Why Scary Lab Accidents Happen

By Enrico Uva | September 10th 2012 02:00 AM

If a chemist has never been in a lab accident, he has been lucky. Of course luck is more likely to come to those whose mentors have learned from bad experiences and to those who have taken preventive measures seriously, despite their anal nature. Chemical reactions create products with behaviors that differ from those of the ingredients. That's what makes them intriguing, and it's also what makes them potentially dangerous. No matter how simple and controllable a reaction seems on paper, when it's carried out in real life, the exact conditions determine its rate. And when gases or acids acquire too much kinetic energy, no one wants eyes, lungs and flesh in their way.

As an adolescent I played with my chemicals more than my instructors did. Rarely did they carry out demonstrations while lecturing. Seldom did they deviate from the tight parameters of cookbook labs. So I unconsciously associated accidents with amateurs or with large scale industrial processes. But after a freshman year of chemistry, I got my first summer job in the lab after a metallurgical company did not rehire a chemistry student previously involved in a serious analytical lab accident.   (More.....)