This post may be a little weird, but I didn’t know how to title it. I want to talk about hazards in science and how they need to be handled. The key point I want to make is that science by its nature requires us to work with obscure and sometimes dangerous chemicals, but they shouldn’t be feared or avoided rather we should be aware of the dangers and use those chemicals with the proper precautions.

At a previous lab I worked at we had to wear special gloves when handling one of the chemicals we used. This chemical was toxic enough to seep through your skin, into your bones and begin leeching the calcium out of your bones, and because of its formulation it would also seep through normal lab gloves. So we wore special safety gloves when handling it and took special precautions: we always wore two pairs of gloves over each other and if we ever noticed we had spilled any we would immediately remove our gloves and start washing our hands. These precautions were the ones endorsed by the National Science Foundation and pretty much anyone who had ever worked with this chemical, and in all my time working with it we never had anyone harmed by it due to our safety precautions.

At one point a visiting scientist was working in our lab alongside me and his experiment required him to use this toxic chemical. I could tell he was nervous and unsure of himself, he was wearing two sets of gloves but didn’t want to touch the bottle in order to pour the chemical into his reaction vessel. He kept saying that he didn’t understand if he was doing it right and wanted to know if we had any special tool or instrument that would pour the chemical for him. Finally I simple took the bottle containing the chemical and poured it myself, saying to him “you don’t lack understanding, you just lack confidence.”

I think the overcautious approach that the visiting scientist had may have come from them misunderstanding the repeated emphasis on safety that we put out. Yes we work with dangerous chemicals and we have to be safe when using them, but overestimating a danger is as inaccurate as underestimating it, and proper lab safety doesn’t mean avoiding the lab work at all costs. We use these chemicals because we have to, they’re the only ones with the right properties to work in our experiments, and so any scientist needs to have the confidence and capability to use them himself. A healthy amount of precaution is good but if it makes you too scared to pick up a bottle then you’ve gone too far, you have to be able to read the scientific literature on a chemical and understand how dangerous it actually is so you can use it when you need it.

I know this post was a bit rambly, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about.