[Jay]

Ok, I will try to keep it short.

I recently graduated from uni as an organic chemist and started working in a spin-off a month ago, in an organic chemistry lab.

Firstly my question, what gloves should I wear when handling chloroform, acetonitrile, methanol and other oganic solvents? Price is an issue, but any suggestions would be welcome. Secondly, what about the lab coat and any other safety measures? We are using fumehoods with good ventilation power.

Oki, so I did a lot of research about the gloves myself and found Barrier gloves by Andell, which are really good, but they are so expensive. Does anyone know of any cheaper alternatives? Basically I need gloves that would last about 5 mins, so that I can take them off when I spill something.

Ok and my personal opinion on this matter, please correct me if I am wrong. It seems to me that not a lot of organic chemists are too bothered about safety. People dont bother with any sort of safety equipment or use the same nitrile gloves for a whole day (having used acetone several times during that time) or reuse gloves etc. Most of the chemists I have talked to, and I am not talking about some old chemists who didnt know anything about safety, I am talking about current post-docs and phd students from top-notch world universities, dont seem to think about safety and protection too much. Everyone just shrugs and sort of says things like people say about smoking.

[Jay]

For some reason I couldnt finish in one post, so heres the second half.

To me it seems that safety measures in organic chemistry labs are not high enough even today. Its strange because health is such an important issue nowadays. And heres where I ask you to correct me, cause maybe I have understood in incorrectly.

But first of all, there are all sorts of fumes in the lab, even with proper fumehoods. I have worked in 3 cutting edge labs and theres still solvent fumes etc in the air, cause solvents are mostly not stored under ventilation, but on desks. Solvents like acetonitrile and chloroform, for example? How can this be safe if acetonitrile is labelled as very toxic and chloroform is a potentially carcenogenic in humans, even by inhallation. Secondly, said solvents are used so casually in labs -- a splash here, a splash there, no-one cares. Shouldnt they be handled more stricktly? Basically to me it seems that chemists dont think that solvents too are very toxic, they are worried about other chemicals, but often neglect safety when using solvents. Another example, people use their bare hands to look at TLC plates at UVC 254 nm, which damages the DNA. Ok, its only a short period, but still bad, right? Sorry about the ranting, but your thoughts on this issue are very welcome, because maybe I am worried about nothing, but to me it seems that we havent quite reached the desired safety consciousness in organic chemistry labs?

Also, I know this is a sensitive topic, but I think its very good to talk about it. Thanks a lot!

[KritikalMass]

What else can you do other than wear the proper safety equipment, ensure there is plenty of ventilation, and read the MSDS for the chemicals you're working with? At my uni they stress safety. And it's alot safer now than what it used to be- you're not allowed to taste the stuff you're working on and generally not encouraged to go around inhaling it directly. Also, you know they used to use benzene like how we use acetone now.

[Jay]

Hey,

I know it's a lot safer than it used to be and it's really good that things have improved, but my question is: are we quite there  yet?

Everything you say about your lab applies to the labs I have worked in, yet how many people actually read MSDS data about chemicals they use?

I know about using benzene in the old days like we use acetone and people used to test things on themselves, which today is completely unacceptable by the general safety standards. But! Should we really use acetone like we use it today? Acetone MSDS says: "May be harmful by inhalation, ingestion or skin absorption. Irritant. Liquid may cause permanent eye damage (corneal clouding). Contact with skin may cause defatting, leading to irritation. Long-term exposure may cause liver damage. Typical TLV 750 ppm. Typical OEL 250 ppm." I wonder how many people have actually read this..

I know no-one likes to be heard that they do things wrongly, but I don't think there's much point on keeping things quiet when it comes to health and safety.

Many thanks,

Jay

[Jay]

Also, I am not saying people don't stress safety. There's safety talks etc and people listen to these, worry a bit and then go back to the labs and are like "whatever"..so I am more talking about organic chemists actually realising that safety should be first priority in labs.

[KritikalMass]

I understand where you are coming from. But think about it this way- most chemist are pretty independent minded and realist. They know the dangers are there and they deal with it everyday so there may be some desensitisizing going on, but for the most part they probably don't really care if something causes cancer. They are there for the science. They don't have time to read and pour over the MSDS every moment of their life because they are busy writing up grant proposals and analyzing data, etc. Consider say people that go skydiving- they know the risk and they do it anyway. If they get hurt they know what was at stake in the first place. Some people are risk takers, some aren't. Unless they are being reckless with peroxides or something along those lines then I don't see the issue. Maybe your place has low safety protocols and if that is the case then file an anonymous complaint with OSHA or suggest a safety committee. But my uni has high safety protocols- it is like "Can I get some dichloromethane to dissolve some Nylon 66 that is stuck on my watch glass?" and they will call a safety supervisor to come do it, all geared up, lol.

I do get you though, safety is important!

[Jay]

Hey

Thanks for the reply. So a question about solvents in your uni? DCM and chloroform say...how are they used? Like how do people actually use them, quite carelessly or with a lot of care?

Or do you have to sign anything etc when working with these solvents?

Many thanks! J xx

[KritikalMass]

Well like I said they freaked out when I asked to use some DCM to take off the Nylon 66. However my lab TA was pouring it into a squeeze bottle with no gloves or apron on and only had on normal safety glasses not goggles. So maybe your point is more valid than I thought. Maybe safety protocols are not being as stringently adhered to as I imagined them to be. Hmm, and to think about it one of the grad students caused an explosion in the lab a year ago because he was doing a distillation and peroxides were forming in a side rxn and they ended up exploding. He was in the hospital for a couple of days. And about 2 years ago there was a huge fire in one of the organic labs because they were using ether as a solvent and the undergrads were supposed to put the solution on a magnetic stirrer but one of them instead put it on a stirrer that also had the ability to act as a heat source and they turned on the heat instead of the stirrer. Now they do all distillations involving ether using steam.

The more I talk about it the more valid your point becomes! 

[Borek]

At some point down that road you spend so much time on safety issues that you have no time for the research.

Don't get me wrong - I am not AGAINST safety. But it has to be reasonable. Risks taken in the lab when using most solvents are much smaller than risks connected with bugee jumping, yet bungee is socially accepted, while smell of benzene is not. That's putting things on the head.

I will quote what I already posted last year on another forum, these are parts of a longer discussion, so they may seem a little bit off at times:

You can't move ahead without looses. General approach that everything can be done without any risk leads to absurds. Chemistry teachers have problems with finding experiments that will be not considered too dangerous. Test tubes are dangerous because you can cut your finger. That's ridiculous.

In fact it is not about loss of life, it is about throwing kid with a bath. We are getting paralysed thanks to our efforts to minimalize risks of every kind, real and imaginary. I have nothing against reasonable regulations that minimalize risks, but at some point they become absurd. For example when we start to require students to use gloves for handling 1M sodium chloride, but we have nothing against the same students engaged in wrestling or football. Somewhere on the road we have lost a balance.

Please stop asking me "How much would you give for" and "what's the price of". I don't know the answer to that question and I have never stated I know. What I am stating is that whether we like it or not there are many ways of calculating life worth, that are used in different places. Be it life insurance, be it health insurance, be it estimates of loses due to war or natural cataclysms. Just because they are not advertised us such doesn't mean they don't exist. They rarely deal with the worth of individuals, rather with some generalization and statistics, but you can always divide to get an average. And I am not going to play the game in which I am pointing you to different methodologies used in different places and you are going to tell "that's not the life worth, because they concentrate on their gains/losses/aims and so on". In all these cases this is life worth from different points of view. You don't have to agree with each of these points of view, but they all deal with the same thing. Life worth.

Also note that I am not pretending to know the answer to the question "how many lives can we afford to lose to keep research going?" It is rather that I am aware of the question and its implications, and I wonder if we can afford to pretend that the question doesn't exist. Things neglected have tendency to change from bad to worse.

Finally, it is not simply a thing of research vs price tag on life. It is a much broader problem. Can you win a war without loosing soldiers? Does it make sense to implement systems dealing with specific pollutants that cost billions a year and potentially save 1 person per decade? Does it make sense to implement medical procedures that are irrationally costly?

Death was always part of our lives, and it won't change in the foreseeable future. We are doing everything to hide it from our view and to pretend we can trick it. Does it make sense to trick ouserlves that we can trick the death spending billions of dollars? Wont it be easier to accept the death as inevitable part of our lives? Accept that we will be getting older and then one day we will make place for others? Accept that everyone has to die one day and while it is better to die later, some of us will die earlier?

Could be I have stated it before - I am not against reasonable regulations that minimize risks. But we have gained momentum into enforcing more and more restrictive regulations. We are probably already past the common reason level and it doesn't look like we are going to stop, avalanche is just starting to speed up. That's in the name of false assumption that we can trick the death.

[Jay]

Thanks for the posts. To be honest, I dont think we are already past the common reason level. I think there is still a lot to do. So, ok if researchers are so busy with science, then you can always hire technicians who are properly trained and do the lab work with extreme care and great safety measures. Cause essentially researchers values are ideas. Lab work can be done by people with proper technical and safety qualifications. Just a thought.

As for the question "How many lives can we afford to lose to keep reasearch going?", my answer would be none! We are living in the 21st century, a time of human rights etc. (lets not start a discussion about that. ) and a time when we can send rockets to the outer space. So clearly we are able to create really really safe labs, it's just that people don't seem to think about it. Just the simpliest things I pointed out in my previous posts. So to me it seems that the questions really is: "How many more lives do we need to lose in order to realise we can actually get the same results without losing them?"

Sorry, if I seem cynical, but I don't think that safety actually takes up that much of researchers time...well, not as much as coffee breaks anyway. All I am saying is that I think we need a better common understanding on safety measures. How much time does it take to keep solvents in fumehoods and use them with extreme care?
J xx

[Borek]

Don't forget additional safety means additional cost (technicians come in tens of k$ per year range ). At some level you have perfectly safe lab that is so costly to run, that you can only close it.

As for the question "How many lives can we afford to lose to keep reasearch going?", my answer would be none!

This is unrealistic. There is no progress without losses, no matter if by progress you mean moving in your car from point A to point B, or pushing borders of our knowledge. We easily accept risks involved in driving, but we don't accept them when it comes to lab work, which means we are applying different safety standards to different areas of life. No reasons for that.

[Jay]

Yes, true, additional safety comes at additional costs. If one major university employs say 20 highly qualified technicians, then the spending would be around 400k dollars a year, which is big, but surely affordable. Ok, the technicians was just an example. My main point was that we are just lacking proper safety training for organic chemists and hence proper understanding of safety. How many undergraduate courses really talk about safety?! I am talking about the simpliest work ethic. If people really understood that all the solvents etc are really quite dangerous, would they want to splash around with them etc? But it's just easier to ignore it and pretend that all is ok and not think about it, because no-one else is bothered.

And by no human losses I mean that this is what we should strive for. We can do things safely, it's just a matter of realising it and applying it. Of course there will be accidents etc, so there always will be risks, just like with driving as you say, but the driving/chemistry lab parallel is sort of the same as saying that firefighters and librarians should be at the same risk, otherwise we have double standards. If we can lower the risks in one area of life, then why not do it?

[DrCMS]

Acetone MSDS says: "May be harmful by inhalation, ingestion or skin absorption. Irritant. Liquid may cause permanent eye damage (corneal clouding). Contact with skin may cause defatting, leading to irritation. Long-term exposure may cause liver damage. Typical TLV 750 ppm. Typical OEL 250 ppm." I wonder how many people have actually read this..

OK what does this actually mean for using acetone then?

[408]

MSDS are one of the worst things to happen to chemical safety, when combined with the litigious nature of society today.  Because the writer of the MSDS must be worried about  getting sued if something goes wrong that he did not explicitly state in the MSDS, every single one reads as if the chemical were a chemical weapon.  The net effect of this is the treatment of benign compounds as if they were far more dangerous than they are, and the ones that one must be very careful with have such similar MSDS properties, that one is more careless.  Proper enlightened safety comes from full research on a compound, far beyond looking at a MSDS...

It is also noteworthy that acetone is a byproduct of biological reactions in vivo.

For example the below warning on several MSDSs:

1) Highly toxic if swallowed, inhaled or absorbed through the skin. Exposure to even small amounts may be fatal. Readily absorbed through the skin.

2)May be harmful by inhalation, ingestion or skin absorption. Irritant. Liquid may cause permanent eye damage (corneal clouding). Contact with skin may cause defatting, leading to irritation. Long-term exposure may cause liver damage. Typical TLV 750 ppm. Typical OEL 250 ppm.

3)This material is strongly corrosive and causes serious burns. Very harmful if swallowed. Lachrymator.

4) Poison. May be fatal if swallowed. Chronic exposure may lead to damage of CNS, liver, spleen, kindey or bone marrow. Respiratory irritant. Typical TLV/TWA 0.5 mg m-3

5) Toxic if swallowed, inhaled or absorbed through the skin. Reported as causing cancer in laboratory animals. Anticipated human carcinogen. May cause irreversible damage. Mutagen. Causes severe irritation. Corrosive.

6) This material is a known carcinogen. The risks of using it in the laboratory must be fully assessed before work begins. TLV 10 ppm. Short-term exposure may cause a variety of effects, including nausea, vomiting, dizziness, narcosis, reduction in blood pressure, CNS depression. Skin contact may lead to dermatitis. Long-term exposure may lead to irreversible effects. Severe eye irritant. Skin and respiratory irritant.

7) Harmful if swallowed, inhaled or absorbed through the skin. Very destructive of mucous membranes. May produce fatal aplastic anaemia and other blood disorders. Eye and respiratory irritant. May cause allergic skin reaction.

Now some of these seem worse than others, such as #1 (deservedly too!), but looking at 4,5,6,7 is this helpful at all in determining which are to be handled in which way?  Now one of those 4 requires much more stringent handling than the other 3, but you would not know which from the MSDS

1) sarin nerve gas
2)acetone
3)acetic acid
4) barium nitrate
5) hydrazine
6) benzene
7) potassium perchlorate

Which of the latter 6 (because 1 is obvious ) would you think one should take the most precautions working with, from looking at the MSDS?

[pantsboy]

yeah MSDS apply more to factory workers that are dealing with chemicals on the macroscale and refer to what would happen if say a whole barrrel of some chemical ruptured and leaked all over a worker.  They provide useful information and data about the chemicals you're working with but may often not be as applicable to lab chemists working with small amounts of reagents at a time that really have to worry about spilling a few drops or so on themselves.

The MSDS for acetone, as the previous poster mentioned, is a perfect example of how an MSDS sheet can make a chemical sound a lot more dangerous than it really is.  In reallity acetone is less toxic and safer than ethanol which a huge portion of america drinks regularily this doesn't mean it would be safe to go swimming in a tank of it though or in ethanol for that matter.

This in mind, I think the current standard level of safety being in taught in highschool and university labs across america is fine and as long as you know what you're working with and have been trained in proper lab techniques you should be fine.  In general, you shouldn't attempt something in the lab if you don't know what you're doing or what to expect.