euziere ([info]euziere) wrote,
@ 2003-02-24 18:34:00
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Entry tags:humor

"Saccharin was discovered in 1879 when a research fellow at Johns Hopkins University found his bread extra sweet one night and figured that something from the lab must have followed him home. Incredibly, he set about to tasting nearly everything in his lab - and lived to find o-benzoic sulfimide - saccharin by any other name. Chance not only favors the trained mind, but in this case, it favored a man brave enough to lick everything in sight till he could trace the source of his discovery." -- The art of innovation, p. 150


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[info]inhumandecency
2003-02-24 03:50 pm UTC (link)
I like that story! But the guy's an absolute pansy compared to Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD. One day while working in the lab:
"I was forced to stop my work in the laboratory in the middle of the afternoon and to go home, as I was seized by a peculiar restlessness associated with a sensation of mild dizziness. On arriving home, I lay down and sank into a kind of drunkenness which was not unpleasant and which was characterized by extreme activity of imagination. As I lay in a dazed condition with my eyes closed (I experienced daylight as disagreeably bright) there surged upon me an uninterrupted stream of fantastic images of extraordinary plasticity and vividness and accompanied by an intense, kaleidoscope-like play of colors. This condition gradually passed off after about two hours."
. Now, most people would have dismissed such an experience, or become severely worried about their mental health. But Hofmann concluded that it must have come from accidental exposure to a chemical he was synthesizing, and shortly thereafter he went back and did it again. This demonstrates a truly weird level of curiosity and intellectual playfulness, considering that people who were unwittingly dosed with LSD (mostly in army experiments) before its properties were widely known reacted with panic. Hofmann not only absorbed the experience and treated it scientifically, he held on to it and remained fully associated with the cultural and psychological landslides it set off.

You don't have to condone psychedelic use to see that Hofmann is truly a model of the enlightened, Heinlein-esque scientist-practitioner.

-----

My secondary reaction to these stories is to wonder at just how much lab safety techniques must suck, and how little faith I have in the protocols I used as a chemistry undergrad to handle all those carcinogenic organic solvents.

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[info]queenofhalves
2003-02-24 07:27 pm UTC (link)
damn, we think alike. i immediately thought of hofmann too, though i had to ask john to remember his name.

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[info]euziere
2003-02-25 08:21 am UTC (link)
That is a better story. I didn't know he'd remained in touch with the various landslides. Good for him. (: I wonder whether the saccharine guy remained up with all the rat studies.

My dad was safety officer for his chemistry department for many years (may still be, I can't remember). I always thought he seemed overconcerned with safety (from what I saw of him at home), but perhaps not.

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[info]inhumandecency
2003-02-25 09:27 am UTC (link)
Effective lab safety is a complex social science. It requires balancing baroque official regulations with respect for the intelligence of the lab workers. Fear of lawsuits has caused chemical manufacturers to go severely overboard with warnings -- I've seen an MSDS for distilled water that says that if spilled it must be absorbed with kaolite and disposed of in a secure container, and that in case of contact the exposed skin must be rinsed for a minimum of five minutes under running water. Chemists are advised to use gloves and fume hoods for chemicals we all know aren't particularly dangerous, such as isopropyl alcohol. This creates an atmosphere in which we're inclined to ignore all warnings, the same way that kids who are taught that pot will destroy your brain don't pay much attention to warnings that meth will destroy your brain.

Kary Mullis also has a good story about a safety officer who put so many warning stickers on the fume hood that the chemists were in danger of hurting themselves because they couldn't see through it!

On the other hand, people need help remembering to be vigilant. The stories of air traffic controllers, security guards, and tanker captains remind us that it's easy to go on automatic pilot when everything goes well, and then get bitten by the one-in-a-million accident that violates our assumptions. Lab safety should be less about telling us things everyone already knows, and more about finding ways to remind people to pay attention and use their safety knowledge actively.

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[info]euziere
2003-02-25 08:23 pm UTC (link)
Yes. It's the ability/accessibility thing we talk about in Culture and Cognition, and also the restraining factor thing that I-can't-remember-who (Levin?) talks about, and the top message of most usability people. It's not teaching people what the right thing to do is; we know that. It's constructing situations so that when push comes to shove, it's easier for us to do the right thing than the wrong one. Everyone's dumb in the wrong situation.

On a related but tangential topic, the right thing for me to do would be to figure out the refrigerator rules so I could keep my lunch in the refrigerator at work. If the current rules were posted on the refrigerator door, I could plan ahead. But they're not, and they're not coherent enough for me to actually remember. I will probably give myself food poisoning one day from being dumb in this particular situation.

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