Safety is something that everyone who handles chemical substances must come to grips with. That’s pretty obvious. It is possible to structure prudent handling practices into policies that control how people come into contact or proximity with chemicals. While I can’t speak for the rest of the world, in the US and EU virtually all of academia and industry have rules that govern the use of personal protective equipment (PPE) and hazardous material storage.
As a group, I have known chemists to span the range of chemical aversion from compulsive chemophobia to stuntman fearlessness. Most chemists are in the middle ground in regard to what toxicological or energetic hazards they’ll unleash at arms length behind the sash.
But there is risk and there is perceived risk and the difference can be quite large. Research laboratories are places where we try to achieve understanding about the unknown. Material hazards may not be readily apparent in advance of an experiment. We all have our sensibilities about what’s hazardous- call it “intuition” or just “experience”- but in reality most workers need to get an occasional recalibration. Our perception of a given risk can be spot on, overly conservative, or overly lax.
Institutions eventually have to put boundaries on the definition of acceptable risk. In innovative industry, companies want employees to try new things. Being overly conservative with risk can lead to time consuming procedural gymnastics that accomplish only delay. Being overly lax with risk can lead to the loss of life and facilities. The necessary administrative skill is to encourage safe innovation.
Researchers have physical hazards to contend with. Managers must dodge administrative hazards that can blow a project out of the water. Reseachers operate within the bounds of physical law. Managers have the fundamental forces of economics, politics, and CYA (cover your a**) in addition to physics.
In candid moments, R&D chemists may admit that much of research seems to entail the discovery of new failure modes. The broad search of reaction space can lead the researcher into patches of higher risk activity. It is quite possible to blunder into energetic hazards or unwittingly generate highly toxic moieties that you were heretofore unaware of. The abstracts from a SciFinder search don’t always offer notification of such hazards, especially if you are making new chemical compounds.
I know more than a few reasonable chemists who work for companies that have attempted to extract all risk of R&D scale incidents. All experiments have to be planned and approved by some overseeing body. Any incident involving a fire or spill is subject to an investigation and disciplinary action is meted out based on the in-house definition of negligence. Large publically-owned commodity producers seem to be the most onerous in this regard. (This is my opinion and the reader is free to take exception).
As is not untypical of large irritable mammals, Th’ Gaussling doesn’t automatically welcome visits by the safety goonsquad. One of my many festering conceits is that I write procedures, I don’t follow them. Unfortunately, this is a card that you can play once or twice at most. The best strategy for long term employment is to stay off the safety radar screen. If you have to take the dragon out for a walk, have your route planned and for gawds sake, keep it on the leash.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
Uncle Al was dinged by a Tiger Team for not wearing polycarbonate safety goggles over didymium clip-ons over shatterpoof PC eyeglasses while butt-sealing dispo-pipettes onto trash test tubes to make polymer vacuum polymerization ampoules on the cheap. Go ahead, try working Kimax against Pyrex.
1) Call in a favor and obtain a gob of didymium glass. Deliver to the VP/R&D and request fabrication of prescription didymium safety goggles. That’s half-way to costing five figures, folks – they must break one fabricated pair of -10 dipoter plus fat astigmatism lenses to show safety requirements are met, then make another.
2)Order 100 polymerization ampoules from the local glassblower. $9.50 each plus tax – and cheap at that price.
Results: Didymium clip-ons over glasses without added goggles were declared in compliance. The Tiger Team visited elsewhere. Uncle Al has a souvenir polished half-gob of didymium glass. The optics guy had the other half. Fair is fair.
I used to make ampules out of disposible pipettes as well. In fact, I still have some crap from grad school in the late ’80’s sitting somewhere …? Hope it isn’t that picrate sample \;-)
I think there is a deep reservoir of criticism of safety culture (or, mania) out there, but folks are afaid to speak up. The nuclear industry is a glaring example of the cancerous growth of SOP’s. Criticizing safety culture is like attacking motherhood and apple pie. You can get the matter on the agenda, but no one will be there to second your motion when you do propose something.
Safety inspectors tend to find problems because that is their job. Fortunately, some are more pragmatic than others.
Safety is a good profession for a control freak. Usually they are given considerable authority in the exercise of their trade. Few are willing to get into a fully involved pissing match with them. Management will rarely back an opponent of safety people owing to the enchantment with CYA and “policy”.
Has anyone noticed that most safety officers aren’t engineers or chemists? The person who I saw that caused the most problems was a former airconditioning repair person. He had no real aptitude for understanding any of the risks involved in the enterprise, and just put up roadblocks in everyone’s way rather than making them safer.
Hi John, I’ve seen that too. You can end up having to live with someone elses risk aversion. To be a right proper safety person, apparently you have to know vast tracts of the CFR and be able promulgate the code. Or, at least your supposed to be able to. Mostly it comes down to SOP’s and documentation to protect the company from liability.
I’m not for exposing “innocent” workers to hazards in the work place. But technically competent people should have a bit of latitude to practice their art unmolested by the nanny state or corporation. Even if it means that willing participants take chances that a bunch of nattering fussbudgets might not approve of.
There are arenas of endeavor that require a few people to do some chancy things. A few weeks ago I saw a fellow hanging from a helicopter working on powerlines. Imagine the signoffs he had to have to to the deed.
What bugs me the most of safety and other regulatory people is that they have presumption on their side no matter what. They can state that something is unsafe and YOU have to prove that it is not. They are under no such burden of proof.