Safety experts are cautiously optimistic new results may help support further cultural and institutional change to address poor laboratory practices in academia.
. Still, academic science has generally remained stubbornly blasé about lab safety. Some see it as directly at odds with getting work done in the lab.
a 2010 survey by the American Chemical Society found that 70% of faculty, 59% of professional staff, and 52% of graduate students work alone in laboratories “often” or “occasionally,”To investigate whether there is in fact such a trade-off between productivity and safety, the researchers looked into publication patterns before and after a tragedy that created a large-scale, drastic change in how people view and practice lab safety.
Amid those changes, publication productivity for 600 UCLA chemistry labs wasn’t affected, the authors of the new study found based on records from the Web of Science, a bibliographic database of scholarly articles. To control for universitywide factors that might have affected research output, the team looked at both experimental “wet” labs and computational “dry” labs, reasoning that dry labs wouldn’t be as affected by changes in safety policies.
The study could help build the case for increasing safety and academic labs, says chemical safety expert Frankie Wood-Black, division chair of engineering, physical science, and process technology at Northern Oklahoma College. “In industry settings, we heard these exact same arguments in the ’80s and early ’90s” regarding productivity, she says, but studies like this helped persuade industry executives to enact safety measurements that are now more stringent than those in academia.
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