What we can learn from safety experts in other fields

Abstract

Nearly every chemist has some connection to a major safety incident. For me, I started graduate school at the California Institute of Technology a year after graduate student Ramsay Bittar was severely injured when a flask overpressurized and exploded during a synthesis procedure and a shard of glass severed an artery in his neck. Years later, a colleague in the field of bioinorganic chemistry, Dartmouth College professor Karen Wetterhahn, died of mercury poisoning after exposure to dimethylmercury in her lab. Her group was working on science close to mine, and I talked with her students about how to finish their research after her death. My connection to Sheri Sangji came when the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine asked me to chair a committee that would prepare a new report on chemical safety. The study was commissioned partly in response to Sangji’s death, and the academies had a novel