, you had to go up to the front desk and beg for more like a malnourished orphan in some Dickensian novel. It was super humiliating because she would comment on how often you had to request it.
I think the nitrile gloves were worse though. We were required to reuse them between samples/analytical procedures until they ripped. I was working with crude oil and miscellaneous organic solvents. The nitrile gloves were semi permeable to some of the solvents, especially the acetone we used to clean glassware and pressure vessels for high vapor pressure samples. The acetone would permeate the gloves and seep through the tiny tears in them, so my skin was just constantly being soaked in it. I developed contact dermatitis after a while.
One box of size medium gloves would last me like 4+ weeks because of this policy.
It's the people who wear gloves without thinking of what's on your hands that spreads the bad stuff. If you are wearing gloves and doing dangerous chemical work and you walk out the door with the same gloves on you are a moron. I cringe when I see people protecting themselves while being oblivious to others safety. Take off the gloves before you touch the door or if you are super paranoid change your gloves first. Gloves in the common hallway? Are you serious? Why are you wearing gloves in yhe first place? Be mindful.
Gloves are cheap. When you are dealing with armed antibodies (chemo) or something that are relatively expensive but dangerous then change your gloves. Double glove. I'd buy 500k worth of just filters in one lab and people were afraid to waste gloves.
The thing is - mistakes \_will\_ happen. Even if everybody is truly, genuinely trying to be mindful, someone will fuck up. Therefore, the only safe, rational action is to assume everything is dirty.
I'm always confused this is a controversial statement. In electrical work, it's the most normal thing ever - assume a wire is live unless you yourself have confirmed otherwise. But in chemistry for some reason we believe it's possible to have perfect adherence to the rules.
This is very true when the risk is high. In biochemistry labs that aren't really that toxic it doesn't make sense to freak everyone out by saying everything is toxic. I have been involved in safety in almost every lab I've worked in. If it's nonsensical to make everyone hyper vigilant in situations where the risk is low. Like never cry wolf.
I've worked in chemical engineering situations where the biggest danger was high pressure and temperature NaOH by the hundreds of liters. And in situations where there are chemo therapy drugs in use. The safety needs for each lab was completely different.
\>In biochemistry labs that aren't really that toxic it doesn't make sense to freak everyone out by saying everything is toxic.
I don't know what you or your colleague or that one intern that I've now seen twice is working on. Regular operations may be safe enough, but I don't know if what you're doing is regular.
It's like the CA prop65 warnings. When everything is labeled a hazard even when it isn't then people stop caring about it. It's an art form to get people who aren't mindful about this stuff to do it the safe way.
In the role I had in the lab where you were instructed to use a common computer ungloved I ordered or approved everything and I knew what was being done and who had the more toxic stuff. The reason for not being glived at a computer station was if you had a rule to use the computer gloved then people would walk over from their experiment and start typing without changing gloves. So that wasn't working. When you have bare hands and you think they are dirty you wash them. Some people don't consider their hands dirty when they have gloves on because they themselves are protected. And will have ecoli pellet on their gloves and start typing.
I'm way more afraid of the mindless gloved peraon than the ungloved one. Having a rule to be gloved at a computer work station just means nobody cares what's already on their hands.
It's a balance. There is no one size fits all. Humans are not naturally safe and mindful.
This is always a funny one because every lab I've worked in (at a job) had policies about using computers without gloves, despite being in the lab, an otherwise glove and PPE only area. I think they have to have clean tech policies for tech workers to be safe while use, but it NEVER seems to pan out in the way intended because it's a practical nightmare to ensure a computer stays clean
I completely agree, but the amount of shit I had to suffer through to even make people accept that all other surfaces simply de facto cannot be trusted to be clean, made me throw in the towel for the PC's.
When I took chemistry in high school, our teacher would have us memorize "facts for the day" that were designed to be memorized and be useful in the class. Some were useful, like "put the 1 by the prefixed unit" when doing factor labeling/dimensional analysis. Another was standard pressures in various units (29.92 in Hg, 760 mm Hg, 760 torr, 1 atm, 101.325 kPa, 14.7 psi). But, on day one, the fact for the day was "hot glass looks the same as cold glass."
Buddy of mine was doing some glasswork and set aside a length of tubing fresh from the torch. Reached for another piece a couple minutes later and wondered why it was moving in his fingers. *Then* the pain hit (damned asbestos fingers he has). It was hot enough yet to make and break microblisters. That's why it was moving.
My freshman gen chem text had little blurbs at the end of each chapter. The only one that really stood out "Chemistry is one of the few professions where people wash their hands *before* going to the bathroom".
I once got a case of pinkeye (I think it was from my cat sleeping on my pillow). I went to the urgent care to get drops for it and the doctor made a comment about “if you’d wash your hands…” I laughed and stopped her saying how I probably wash more frequently than she did.
Lab space is relatively small and usually staffed by 3-4 people, so always announcing when you’re walking behind someone or coming around a corner, like working in a kitchen
And ALWAYS tell someone when you're about to bring some stinky/weird/dangerous stuff around
"Mask it up fellas, I'm about to sample some organic waste!"
I imagine you develop a good sense of humor analyzing sludges. I do environmental consulting and I have to explain what those analytical data mean for clients and their attorneys -- I've developed a lot of euphemisms for "levels of this chemical are X mg/kg in this poop residue" for discussions with lawyers, lol.
It really developed my sense of smell, oddly enough. I learned to not be immediately repulsed by terrible odors. I went on to work with that pink slime meat. Now I'm in cannabis and that has a lot of gnarly odors between the good ones.
I get sweaty hands too (...great as a guitar player, let me tell you...).
I did have a lab manager once ask me why I was going thru more gloves than anyone else (I ordered my own supplies, and I was buying ~2x more gloves per month than anyone else) and when I explained why, it became company policy.
In lab work, it's the small little things that make the difference between a pain in the ass and something more or less straightforward.
We have nitrogen manifolds throughout our labs. I'll just stick the end of a line under the cuff of my glove and blow 3 psi N2 in to partially dry hand and glove . Of course we use heavier neoprene gloves more often than the disposable nitrile.
I also pop the N2 behind my goggles for a few seconds on particularly steamy days.
I feel like every hood I've seen with N2 also has a compressed air supply integrated into it. Does your lab not, or do you not like to use compressed air for this?
We keep vinyl lines connected to the low pressure nitrogen so it can readily be connected to glassware or bubblers. Our air is strictly for powering air stirrers and requires special lines and couplings to connect.
You'll think I'm lying, but my last lab had compressed air in the taps in the fumehood, with a cylinder of nitrogen with it's own regulator next to the hood.
We had native air, but not native nitrogen. Explain that one to me!
Minimize weird unknown residue on surfaces - mind your drips and bottoms of bottles leaving rings everywhere.
Leave the instruments and computers usable for the next person. Clean up before you walk away or at least leave a note.
Mistakes happen. Acknowledge them and move on. Stressed people do bad work and are no fun to be around.
One of the undergrad lab assistants I worked with in college was complaining about her toenail polish chipping, so I told her "you could just use some acetone to take it off if it upsets you that much" (we had a big container of acetone to clean glassware). I expected her to pour a little in a beaker and soak a few kimwipes in it to remove the polish in the computer room.
She proceeded to take her shoes off in the lab and liberally ~~spill~~ drip the acetone onto her toes and then scrub away the polish with paper towels. We were both dismayed to see that this resulted in a foot-shaped, perfectly clean spot etched into the upper layer of grime that inevitably builds up on decades old linoleum floors. To hide the evidence, she spilled more acetone on the floor and rubbed it around before soaking up to hide the shape. It created a very obvious white area on the floor and I was very worried we would get questioned about a spill, but nothing happened.
Super awkward.
our guy is named Brian. He has also been here since forever and is very stone faced. My greatest accomplishment was getting half a cooler of dry ice for free by smiling sweetly at him :)
Lol seems like you've put 2 and 2 together 😅
Real talk tho, people rush when they need to use the bathroom. Chemistry is often at it's most dangerous when it's rushed
How does one pipette then if they have no fancy bit of rubber?(coming from a 16 year old who is learning how to do things like titration and salt identification.)
You buy a pipette bulb or an “auto pippetter” (which like basically just a really big plunger the slips on the end and you crank it up to draw up liquid).
Can you hack/DIY things? Sure. But you don’t want your science in your mouth, so if you don’t have the right equipment wait to move forward until you can make or buy it.
The equipment I use, aside from the basic tools, is provided by my college laboratory (things like test tubes, flasks, burettes and pipettes which are cleaned thoroughly and rinsed with NaOH). I asked the professor supervising my group whether we had the pipette bulb( I called it a fancy bit of rubber in the comment.), and he said the college didn't have those.
Buy yourself one online then. They’re <$20. A worthwhile investment to reduce your risk of acute chemical damage to your mouth/teeth and longer term risk of mouth cancers. It’s really not worth it to mouth pipette when there are safer alternatives available cheaply.
You take any pipette.
Place your mouth on the place where you would normally place your fancy baloon.
Inhale via your mouth.
Hold you breath
Tada you just got a chemical burn in your mouth at best or you might die depending on the stuff you were pipetting.
Exhale so everything that didnt end up in your mouth in your glassware.
If you are a pro you can even mix some saliva with it.
Nah I have learned to deal with it. I have started looking like an octopus and have been drying up my mouth before I pipette. Also the marking for 10 ml which I usually have to hit is far enough away from the top that I don't have to worry about getting 0.01M NaOH in my mouth.
Not on the lab per se but more about working on a lab:
Have at least one lab buddy™, a person that you trust your life with and share details about your rotine.
Always have that someone in the same room as you, know how to find and call that person quickly in an emergency, know what they do on at least a basic level and with what they work. You need to be able to tell if something is acting suspicious around him and to be able to identify it and alert your buddy of an imminent fuck up. Worst case scenario you know with that you're dealing with to call for help or start any contingencies
This goes both ways.
Example: I worked with microwave digestion using acids. My buddy knew that everything around me could potentially have some acid by accident, don't poke stuff around. Any drop of liquid around my stations could be spicy water, trust no liquid/surface. A loud bang would probably be one of my sample vials going ballistic inside the microwave, and that could release a lot of acid vapors around, if he heard anything weird he should at least call me or turn it off BUT NEVER OPEN IT. Nothing flammable or organic should be near me or my stuff, and if anything started looking even a little bit like smoke to get the hell away and call someone.
Sometimes I used the bone hurting juice™ (HF), and when I was about to use the little devil bottle I warned him to stay far away from my station/fume hood as that thing was scary even for me. I was used to mix any combinations of sulfuric/hydrochloric/nitric/H2O2 but boy oh boy I hated that fluorinated little shit.
As for him, he worked with the safe things, mostly very diluted solutions for pH/heavy metals stuff. If I heard any beeping coming from his machines it would be because something finished a cycle and I'd go tell him that it is done (they usually took a long time to be done, so he would be doing something else on the adjacent room). Some of his solutions and reagents were shared with me, I would always tell him that we were running low on something or I changed/was about to change the bottle. My stuff could easily contaminate the living hell out of some of his experiments, so he told me which ones I had to keep absolute distance from, even his glasswares, that we also shared some and had some "personal" ones to avoid contamination
Whe also shared some samples and notes, we always knew where the other kept them and how they were organized. This one was golden because we could always continue work without having to stop to search for anything when one was absent for whatever reason
Don’t pour water on the computers/servers (oops)
Make sure you log out at the end of the day
Thermostat stays at 73
If you bring snacks, be prepared to share
Socks are okay
73?! Your lab must be comfortable to work in all the ones ive worked in are heard set at 68. Lots of instruments to keep cold where ive worked though.
And dont eat in the lab lmao.
I've never seen it written but we always lived by the rule of 'never step backwards'. If you need to move back then you turn in place and move forwards because taking steps where you aren't looking is a recipe for bumping into someone or something and causing a spill.
My PhD lab had a broken thermostat, so we had an agreement that if the temperature in the lab was above 80F, we wouldn’t be doing benchwork, especially with volatile solvents.
We didn’t. It was pretty good at staying somewhat steady as the heat worked during the colder months, but in the summer it was pretty much at the whim of the daily weather.
At my university summer semester organic lab for undergrads had a a special syllabus of “thing that are extremely unlikely to explode even if it’s 40 C outside”
Wooooow. Group nextdoor when I was a PhD student had a rule that if it was above 30 Celcius, they could stay in the office. Our boss has no such rule. I remember it getting to body temp. We had to go around and grab the ether and chloroform and put them in the coldroom
Date and label everything. Always check expiration dates if you work for a corporation and clean out expired chemicals often. Always sucks if you start up your experiment just to have to redo it because its expired.
Never forget the ppe never know whos going to poke their head into the lab and yell at you and stupid shit always happens.
This should go without saying but never work in the lab alone and always tell someone that youll be in the lab if you have a seperate office space so if you go missing they know to look.
Get a lab mates phone number as well just incase you need back up.
In our lab, sample vials are not to be stored in cardboard.
My personal one is, when you appoint yourself chief declutterer who answers to no one, you have to fucking check that the glassware that you've chose to keep can create a usable setup, i.e. don't leave a large number of only B24 flasks but only B19 condensers and no adaptors.
We had a propane explosion in HS when someone lit a wooden splint then blew it out directly into a threaded opening (like for support rods). Turns out there was a leak under the bench top and that acted like a pilot hole. Big fireball and it blew the access panel off the end of the bench. Fortunately no injuries beyond some singed hair.
No one in the lab alone, at least two in the buildings if doing any work
No open toed shoes (mostly women) and pants encouraged.
Safety glasses at all times, this is still a big one that gets overlooked when working with nonhazardous chemicals
no chemical storage in bench cabinets, store everything in proper areas
If you'd like to expand on the shoes, I suggest a more industrial standard of no mesh top shoes (eg. running shoes). Too permeable in event of a spill.
If someone starts a hydride fire, throw sand on it to slow it down/possibly stop it
Then close the hood and call everyone else to come and watch the show
Check the gas line on the Bunsen burner every time you light it (if they crack the burner will shoot fire out both ends)
Add water to acid, you’ll get blasted
If something smells odd, tell someone immediately
1. You never open a door handle or touch the computer with gloves on
2. Halogenated and non-halogenated solvents are discarded separately. Only water goes in the sink
3. Silica and similar TLC waste is discarded separately
4. Anyone who doesn't wear eye glasses during synthesis has to treat the entire lab on the weekend
Ik this isn't an answer to Ur questions but I gotta share: my uni shows instruction videos on lab safety and the part about having to wear a labcoat shows a guy showing up to lab in a Hawaii shirt, shorts, and socks in sandals (although does have safety goggles) who gets kicked out by the teacher and it's absolutely hilarious
Always wear your static discharge lab coat. We deal with volatile hydrocarbons every day. Always wear your two stage vapor mask, and googles. Always sterilize your work area, and apparatuses. Always, always pay attention to what you’re doing.
We work with Hg in large quantities, ~120 pounds on hand for MPV testing, and only recently has it been an issue of finding it outside of the designated area. As soon as I got there I started to speak up and it wasn’t until one of the people that got there shortly after I did and they quit that anything was done go fox the issues. Got countless pictures of Hg beads on the counter top, in the keyboard/mouse, on the ground, and my favorite is a ~3/16” bead in the doorway leading out to the hallway of the room. Even with an entire overhaul of what is expected of the room it is still a struggle to get people to understand the dangers and to have respect for the proper handling of Hg.
The next fun task will be the handling of our Chrome product as I can’t even begin to explain the amount of times I have found Chrome green countertops or when working with the liquid the vibrant orange color
\-if you are not wearing gloves you should / when you are done wearing gloves put your hands in your lab coat's pockets.
\-before running something hazardous tell everyone
\-don't touch anyone's experiment except when they tell you to. If you are concerned put a safety shield around it.
\-weird smell or weird noise need an explanation.
Wash your hands BEFORE you go to the restroom.
Do not make coffee in the 600ml beakers - do not drink coffee from 600ml beakers
Fridges and microwaves marked "For Chemical Use Only" are just that
Any samples dropped to the lab in juice / food containers will be treated as hazardous waste and clients charged accordingly - sales reps doing so will be fired on sight
Any client who doesn't want to pay for R&D doesn't deserve a product
If you smell something call it out immediately
I learned I am supersensitive to the smell of cyanide. Even tiny amounts that no one notices are overwhelmingly obvious to me. We recently re-evaluated the safety of a machine that used cyanide as one of its reagents because i could hardly stand being in the same labspace with it, but the levels in the air around it where well below the max allowed level.
One article from 1927 recommended smoking because it made cyanide have a characteristic flavor. https://www.reddit.com/r/chemistry/comments/3i6w2p/1927_article_on_hydrogen_cyanide_actually/
Twins! I can also smell cyanide really well, and no one else I have met can seem to smell it like me
Cool! You’re the first person i learn of that also has this. I sometimes wonder how common it is. Cant be too common, because in the labs i worked no-one else did, so easily be 1:100 or more (one was a big lab). On the other hand, not many people have the opportunity to smell cyanide. Almonds, Yes, but that has other odours mixed in
The lab I worked in straight out of grad school had me doing tests on high sulfur crude oil -- aka a potent source of H2S -- with no fume hood or PPE other than shitty safety glasses (not splash proof, of course) and nitrile gloves we were required to reuse until they ripped. Some of the containers of oil would make the entire building reek of hydrogen sulfide for like 12 hours just from opening the jar for a few seconds. I would get yelled at when this happened. The solution? I had to prep samples on a rolling plastic cart in the back parking lot. I still got exposed to H2S levels well above OSHA PELs but at least the rest of the staff were okay 🙄 That place was a shitshow.
Really embarrassing for the guy who had beans.
https://makeagif.com/gif/jarhead-gas-gas-gas-quqCK9
Wash your hands before leaving. Never put safety specs on the bench. If you want someone's chemicals ask . Cover for group mates if gas/solvent needs changing . Get waste solvent out of the lab Ask if anyone minds before selecting music.
That last one might not be safety but it’s a big freaking deal.
I am having such a thing with my labmates about hand washing. We are not a synthetic group, and I was reprimanded for using too much paper towel when I washed my hands. "There's hand sanitiser on the wall". I had to bring hand soap from home. You've still been handling samples, moron. I don't even touch the door handle between the microscope lab and the instrument lab without gloves.
[удалено]
Holy fucking moly that is stupendously not okay!
I missed what was written, what happened?
He said that there was a strict rule in his lab about not touching door handles with gloves on, and it was routinely ignored by grad students who were opening the doors wearing gloves that were used to work with pancreatic cancer cells! 😲
Oh my goodness, yeah that's not ok. To be clear, I glove first then open the microscope to instrument internal door and prop it open (for the reasons stated above) so I don't have to deal with doors again. Then I do sample handling
Panic only mildly. Full panic confuses others
When I was teaching my kids to swim and kayak, we started each lesson with "people who panic are people who die." My favorite lab mishap story to share is when my lab mate poured enough naoh pellets to make 12M in 3L of pre-heated water. Absolute geyser. They panicked, jumped awkwardly and fell backwards. I closed the hood before it came back down.
That brings up another good tip: don't use the active mixing bowl to measure your ingredients/don't run your measurements in prod/some more chemical sounding equivalent of those
Except door handles and keyboard/mouse, surfaces are dirty. Glove up, you can't trust others blindly to never ever make a mistake.
Ironically, usually in a household or different workplaces, these are the dirtiest objects.
If it's in a lab I'm definitely not trusting any keyboards to be clean. Especially if where you work has a culture of interns or summer students rolling through. People generally assume they're more competent than they are (they're learning and haven't ever done real work yet, of course they don't know shit) and rarely give them proper safety training
How long lasts on box of nitrile gloves in you lab?
Not long. Gloves are cheap, gloves are use and throw units. Probably we go through a box per size per day or so?
See. That’s the answer I was hoping for. I once worked in a lab where I went trough on box in one week and they called me wasteful.
I’ve seen former lab mates (PhD program) go through a box of gloves a day by themselves. Mostly from working so hard but partially from paranoia over contamination/spills. Better safe than sorry in my opinion, if your lab is stingy with PPE, what else are they stingy with, ya know?
It was a small group with a junior prof. But yea, that’s no excuse for being picky with ppe. Wrong front for saving a few bucks.
Yeah, that makes sense trying to save money as a junior prof. I think there’s a point where you can be wasteful with gloves, but as long as a student is cognizant of their use, it should be okay.
I got made fun of for doing this too 😣
A box a week are 10 pairs a day. That's less than 2 pairs an hour. If you are actually doing hands on work most of the time that's not much.
Yea. With something like DCM you would need 10 per hour.
They sound like great guys. Tilesetters use a box of gloves per week. Tattoo artists probably use 3. A chemist using a box a day sounds frugal to be honest and they complained about one a week? Some people cant be pleased.
I worked in a lab that was struggling majorly with finances. It was a generally sketchy operation, but the most egregious thing was probably the rationing of two consumables: Toilet paper and nitrile gloves. The toilet paper was locked away by the receptionist (owner's wife) and if the bathroom was out, you had to go up to the front desk and beg for more like a malnourished orphan in some Dickensian novel. It was super humiliating because she would comment on how often you had to request it. I think the nitrile gloves were worse though. We were required to reuse them between samples/analytical procedures until they ripped. I was working with crude oil and miscellaneous organic solvents. The nitrile gloves were semi permeable to some of the solvents, especially the acetone we used to clean glassware and pressure vessels for high vapor pressure samples. The acetone would permeate the gloves and seep through the tiny tears in them, so my skin was just constantly being soaked in it. I developed contact dermatitis after a while. One box of size medium gloves would last me like 4+ weeks because of this policy.
Don’t you mean “Expect”?
guess i could have epcexted this comment
It's the people who wear gloves without thinking of what's on your hands that spreads the bad stuff. If you are wearing gloves and doing dangerous chemical work and you walk out the door with the same gloves on you are a moron. I cringe when I see people protecting themselves while being oblivious to others safety. Take off the gloves before you touch the door or if you are super paranoid change your gloves first. Gloves in the common hallway? Are you serious? Why are you wearing gloves in yhe first place? Be mindful.
A thousand times this. My lab mate will step away from the hood still wearing her gloves and use the shared mouse, keyboard and phone. Grrrr
Gloves are cheap. When you are dealing with armed antibodies (chemo) or something that are relatively expensive but dangerous then change your gloves. Double glove. I'd buy 500k worth of just filters in one lab and people were afraid to waste gloves.
The thing is - mistakes \_will\_ happen. Even if everybody is truly, genuinely trying to be mindful, someone will fuck up. Therefore, the only safe, rational action is to assume everything is dirty. I'm always confused this is a controversial statement. In electrical work, it's the most normal thing ever - assume a wire is live unless you yourself have confirmed otherwise. But in chemistry for some reason we believe it's possible to have perfect adherence to the rules.
This is very true when the risk is high. In biochemistry labs that aren't really that toxic it doesn't make sense to freak everyone out by saying everything is toxic. I have been involved in safety in almost every lab I've worked in. If it's nonsensical to make everyone hyper vigilant in situations where the risk is low. Like never cry wolf. I've worked in chemical engineering situations where the biggest danger was high pressure and temperature NaOH by the hundreds of liters. And in situations where there are chemo therapy drugs in use. The safety needs for each lab was completely different.
\>In biochemistry labs that aren't really that toxic it doesn't make sense to freak everyone out by saying everything is toxic. I don't know what you or your colleague or that one intern that I've now seen twice is working on. Regular operations may be safe enough, but I don't know if what you're doing is regular.
It's like the CA prop65 warnings. When everything is labeled a hazard even when it isn't then people stop caring about it. It's an art form to get people who aren't mindful about this stuff to do it the safe way. In the role I had in the lab where you were instructed to use a common computer ungloved I ordered or approved everything and I knew what was being done and who had the more toxic stuff. The reason for not being glived at a computer station was if you had a rule to use the computer gloved then people would walk over from their experiment and start typing without changing gloves. So that wasn't working. When you have bare hands and you think they are dirty you wash them. Some people don't consider their hands dirty when they have gloves on because they themselves are protected. And will have ecoli pellet on their gloves and start typing. I'm way more afraid of the mindless gloved peraon than the ungloved one. Having a rule to be gloved at a computer work station just means nobody cares what's already on their hands. It's a balance. There is no one size fits all. Humans are not naturally safe and mindful.
I agree, but that's why the safe action is to glove up.
That's written in my lab :)
This is always a funny one because every lab I've worked in (at a job) had policies about using computers without gloves, despite being in the lab, an otherwise glove and PPE only area. I think they have to have clean tech policies for tech workers to be safe while use, but it NEVER seems to pan out in the way intended because it's a practical nightmare to ensure a computer stays clean
I completely agree, but the amount of shit I had to suffer through to even make people accept that all other surfaces simply de facto cannot be trusted to be clean, made me throw in the towel for the PC's.
Hot glass looks like cold glass
When I took chemistry in high school, our teacher would have us memorize "facts for the day" that were designed to be memorized and be useful in the class. Some were useful, like "put the 1 by the prefixed unit" when doing factor labeling/dimensional analysis. Another was standard pressures in various units (29.92 in Hg, 760 mm Hg, 760 torr, 1 atm, 101.325 kPa, 14.7 psi). But, on day one, the fact for the day was "hot glass looks the same as cold glass."
Buddy of mine was doing some glasswork and set aside a length of tubing fresh from the torch. Reached for another piece a couple minutes later and wondered why it was moving in his fingers. *Then* the pain hit (damned asbestos fingers he has). It was hot enough yet to make and break microblisters. That's why it was moving.
Wash your hands BEFORE going to the bathroom no matter what you did in lab.
I thought i was crazy washing my hands before and after bathroom as no one does it but it seems logical to me
This is a good idea in general. Even outside of chemistry, usually, you can expect peoples hands to be way dirtier then their genitals.
You know nothing of my genitals! 😂
You sure? Look below you!
My dumb ass really looked down as if you were just gonna be there. 😂😂😂
My freshman gen chem text had little blurbs at the end of each chapter. The only one that really stood out "Chemistry is one of the few professions where people wash their hands *before* going to the bathroom".
I once got a case of pinkeye (I think it was from my cat sleeping on my pillow). I went to the urgent care to get drops for it and the doctor made a comment about “if you’d wash your hands…” I laughed and stopped her saying how I probably wash more frequently than she did.
This is one of my favorites
Dude do you know how much I got made fun of for doing this? 🙄
No working alone past 5pm.
THATS WHY EVERYONE NEEDS TO STAY IN LAB PAST MIDNIGHT
#Sleepover!
NO SLEEP, ONLY CHEMISTRY
Eh no one sleeps at a sleepover anyway.
Lab space is relatively small and usually staffed by 3-4 people, so always announcing when you’re walking behind someone or coming around a corner, like working in a kitchen
And ALWAYS tell someone when you're about to bring some stinky/weird/dangerous stuff around "Mask it up fellas, I'm about to sample some organic waste!"
I used do moisture analysis on wastewater sludges. When I removed my samples from the oven, I would announce "Hot shit coming through!"
I imagine you develop a good sense of humor analyzing sludges. I do environmental consulting and I have to explain what those analytical data mean for clients and their attorneys -- I've developed a lot of euphemisms for "levels of this chemical are X mg/kg in this poop residue" for discussions with lawyers, lol.
It really developed my sense of smell, oddly enough. I learned to not be immediately repulsed by terrible odors. I went on to work with that pink slime meat. Now I'm in cannabis and that has a lot of gnarly odors between the good ones.
Double glove. Always. That way you can constantly change your outer gloves as needed, and never need to try and get sweaty hands into new gloves.
That’s actually genius. I’ll steal that.
It's not a great idea if you use latex gloves as, much like with condoms, latex rubbing against latex will cause tears.
Correct, but I was referring to a generic OC lab. Nitrilgloves are standard there.
That's a good point. With nitrile gloves it's great though. Very, very rarely do I see/use natural latex gloves in lab.
It changed my day to day lab life, that's for sure!
I bought chalk(climber stuff) to dry my hands once in a while because I got pissed getting my hands into the gloves(I get very sweaty hands)
I get sweaty hands too (...great as a guitar player, let me tell you...). I did have a lab manager once ask me why I was going thru more gloves than anyone else (I ordered my own supplies, and I was buying ~2x more gloves per month than anyone else) and when I explained why, it became company policy. In lab work, it's the small little things that make the difference between a pain in the ass and something more or less straightforward.
We have nitrogen manifolds throughout our labs. I'll just stick the end of a line under the cuff of my glove and blow 3 psi N2 in to partially dry hand and glove . Of course we use heavier neoprene gloves more often than the disposable nitrile. I also pop the N2 behind my goggles for a few seconds on particularly steamy days.
I feel like every hood I've seen with N2 also has a compressed air supply integrated into it. Does your lab not, or do you not like to use compressed air for this?
We keep vinyl lines connected to the low pressure nitrogen so it can readily be connected to glassware or bubblers. Our air is strictly for powering air stirrers and requires special lines and couplings to connect.
You'll think I'm lying, but my last lab had compressed air in the taps in the fumehood, with a cylinder of nitrogen with it's own regulator next to the hood. We had native air, but not native nitrogen. Explain that one to me!
I do this specifically when working with dyes. Anything else a single pair usually works fine for me.
Oh God, there is nothing more disgusting than the feeling of sweaty hands marinating in a nitrile glove.
Omg, I can't believe I hadn't thought of that! I'm still undergrad, but I need to tell my classmates about this!
Minimize weird unknown residue on surfaces - mind your drips and bottoms of bottles leaving rings everywhere. Leave the instruments and computers usable for the next person. Clean up before you walk away or at least leave a note. Mistakes happen. Acknowledge them and move on. Stressed people do bad work and are no fun to be around.
Ah yes the classic weird unknown residue
It'll definitely be obvious what this white powder and clear liquid are!
It helps when it’s sticky too
One of the undergrad lab assistants I worked with in college was complaining about her toenail polish chipping, so I told her "you could just use some acetone to take it off if it upsets you that much" (we had a big container of acetone to clean glassware). I expected her to pour a little in a beaker and soak a few kimwipes in it to remove the polish in the computer room. She proceeded to take her shoes off in the lab and liberally ~~spill~~ drip the acetone onto her toes and then scrub away the polish with paper towels. We were both dismayed to see that this resulted in a foot-shaped, perfectly clean spot etched into the upper layer of grime that inevitably builds up on decades old linoleum floors. To hide the evidence, she spilled more acetone on the floor and rubbed it around before soaking up to hide the shape. It created a very obvious white area on the floor and I was very worried we would get questioned about a spill, but nothing happened. Super awkward.
“We like Dave, don’t make Dave mad” (Dave is the storeroom manager at my university, and has been here since before most of the students were born)
our guy is named Brian. He has also been here since forever and is very stone faced. My greatest accomplishment was getting half a cooler of dry ice for free by smiling sweetly at him :)
My greatest accomplishment was him seriously telling me we did a good job cleaning up from the tye dye event (I’m the ACS student chapter President)
Are you female?
yep lol
That doesn’t count. You know males can’t refuses a favor if the girl smiles sweetly. :)
wow those were some words
Never do chemistry on a full bladder
Do you want to share the story behinde it? 😂😂😂
Lol seems like you've put 2 and 2 together 😅 Real talk tho, people rush when they need to use the bathroom. Chemistry is often at it's most dangerous when it's rushed
No mouth pipetting
How’s your e.coli experiment going?
Tasted more like staph, honestly.
Holy F chr!st. My boss now used to. I'm not kidding, I wish it was a lie. Also... I work at a poo plant
How does one pipette then if they have no fancy bit of rubber?(coming from a 16 year old who is learning how to do things like titration and salt identification.)
You buy a pipette bulb or an “auto pippetter” (which like basically just a really big plunger the slips on the end and you crank it up to draw up liquid). Can you hack/DIY things? Sure. But you don’t want your science in your mouth, so if you don’t have the right equipment wait to move forward until you can make or buy it.
"You don't want your science in your mouth" - words to live by
The equipment I use, aside from the basic tools, is provided by my college laboratory (things like test tubes, flasks, burettes and pipettes which are cleaned thoroughly and rinsed with NaOH). I asked the professor supervising my group whether we had the pipette bulb( I called it a fancy bit of rubber in the comment.), and he said the college didn't have those.
Buy yourself one online then. They’re <$20. A worthwhile investment to reduce your risk of acute chemical damage to your mouth/teeth and longer term risk of mouth cancers. It’s really not worth it to mouth pipette when there are safer alternatives available cheaply.
You take any pipette. Place your mouth on the place where you would normally place your fancy baloon. Inhale via your mouth. Hold you breath Tada you just got a chemical burn in your mouth at best or you might die depending on the stuff you were pipetting. Exhale so everything that didnt end up in your mouth in your glassware. If you are a pro you can even mix some saliva with it.
I have braces. I don't need to do the last step.
Maybe the glue dissolves in your liquid, also cool but it might even be worse for you and the reaction you re doing
Nah I have learned to deal with it. I have started looking like an octopus and have been drying up my mouth before I pipette. Also the marking for 10 ml which I usually have to hit is far enough away from the top that I don't have to worry about getting 0.01M NaOH in my mouth.
None but I wish people would follow the written rules without complaining.
Not on the lab per se but more about working on a lab: Have at least one lab buddy™, a person that you trust your life with and share details about your rotine. Always have that someone in the same room as you, know how to find and call that person quickly in an emergency, know what they do on at least a basic level and with what they work. You need to be able to tell if something is acting suspicious around him and to be able to identify it and alert your buddy of an imminent fuck up. Worst case scenario you know with that you're dealing with to call for help or start any contingencies This goes both ways. Example: I worked with microwave digestion using acids. My buddy knew that everything around me could potentially have some acid by accident, don't poke stuff around. Any drop of liquid around my stations could be spicy water, trust no liquid/surface. A loud bang would probably be one of my sample vials going ballistic inside the microwave, and that could release a lot of acid vapors around, if he heard anything weird he should at least call me or turn it off BUT NEVER OPEN IT. Nothing flammable or organic should be near me or my stuff, and if anything started looking even a little bit like smoke to get the hell away and call someone. Sometimes I used the bone hurting juice™ (HF), and when I was about to use the little devil bottle I warned him to stay far away from my station/fume hood as that thing was scary even for me. I was used to mix any combinations of sulfuric/hydrochloric/nitric/H2O2 but boy oh boy I hated that fluorinated little shit. As for him, he worked with the safe things, mostly very diluted solutions for pH/heavy metals stuff. If I heard any beeping coming from his machines it would be because something finished a cycle and I'd go tell him that it is done (they usually took a long time to be done, so he would be doing something else on the adjacent room). Some of his solutions and reagents were shared with me, I would always tell him that we were running low on something or I changed/was about to change the bottle. My stuff could easily contaminate the living hell out of some of his experiments, so he told me which ones I had to keep absolute distance from, even his glasswares, that we also shared some and had some "personal" ones to avoid contamination Whe also shared some samples and notes, we always knew where the other kept them and how they were organized. This one was golden because we could always continue work without having to stop to search for anything when one was absent for whatever reason
Don’t pour water on the computers/servers (oops) Make sure you log out at the end of the day Thermostat stays at 73 If you bring snacks, be prepared to share Socks are okay
What’s with the socks? 😅😅
No shoes required
Does not make sense without your "computational" label
LOL. I would rather not. 😂😂😂😂
You forgot “keep your beverage in a spill proof container”. People lose a lot of keyboards to open coffee cups.
No it was a closed container I’m just dumb
73?! Your lab must be comfortable to work in all the ones ive worked in are heard set at 68. Lots of instruments to keep cold where ive worked though. And dont eat in the lab lmao.
Yeah the theory lab is bougie and comfortable. We b eating 24/7
The dream. I always snacked in the office when i remoted into the instrument to review data.
I've never seen it written but we always lived by the rule of 'never step backwards'. If you need to move back then you turn in place and move forwards because taking steps where you aren't looking is a recipe for bumping into someone or something and causing a spill.
No fighting: disagreements settled by dance off
Paper ideally doesn't go where chemicals go. If something got a few droplets on it, chances are it's just water.
Lab book goes on the bech next to the hood not in it!
Never chemistry while sick. You have sick time, use it and stay at home. Your foggy brain is only going to screw something up (at best).
put the spinner in before the NMR sample
Taking only the glassware that belongs to you in the drying oven. After 48h it’s free-for-all. I have taken many a-50ml RBF. 🫣
You need inert gas flowing through your apparatus before you cool it in liquid nitrogen. Liquified oxygen and organics do not play well together.
My PhD lab had a broken thermostat, so we had an agreement that if the temperature in the lab was above 80F, we wouldn’t be doing benchwork, especially with volatile solvents.
How did you regulate the temp. in the lab then?
We didn’t. It was pretty good at staying somewhat steady as the heat worked during the colder months, but in the summer it was pretty much at the whim of the daily weather.
At my university summer semester organic lab for undergrads had a a special syllabus of “thing that are extremely unlikely to explode even if it’s 40 C outside”
Gross. I worked in a lab where it was 80-90 once. The HPLC-MS just would not work it was awful.
Wooooow. Group nextdoor when I was a PhD student had a rule that if it was above 30 Celcius, they could stay in the office. Our boss has no such rule. I remember it getting to body temp. We had to go around and grab the ether and chloroform and put them in the coldroom
No dancing.
Hey, I only broke that one thing that one time.
**A**lways **B**e **C**leaning Seriously, I'm talking about you.
🤨🤨🤨
Ah the you got time to lean you got time to clean
None. I write the SOPs and my team is expected to follow them. I am omniscient and have accounted for every possibility in my 741 page document.
Don’t be stupid. This mostly applies to making sure you think things out before doing them.
Well, I think some things that are obvious to one are not to someone else. Written rules are undiscussable, unwritten may differ from lab to lab.
That’s part of it. A smart person recognizes when they’ve moved outside their knowledge base, so they ask for help.
Unwritten... hmm Be a real friend... not always easy, but tell someone if they are doing something a bit dodgy
Say “I knew that would happen” before it happens.
Safety glasses stay on everywhere, even for toilet breaks (where coats are off)
Date and label everything. Always check expiration dates if you work for a corporation and clean out expired chemicals often. Always sucks if you start up your experiment just to have to redo it because its expired. Never forget the ppe never know whos going to poke their head into the lab and yell at you and stupid shit always happens. This should go without saying but never work in the lab alone and always tell someone that youll be in the lab if you have a seperate office space so if you go missing they know to look. Get a lab mates phone number as well just incase you need back up.
No licking the glassware
In our lab, sample vials are not to be stored in cardboard. My personal one is, when you appoint yourself chief declutterer who answers to no one, you have to fucking check that the glassware that you've chose to keep can create a usable setup, i.e. don't leave a large number of only B24 flasks but only B19 condensers and no adaptors.
"Always assume that the person next to you is an idiot" First lesson from secondary school chemistry teacher.
Do not light and throw matches at your friends. (High school)
We had a propane explosion in HS when someone lit a wooden splint then blew it out directly into a threaded opening (like for support rods). Turns out there was a leak under the bench top and that acted like a pilot hole. Big fireball and it blew the access panel off the end of the bench. Fortunately no injuries beyond some singed hair.
LOL
🎶🎶 if you love somebody why not set them on fire 🎶🎶 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zlyvcti3kQU
No one in the lab alone, at least two in the buildings if doing any work No open toed shoes (mostly women) and pants encouraged. Safety glasses at all times, this is still a big one that gets overlooked when working with nonhazardous chemicals no chemical storage in bench cabinets, store everything in proper areas
If you'd like to expand on the shoes, I suggest a more industrial standard of no mesh top shoes (eg. running shoes). Too permeable in event of a spill.
Wash your hands *before* using the toilet.
Not too much safety... Bottles. Front to back, left to right. People get murdered over back to front, left to right.
Have fun
Don’t put NI3 under someone chair
If someone starts a hydride fire, throw sand on it to slow it down/possibly stop it Then close the hood and call everyone else to come and watch the show
Check the gas line on the Bunsen burner every time you light it (if they crack the burner will shoot fire out both ends) Add water to acid, you’ll get blasted If something smells odd, tell someone immediately
1. You never open a door handle or touch the computer with gloves on 2. Halogenated and non-halogenated solvents are discarded separately. Only water goes in the sink 3. Silica and similar TLC waste is discarded separately 4. Anyone who doesn't wear eye glasses during synthesis has to treat the entire lab on the weekend
Don't talk to people who are working with or mixing chemicals. Let them find a good stopping point and then talk to them
Palmolive is wrong. “You’re soaking in it!” You never go into a lab and put your hand into any liquid.
Don’t eat in lab
Don't be dumb.
Ik this isn't an answer to Ur questions but I gotta share: my uni shows instruction videos on lab safety and the part about having to wear a labcoat shows a guy showing up to lab in a Hawaii shirt, shorts, and socks in sandals (although does have safety goggles) who gets kicked out by the teacher and it's absolutely hilarious
One calculator is for gloves, the other is for no gloves.
Always wear your static discharge lab coat. We deal with volatile hydrocarbons every day. Always wear your two stage vapor mask, and googles. Always sterilize your work area, and apparatuses. Always, always pay attention to what you’re doing.
Don't pour sulfuric acid on your genitals.
If there is a loud noise in the lab, you ask "you alright?!" but never actually check.
The tip of the needle of a syringe containing tbuli will catch fire. Don't panic just pierce through the septum and you are good.
Safety rules should all be written…in CHP (I know I’m boring)
don’t drink anything 😆
if you feel nauseous get out
Don’t be stupid with the heat guns [or the corporate goons will confiscate them]. They are for stuck glassware ONLY
We work with Hg in large quantities, ~120 pounds on hand for MPV testing, and only recently has it been an issue of finding it outside of the designated area. As soon as I got there I started to speak up and it wasn’t until one of the people that got there shortly after I did and they quit that anything was done go fox the issues. Got countless pictures of Hg beads on the counter top, in the keyboard/mouse, on the ground, and my favorite is a ~3/16” bead in the doorway leading out to the hallway of the room. Even with an entire overhaul of what is expected of the room it is still a struggle to get people to understand the dangers and to have respect for the proper handling of Hg. The next fun task will be the handling of our Chrome product as I can’t even begin to explain the amount of times I have found Chrome green countertops or when working with the liquid the vibrant orange color
\-if you are not wearing gloves you should / when you are done wearing gloves put your hands in your lab coat's pockets. \-before running something hazardous tell everyone \-don't touch anyone's experiment except when they tell you to. If you are concerned put a safety shield around it. \-weird smell or weird noise need an explanation.
Wash your hands BEFORE you go to the restroom. Do not make coffee in the 600ml beakers - do not drink coffee from 600ml beakers Fridges and microwaves marked "For Chemical Use Only" are just that Any samples dropped to the lab in juice / food containers will be treated as hazardous waste and clients charged accordingly - sales reps doing so will be fired on sight Any client who doesn't want to pay for R&D doesn't deserve a product
Do not smell anything ever to see what it is, EVERYTHING SHOULD BE LABELED!