Are you happy to eat genetically modified foods? What about your friends and colleagues? Do the GM pros outweigh the cons?

I asked a few contacts for some answers by way of building up to a more formal response to those kinds of questions that will be published soon in the International Journal of Biotechnology (IJBT, 2008, 10, 240-259).

Plant geneticist Dennis Lee, Director of Research at mAbGen, in Houston, Texas, suggests that GM crops have several significant advantages. “Total cost per acre can actually be significantly less for GM crops,” he says. This is particularly true for crop species, such as maize, that have been modified to produce natural toxins that fend off insect pests or protect the crop from the herbicides need to keep weed growth at a minimum. However, he points out that, “In practice, this is often not the case - farmers tend to err on the side of caution and continue to use significant amounts of pesticides and herbicides.”

That said, crops can also be modified to grow in substandard conditions, such as strains of tubers grown in Kenya that are capable of surviving both drought conditions and high-salt soils. “Obviously, this is beneficial to yield - you can actually get some food out of places where you previously could not,” adds Lee. In addition, it could be possible to modify some crops to have greater nutritional content, such as the so-called “golden rice” project by Ingo Potrykus then at the Institute of Plant Sciences of the ETH Zurich.

One of the biggest perceived problems regarding GM crops is the possible contamination of other species. What if
herbicide-resistant
genes could
jump into weed speciesWhat if herbicide-resistant genes could jump into weed species, for instance? Lee points out that this putative problem can be overcome by using terminator technology to jumping genes. “However, in doing so, it creates a different problem,” Lee adds, namely that farmers must buy seed from the agbiotech company each year rather than save seed for planting.” One might say that this is an exploitative industry focused purely on maximizing profits, but at the same time it solves a serious technical problem that has been seen as one of the biggest stumbling blocks to the acceptance of GM crops.

Jeff Chatterton, a Risk and Crisis Communications Consultant at Checkmate Public Affairs, in Ottawa, points out that the pros are well documented: increased yield per acre, ease of use and perhaps, some day, increased ‘consumer level’ benefits such as higher nutritional values. But, echoes others’ comments on the hidden con of farmers the world over potentially being locked into the agbiotech company’s seed and having no recourse to produce their own from one year to the next.

“As traditional family farms are increasingly moving towards “Roundup Ready” corn or soybeans, you’re increasingly seeing a change in the business model of farming,” he says. “Rather than ‘family farms’ using traditional farming practices, agricultural operations are increasingly becoming factory farms.” It might be said that the emergence of factory farms is occurring outside the realm of GM crops, but with pressure being applied to produce more and more crops for non-food purposes, including, biofuels, unique polymers, and other products, the notion of a factory farm that doesn’t even feed us could become an increasing reality.

Lee also mentions an intriguing irony regarding the public perception of risk-benefits concerning GM crops and that is that the toxins produced by modified Bt maize is exactly the same toxin produced by the natural soil microbe Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) itself and this is same Bt toxin that so-called “organic” farmers are usually allowed to use instead of “synthetic” pesticides.

Information Technology and Services Professional Bill Nigh of Bluenog, based in New York, provides perspective as a lay person. “We’ve been engaged in genetic manipulation for a long time now,” he says, “but it was limited by the technology at hand. With recombinant DNA it’s a remarkably more vast
field of
play and a
whole new ball gameWith recombinant DNA it’s a remarkably more vast field of play and a whole new ball game.” He stresses that his main concern regarding GM crops is that, “We seem to be just smart enough to make drastic breakthroughs and inventions, and are driven by the dynamics of the marketplace and ego to produce a lot of new things quickly. However our systems of governance, oversight and coordination are not mature enough to work through the implications of those new things in a timely fashion, especially the unforeseen synergies the breakthroughs can unleash.”

All that said, an international team has now investigated the various issues and has assessed the public’s Willingness to Accept (WTA) GM foods based on experimental auctions carried out in France, UK, and USA. Lead author of the IJBT paper Wallace Yee now at the University of Liverpool, worked, while at Reading University, with colleagues in various disciplines, from agricultural and food to business and economics in Italy, New Zealand, UK and US to explore perceptions of risk and benefits, moral concerns and attitudes to the environment and technology.

“Trust in information provided by industry proved to be the most important determinant of risk/benefit perceptions,” the researchers conclude, “willingness to accept followed general attitudes to the environment and technology.” They also found that educational level and age could also enhance perceived benefits and lower perceived risks of GM foods. “Our research suggests that trust-building by industry would be the most effective approach to enhancing the acceptance of GM foodstrust-building by industry would be the most effective approach to enhancing the acceptance of GM foods,” the team says.

“If the industry could educate people that GM technology does not pose any threat to the environment, but provides benefits to society as a whole and consumers as individuals, the attitudes of the public towards GM in food production would be favourable, and in turn increase their willingness to accept,” they conclude.

Computing professional Paul Boddie of Oslo, Norway, coming at the issue of GM crops from an indirect angle provides an allusion to computer programming that seems quite pertinent and was originally attributed to Brian Kernighan, which Boddie suggests readily transfers to other disciplines including genetic engineering: “Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you are as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?”

A post from David Bradley Science Writer

Genetic Manipulation

The May issue of my Spotlight column over on the Intute site is now online, this month featuring:

Flush with nanoparticles - What happens to carbon-based nanoparticles when they enter groundwater? Can municipal water supplies filter them out? And, if they cannot will they cause health problems? These are crucial questions that need answers now, as nanotechnology grows. Now, a new study by Kurt Pennell, of the Georgia Institute of Technology, and colleagues, suggests that subtle differences in the solution properties of the water carrying such particles can determine their ultimate fate.

Ocean oxygen starvation - Oxygen-poor regions of tropical oceans are expanding as the oceans warm, limiting the areas in which predatory fishes and other marine organisms can live or enter in search of food, according to a major ongoing marine exploratory project. The phenomenon could cut overall marine biodiversity.

The Collaborative Research Centre programme - Climate: Biogeochemistry Interactions in the Tropical Ocean - funded by the German Research Foundation is working in close cooperation with the University of Kiel, and researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego.

Carbon balls to the dinosaurs - Palaeontologists presume that an asteroid impact led to such enormous and widespread environmental upheaval that it wiped out the dinosaurs and thousands of other species when it struck the Earth. Now, researchers from Italy, New Zealand, UK, and USA suggests that the impact force was so great that it would have liquefied carbon in the planet’s crust and sprayed tiny airborne carbon beads into the atmosphere in unimaginable quantities.

You can check out the Spotlight archives via the Sciencebase recent scientific discoveries page.

A post from David Bradley Science Writer

Balls to the Dinosaurs, Oceanic Oxygen, and a Nano Flush

Anyway, Matthew immediately followed up my comment with a defence of using freshly drawn water for making a cuppa. He’s a man after my own heart. I’ve done this once or twice in the past and it exemplifies precisely how blogs are if nothing else a dialogue (please don’t prove me wrong by not commenting on this post…)

I’d better qualify my boiling/reboiling comment on his blog. Chemically speaking the difference between starting with freshly drawn water each time will be a simple matter of formation of insoluble calcium and magnesium salts. With freshly drawnn water you’re adding new metal ions, which will effectively add to your limescale. However, the de-hardening of hard water by heating is not a perfect process so some will be retained in the beverage once you pour over tea leaves, but the actual balance depends on how soft or hard is your water supply in the first place.

However, now that I’ve had a glass or two of vino (at the time of writing), it has also occurred to me that there are lots of other, organic, components in fresh tapwater, such as humic acids, and organochlorine compounds (possibly even fluorine compounds depending on where you live). These will be presumably be degraded and/or boiled off with the first boil to a degree. In the second boiling it is more likely that you will get rid of all these flavoursome ingredients from the water. So, perhaps there is something in the use of fresh water for the best cuppa, but it’s marginal given that any flavours in the water will essentially be overwhelmed by the flavour of the tea itself. It’s like worrying about the sounds they leave out when compressing a music file into mp3 format.

Meanwhile, the origins of tea lie in an attempt at “storing” water in Asia, so legend goes, and to protect it from contamination by pathogens (namely cholera, although they didn’t know this as the agent at the time). The polyphenolics and other materials in tea infused into the water are to a degree antimicrobial, but perhaps more importantly the simple act of boiling kills of the microbes quickly and succinctly without any recourse to chemistry.

In the “West”, the equivalent solution to the great clean water problem was the addition of fermenting fruits and the subsequent production of wine or beer depending on the region. It’s thought to explain why westerners have evolved an enzyme to break down alcohol and its metabolites whereas some Asians lack this enzyme system.

Given the choice between a freshly brewed cuppa, I know which I prefer, especially at this time of the evening…now where’s that corkscrew?

A post from David Bradley Science Writer

Teatime

How does one measure the worth of the science base? From the scientists’ perspective it is their bread and butter, or low-fat spread and rye biscuit, perhaps, in some cases. From industry’s standpoint, it is occasionally a source of interesting and potentially money-spinning ideas. Sometimes, it sits in its ivory tower and, to the public, it is the root of all those media scare stories. At worst, the science base is perceived as a huge drain on taxpayers’ money, especially when the popular press gets hold of ’spiders on cannabis’ and the ’scum on your tea’ as the lead science stories for the year!

For the government though, which more often than not is providing the funds for basic research, the science base is crucial to all kinds of endeavours: wealth creation, the development of fundamental science into practical technology, the demolition of those ivory towers and the mixing of scientists with the great industrial unwashed through collaboration. As such, governments try to ensure that the science they fund is accountable - to government, to its sponsors and to society and the public as a whole.

But, I come back to my first question. How does one measure the impact of basic research on society? If one went begging for funding for a new area in chemistry with no practical applications anywhere in sight, funding would likely be meagre. It can be dressed up, of course, natural product chemistry almost always has the potential for novel medicinally active compounds while even the most esoteric supramolecular chemistry could be the nanotechnology breakthrough we have been waiting for. You’ve seen and maybe even written the applications yourself. On the other hand, take any piece of genetics with the potential to cure some likely disease and the cash will usually roll in, at least relatively speaking.

So, what does
quality
mean when
applied to scientific researchwhat does quality mean when applied to scientific research? Was the discovery of the fullerenes quality science? Well, yes it obviously was in that it stirred up the chemistry and other communities and generated mass appeal for a subject that gets rather less of an airing in a positive light than certain other sciences. Fullerenes also provided some of the scientists involved with a Nobel Prize so someone in Sweden must have liked it.

But, if we were to apply any kind of standard criteria of usefulness to society we would be hard pushed to give it the highest score except only as a demonstration that fundamental science can still excite. After all, have you seen any real applications yet? I touched on the potential for medicinal fullerenes early in the fullerene rising star and it is probably unfair to single them out for accountability, especially as ultimately they inspired the carbon nanotubes. You might say that they are simply one of many examples of science as art. They allow us to visualise the world in a new way, they are beautiful - chemically, mathematically, physically.

The pressure is now on scientists to face up to some imposing questions as government-mandated requirements begin to come into effect. [This has become a moot point in the UK since this article was first aired, given funding cuts for big, esoteric science projects]. Efforts to make science accountable come with a massive burden of controversy and are hindered by the almost impossible task of measuring creative activities such as research. Added to this, accountability requires increasing levels of administration especially at times of formal assessment for the scientists themselves.

The careers of most scientists hinge on these assessments, in more ways than one, as the pressure on faculty pushes them in directions they may not naturally go, producing research papers just to satisfy the assessment process, for instance. This coupled with a general drive to bring science to the public - through media initiatives - and so demonstrate to people why science is important and why their money should be spent on it - just adds to the pressure.

However, despite the marketing-style talk of stakeholders, and the close industrial analogues, the shareholders, basic scientific research is not about customers and churning out identical components on a production line. There are usually no targets and no truly viable and encompassing methods to assess the quality of any part of the scientific endeavour. Ironically, this means the end-of-year bonus is something on which most scientists miss out, regardless of their successes. Science is the art, technology makes it pay, but some art is fundamental or avant garde and some finds its way on to advertising hoardings. Which do you prefer, fine art or glossy brochure?

By forcing basic science to become accountable in terms of product and efficiency there is the possibility that creativity and autonomy will be stifled. If done right, accountability can strengthen the relationship between research and societyaccountability can strengthen the relationship between research and society.

Measuring the socioeconomic benefits from specific scientific investments is tough. Basic research gets embodied in society’s collective skills, putatively taking us many more directions than we would otherwise have headed. As such, it can have a future impact on society at entirely unpredictable points in time. Who knows where that pioneering fullerene chemistry will have taken us by the end of this century?

Sir Harry Kroto, co-discoverer of the fullerenes told me in an interview once that, “Scientists are undervalued by a society that does not understand how outstanding someone has to be to become a full-time researcher.” Maybe the measure of science is in its beauty rather than its assessment scores.

A post from David Bradley Science Writer

Accounting for Research

Social engineering attacks, what used to be known as a confidence, or con, tricks, can only be defeated by potential victims taking a sceptical attitude to unsolicited approaches and requests for privileged information and resources. That is the message that arrives from European researchers.

Most of us have received probably dozens of phishing messages and emails from scammers on the African continent seeking to relieve us of our hard-earned cash. Apparently, these confidence tricksters are so persuasive that they succeed repeatedly in hustling funds even from those among us with a normally cynical outlook and awareness of the ways of the world.

On the increase too are cowboy construction outfits and hoax double-glazing sales staff who wrest the life savings from senior citizens and so-called boiler room fraudsters who present get-rich-quick schemes so persuasively that thousands of unwitting individuals lose money totalling millions of dollars each year.

Con artists and hustlers have
always
preyed on
greed and ignorancehustlers have always preyed on greed and ignorance. As the saying, goes a fool and their money are easily parted. However, the new generation of social engineers, are not necessarily plundering bank accounts with promises of riches untold, but are finding ways to infiltrate sensitive databases, accounts, and other resources, using time-honoured tricks and a few new sleights of hand.

Now, Jose Sarriegi of the Tecnun (University of Navarra), in San Sebastian, Spain, and Jose Gonzalez, currently in the department of Security and Quality and Organizations, at the University of Agder, Norway, have taken a look at the concept of social engineering, and stripped it down to the most abstract level (International Journal of System of Systems Engineering (2008, 1, 111-127)). Their research could lead to a shift in attitude that will arm even the least sceptical person with the necessary social tools to spot an attempt at social engineering and stave off the attack with diligence.

Fundamentally, the researchers explain, social engineering is an attempt to exploit a victimsocial engineering is an attempt to exploit a victim, whether an individual or organization, in order to steal an asset, money, data, or another resource or else to make some resource unavailable to legitimate users in a denial of service attack or in the extreme instigate some terrorist, or equally destructive, activity.

Of course, a social engineering attack may not amount to a single intrusion, it could involve layer upon layer of deceptions at different places and on different people and resources. The creation of a sophisticated back-story, access to less sensitive resources, and targeting of the ultimate goal is more likely to be a dynamic process. This, the researchers suggest, means that looking for “heaps of symptoms”, as might occur in attempting to detect someone breaking into a computer system, is no longer appropriate and a dynamic response to a dynamic attack is more necessary now than ever before.

Recognising the shifting patterns of an ongoing and ever-changing social engineering attack means better detection of problems low in the metaphorical radar, the team suggests. Better detection means improved efficacy of security controls. The best defence is then to build, layer-by-layer, feedback loops that can catch an intruder at any of many different stages rather than relying on a single front-line defence that might be defeated with a single blow.

A post from David Bradley Science Writer

A Wrench for Social Engineering

So this, week the first May issue is brought to you by the letter “F” with articles entitled: Fishing for amines, Fancy ants for arthritis, and Fixing chemotherapy. We also have, Rewiring brains therapeutically, Hybrid contact, and Boning up with Raman, but they don’t start with an “F” so required a separate sentence. Anyway…

Those fancy ants are perhaps not the first organism one would think to turn to for medical assistance, but researchers in Hong Kong and Japan have now used spectroscopy to study the chemical structures of various compounds extracted from Chinese medicinal ants that are thought to have anti-arthritic activity and be beneficial in treating hepatitis. There are lessons to be learned here, regarding the harvesting of traditional knowledge from folk medicine as well as yet another reason to try and conserve biodiversity the world over.

In Rewiring brains therapeutically, Edward Taub and colleagues at UAB use MRI scans to lay to rest once and for all the medical myth that the adult brain cannot grow new neurons. They show that a form of therapy, developed by Taub in the early 1990s for helping stroke patients recover use of paralysed limbs, so-called constraint induced (CI) therapy, really does induce a remodelling of the brain.

And in my Hybrid contact item, I discuss how early attempts to create protein-polymer hybrid materials often foundered because the mixed chemistry was simply not up to the task. Now, a UCB team has developed a new approach to hooking up natural proteins with synthetic polymers that could work with almost any protein and any polymer and could be used to develop new types of chemical sensor for medical diagnostics, quality control and environmental analysis. Related materials might also work as highly targeted drug-delivery systems, or even as the components of a future nanomachine.

A post from David Bradley Science Writer

Latest on Spectral Lines

A post from David Bradley Science Writer

RSS Awareness Day

I had rather hoped to kick off a lively debate on nanogoo and the media hype and parallel scare stories that have emerged since K Eric Drexler’s first proclamations about nanobots following on from Feynman’s famous room at the bottom lecture.

We’ve all read the grey goo headlines but we’ve also seen the hype regarding what nano has to offer. I often tell people it’s nothing special, just stuff that happens to be a few billionths of a metre in scale. If it’s not grey goo and it’s not the Drexlerian promise of a decade since, then where is modern nanoscience and when will it truly beecome nanotechnology?

I also asked the same question, in time-honoured fashion, of my LinkedIn contacts and have summarised responses here.

Liam Sutton, a Business Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield’s Polymer Centre and Technical Consultant at FaraPack Polymers had this to say: “Well, ‘nanoscience’ is such a broad area. After all, the term encompasses (as far as I understand it) anything physical with a characteristic length scale in the order of nanometres. So there are unpleasant stories to tell, like the discovery of penetration of the blood-brain barrier in rats by diesel smoke particles and, equally, there are billion-dollar nanotechnologies already out there like hard disk drives based on the giant magnetoresistance of synthetic nanoparticles.”

Suttons adds that the Sheffield answer to this sort of question is to direct people towards the Soft Machines blog of Richard Jones, who is Senior Strategic Advisor for Nanotechnology for the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. “It’s a very well written and authoritative source on the place and direction of nanoscience and technology,” Sutton says.

Tim Harper, a (nano)Technologies Entrepreneur, says that, “Most of the hype seems to have shifted to Cleanteach (along with most of the hypers) so the picture is becoming a lot clearer. The technology is now emerging in a number of areas although the majority of ‘nano’ is still nanoscience.” He points readers to a couple of white papers dealing with this on the Cientifica website. Harper is VP Business Development at PlayGen, Contributing Editor at The Real Nanotech Investor, and an Editorial Board member on NANO, published by World Scientific.

Philippe Bradley (no relation), an Oxford Uni student and founder of CivSpark.com, which is currently in development said: “Nanobiotechnology seems to be a very exciting field at the moment - because, behind the opaque name, it’s basically the science of beating nature at its own game. The body is full of amazing machines, nanoscience seeks to modify or emulate them - or create completely new machines that perform similar functions.”

“Nanotechnology, as far as theory goes for technology in the nano domain, exists very much today,” adds Santanu Ganguly, at Network Engineer at Swisscom. He points to quantum dots, electron spin dynamics, atomic clusters etc, which all lie under the nanoscience banner. “In terms of actually seeing the basic science become a ‘true’ technology, certain challenges still remain,” he adds, “most of which has to do with quantum interactions. The most promising part so far, from the point of view of applications and control over quantum interactions, seems to be quantum optics and manipulation of DNA.”

You can read other responses and follow additional resources via the LinkedIn answers page. What are your thoughts on nano hype and nano fears? Are we set to drown in nanogoo at some point in the future or will nano save the world? Surely, with all this paprika around it’s time for a pep talk…

A post from David Bradley Science Writer

Spicy Nanogoo

A friend of mine who worked in a biotech lab in Europe suffered a bout of what she thought was hayfever this year…snuffling and runny nose, itchy and sore eyes, the usual thing…except this was in February! She took a few days sick leave - it was that bad - and the symptoms subsided. Until she went back to work, where she started up again her earlier experiment - enzymatic chemical synthesis.

The devastating result was far worse than the snuffles she had suffered before his sick leave - her neck and face went bright scarlet, she started shaking and collapsed gasping for air. Anaphylactic shock was the diagnosis. She had to leave her job although the lab in question has implemented very strict protein-powder handling control systems, it’s the kind of accident that is almost impossible to predict and potentially more common than ever.

There are more unusual accidents. In December 1999, Emory University in Atlanta paid out $66,400 in fines and changed its procedures following the death two years earlier of primate researcher Elizabeth Griffin who contracted herpes B after being hit in the eye with fecal material, urine, or saliva while putting a rhesus monkey in a cage at the Yerkes Regional Primate Center.

A small-scale lab accident may involve someone mixing something and getting an unexpected exothermic or explosive reaction. The results often reach the community by word of mouth and through a note in the literature. For instance, Toshi Nagata of the Institute for Molecular Science, Okazaki, Japan, recently reported an accident while following a literature procedure published ten years ago. The chemical preparation involved synthesising a brominated bipyridine (Can. J. Chem. [69, 1117 (1991)] but instead of using standard quantities Nagata’s team had scaled it down to a tenth. While they were purifying the product, the 100 ml reaction flask exploded violently injuring one of the team in the arm. Nagata suspects that the problem lay in the formation of a peroxide by-product that would have been less concentrated on a larger scale. Nagata, wrote to Chemical & Engineering News, the flagship journal of the American Chemical Society, saying, “I do not intend to blame the authors for not describing the danger, but all chemists should be aware that this procedure could be dangerous.”

Guidelines and regulations are all well and good but what about insidious threats like this? Such incidents beggar the question of how might they be predicted. Should there be stricter guidelines for the way procedures are described in the literature? If so, what might they be and how would they be applied?

In 1995, a seemingly small-scale spill of hydrofluoric acid killed a technician in Australia. He died from multi-organ failure two weeks after the incident. Several factors contributed to his unfortunate death, according to the official report - he was alone, wearing only rubber gloves and sleeve protectors but nothing covering his lap, He was working in a crowded fume hood. The lab had no emergency shower, nor any calcium gluconate gel antidote available. The lessons may be obvious. But, accidents happen
to
even the
most experienced of scientistsaccidents happen to even the most experienced of scientists.

The slow death that befell Dartmouth chemist Karen Wetterhahn when she was exposed to a few drops of the highly toxic dimethylmercury in August 1996 took several months to kill her. Although Wetterhahn was wearing latex gloves this compound rapidly penetrated them and was absorbed through her skin. Ironically, she was at the time using dimethylmercury to examine the effects of toxic metals, such as chromium, on human cells. While, in October this year, Michal Wilgocki of the University of Wroclaw in Poland, a chemistry professor of thirty years experience, died after an explosion in his laboratory. Fire-fighters have suggested the accident may have happened while Wilgocki was drying unstable perchlorates.

So, who ensures that rules and regulations are adhered to in order to prevent accidents? Who makes sure the fume-cupboards and filters are up to a high enough standard and the reagent bottles are stored safely?

According to Jim Kaufman of the Laboratory Safety Institute (LSI), “There are three levels of responsibility. First is Management. Safety is their responsibility. Preventing accidents and injuries is their responsibility. If you manage others, you are responsible for their health and safety. You have to enforce the rules,” he explains. “Second is the Chemical Hygiene Officer and the lab’s safety committee. They are advisors and recommenders. Third is everyone. Everyone needs to be responsible for health and safety. Follow the rules, report accidents, injuries, and unsafe conditions.”

Organizations such as LSI - formerly the Laboratory Safety Workshop a not-for-profit center providing a focus for safety in science education, work, and our everyday lives. The LSI makes several assumptions about the level of knowledge of those “in the know”, they say “You know the hazards, you know the worst things that could happen, you know what to do and how to do it if they should happen, you know and use the prudent practices, protective facilities, and protective equipment needed to minimize the risks.” But, when the pressure is on, there can always be a proverbial roller-skate left on a stair to wreck the best of intentions.

With the ubiquity of the Internet, every lab now can have instant online access to its health and safety rules and guidelines. The Biological Safety Policy of Washington State University at Pullman is a typical example of the materials freely available. One aspect of safety that is often ignored is that while personal protective equipment (PPE), such as eye protection, lab coats and fume hoods are essentialeye protection, lab coats and fume hoods are essential, there is an alternative and that is to better design an experiment so that the hazards are controlled without resorting to PPE. If safer materials or processes are available or the whole experiment can be enclosed then that reduces risks.

There are numerous career opportunities in the field of safety. And quite a few glamorously named positions available, many of which are fairly synonymous job description minutiae aside. There are process/equipment safety engineers and technicians, laboratory safety officers, environmental protection agents, industrial (and chemical) hygienists, environmental, safety and health specialists, occupational health specialists and many others.

Most of these positions require at least a Bachelor’s degree in a technical subject, usually chemistry, biology, engineering, or physics, and it is, of course, possible to graduate in Industrial Hygiene or the related Occupational Safety too. One important aspect of many of these positions is that they usually require that the jobholder can physically wear appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE) and be capable of functioning while wearing respiratory protection. Which precludes some applicants on medical grounds.

An experienced industrial hygienist might work within an institute’s Occupational and Environmental Safety Office, for instance, and be responsible for coordinating support for the various laboratories, and ensuring employees, students, visitors, (patients, if they are working in a hospital), and the surrounding environment are protected.

Jason Worden has just completed his first year as a Laboratory Safety Technician at the University of Idaho, and has enjoyed the experience so far. “I work at a University in the Environmental Health & Safety Office,” he says, “My job includes surveying/inspecting labs on campus and testing and maintaining safety equipment. Another part of my job includes Radiation Safety duties as well as responding to Hazardous Material Emergencies and general office duties.”

There are important differences between the various job descriptions though, for instance, a safety engineer deals with protection of people and property from injury and damage investigating incidents. Whereas an industrial hygienist may be looking at protecting people from more insidious threats, injuries and illnesses that come about because of exposure to chemical agents or materials that may not be such an obvious hazard as a boiling vat of solvent outside a fume hood.

Jay Jamali is Environmental Health & Safety Director at Enviro Safetech Incorporated, a San Jose based company http://www.envirosafetech.com. So, what routes are there into safety? “I have a client that went from researcher to safety specialist in a biotech company,’ says Jamali. “In other cases the safety staff have no background in biotech.” He adds that the position of “safety officer” is usually dependent on size of an organization or institute. “Smaller organizations assign safety to multiple site personnel,” he explains, “some doing chemical hygiene plan, same radiation safety, some bloodborne pathogen safety, some laser safety, some doing the personal protective equipment and some the lab safety.” On the other hand, outside contractors, such as Enviro Safetech, can take on the entire safety support operation on an as needed basis.

Bill Paletski of the Pennsylvania Technical Assistance Program (PENNTAP) points out that “flexibility and diversification is your key to beginning a career and improving it in the field of safety.” He suggests that without, belittling education, “Degree after Degree will not help�getting your feet wet is a good start.”

Many countries have regional safety departments that also inspect laboratories while every university should have a safety officer or section. Companies are bound by law to ensure the
safety of
their staff and
visitors to their labsCompanies are bound by law to ensure the safety of their staff and visitors to their labs. Pay with a government agency, such as OSHA or EPA, is generally not as high as with a permanent position within an organization but they do offer good experience and training, according to Jamali. On the whole though pay is usually commensurate with experience, degrees and initials.

“The work is very addictive,” Jamali enthuses, “and very few leave the field after they get in because it gets under your skin.” He adds, that, “The key to success is to be a generalist, specialize in one of the three [main] fields and be an expert in at least two topics in your specialty.”

There are many specific problems that have not previously been such a concern in lab safety. Bio and chemical terrorism. Post 9-11, safety issues have been brought into sharp relief. Although most institutions are carrying on essentially as normal, security will ultimately impact on working practices in laboratories around the world. According to a spokesperson for Cornell University, “We’re still discussing all of this at various levels and there aren’t any clear answers. The one place that’s definitely involved is the College of Veterinary Medicine, where research on anthrax has been ongoing for years.”

Merle Schuh is a chemist at a small college - Davidson in North Carolina. He reckons in terms of the safety of faculty and students, “We have not instituted any new security measures or management procedures as a result of the increased threat of terrorism. We have always been conscious of safety considerations and lab and building security, and our present activities and procedures are deemed adequate,” he told me. “Since we are a small college, most students and faculty recognize each other, and any strangers to the chemistry building and other science buildings during daylight hours would generally be noticed.”

Working down a mine or on the high-seas, one might anticipate a real sense of danger when applying for the job, it might even be one of the thrills of the chase, but perhaps with the exception of those delving into active volcanoes or deep beneath the waves most researchers do not actively seek out dangermost researchers do not actively seek out danger.

Instructors at colleges and universities have a duty to emphasize and teach safety to their students. Proper education leads to awareness of safety issues and self motivation for their personal safety and the protection of others. “By the time science students graduate,” says Schuh, “ideally their conscientiousness about safety issues should be as well developed as their skills in doing laboratory work.” These days, not even the smallest or most ill-equipped lab has an excuse for failing to do its best to keep its researchers safe. But, still, in real life there is no safety net.

A version of this feature article by David Bradley first appeared in his careers column on BioMedNet.

A post from David Bradley Science Writer

Incidents and Accidents