david wayne osedach:Universities need to crack down on laboratory safety. They are educating students not the other way around.
i remember applying for a job as a postdoc/research associate at a big famous lab in a big famous school, in the back when. part of the job was to be the lab safety officer, which they made clear meant you weren't to interfere with anybody, you were mostly just supposed to be the scapegoat who took the fall when anything bad happened in the lab. Which wasn't infrequent, either; i didn't take the job, but sure enough a few months later when i'm walking past the place there's this whole little footpath of acrylic squares taped to the hallway floor, commemorating the path which somebody took as they tracked radioactive phosphorus all the way from the lab to the cafeteria. New safety officer job opening up!
(radioactive phosphorus has a very short half life and it's safer to just let it decay rather than try to clean it up; but somewhat paradoxically to the layman, it's so "hot" that you can't shield the radioactivity with lead or some such, you need something gentler, i.e. plastic. kind of like hiding from a mortar round behind a wall of sandbags, rather than a brick wall. <link>, thus periodic appearances of little temporary walkways made of acrylic in the hallways outside of genetics labs)
