Chemjobber

Via a report in the Salt Lake Tribune (by Courtney Tanner) and help from Twitter, this rather alarming report from the Utah State Legislature about an incident at the University of Utah:

A University of Utah Incident Demonstrates The Difference a Lab Coat Can Make 

In February 2018, an incident in the University of Utah’s Chemistry Department led to chemical burns for two lab personnel. This incident involved air-reactive chemicals that combust when exposed to air, which was the hazard that led to the 2008 death of a UCLA researcher. In this incident, the researcher conducting the experiment and their spotter, who had a fire extinguisher, each received burns. Figure 1.2 shows the lab coat and burns resulting from the accident.  

In this case, the researcher was wearing a flame-resistant lab coat or more serious injury could have occurred. Unfortunately, we observed and OEHS has reported repeatedly that lab coats in general are not being worn consistently.  

Unlike the incident at UCLA, two major differences were observed in the University of Utah’s incident report. First, the researcher was wearing the flame-resistant blue lab coat shown in Figure 1.2. As the figure shows, the air-reactive chemical left burn marks in the material. However, an incident report noted that the clothing and skin beneath the coat were unaffected. The second major difference was that a spotter was present to extinguish the chemical. Neither of these safety precautions were present in the UCLA tragedy. 

After the Chemistry Department’s Safety Committee reviewed the incident, the following improvements to this specific lab group’s safety practices were identified.

• Use Fire-Resistant Gloves: While the researcher’s nitrile gloves did not melt, second-degree burns were still incurred. Another research group in the Chemistry Department uses fire-resistant pilot gloves, which were recommended for future use when air-reactive chemicals are involved.
• Build Larger Margins of Safety into Procedures: The fire resulted when the plunger of the 5 mL syringe came out while drawing 4.6 mL of the chemical. A proposal to fill syringes only to 60 percent of capacity when working with air-reactive chemicals was developed, a level significantly lower than 92 percent of syringe capacity that caused this incident. 

Ten years ago today, Sheharbano (Sheri) Sangji died of her injuries sustained while running a reaction with tert-butyl lithium in the laboratory of Professor Patrick Harran at UCLA. My thoughts and prayers are with her friends and her family.

I am appalled by the opinions based on ignoring well-published facts. Jyllian Kemsley has done outstanding factual reporting of this entire story. Please go to the SAFETY ZONE and read the entire background before you develop and vocalize an opinion.

1. Sheri was an employee, NOT A STUDENT. Thus, Cal/OSHA had jurisdiction.
2. Sheri was hired to assist the lab in purchasing and installing Agilent instrumentation, with which she had extensive experience as an undergrad.
3. While she had little experience with organic synthesis, she asked for and was given by Prof. Harran a synthetic project to work on in addition to her instrumentation work.
4. She received no documented training of any type on handling tBuLi. Professor Harran did watch her handle an air-sensitive catalyst successfully, before turning her loose on the tBuLi project.
5. Professor Harran was in the building the day of the fire and had instructed her to perform a 3-fold scale-up of the reaction she had done in October. He was in his office at the time of the fire.

K. P. Jamison (September 26, 2018 2:37 PM) asked if any "modelling" was done regarding outcomes if other PPE had been worn. Yes, though until today it has never been discussed. During the investigation, with the actual medical records in hand, we considered how events might have played out if she had been wearing an FR lab coat as well as all cotton clothing and various other options. While skin burns likely would have been reduced, the pulmonary injuries likely would have been the same. We never definitively decided if an FR lab coat would have changed the ultimate outcome. 

Bottom line: The PI is the "Captain of the Ship" and is ultimately responsible for all events on the ship. As a long-retired PI, I say to anyone in that position, you are responsible for your people. Protect them as if they were your children and family.

I think my only potential quibble is to the extent to which it is true that American PIs are treated as "the captains of their ship" and "ultimately responsible" for the outcomes in their laboratories. As a ideal, I think it's a good one.

The extent to which, for example, the US Navy holds its ship captains responsible for events under their command and how "loss of confidence" means a constant stream (one a week? one a month?) of fired Navy ship captains - that's certainly not the case for US science academia. Rather than court-martial by UCLA prosecuting authorities, Professor Harran was defended to the utmost against the Los Angeles District Attorney by his institution, including the Regents of the University of California taking on much of the legal responsibility for what happened in the Harran laboratory. Quite a difference, there. 

Via Kim Christensen of the Los Angeles Times:

Any institution receiving grant monies from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) must now inform the agency if it finds that anyone funded by the grant proposal has committed sexual harassment. The policy will take effect after a 60-day public-comment period ends. 

Until now, “we haven’t had a requirement on universities to report a [harassment] finding or when they’ve put someone on administrative leave” during a harassment investigation, says France Córdova, the NSF director. “We didn’t have the channel to find out what’s at the end of an investigation.” 

The reporting requirement comes in the wake of numerous sexual-harassment scandals in the sciences. It is a rare move among US federal research agencies, which generally do not require grant recipients or their employers to disclose sexual-harassment allegations or findings.

Why did this happen? Well, surely the current cultural moment has something to do with it. There's also this:

Like other federal agencies, the NSF is under pressure from the US Congress to strengthen its response to sexual harassment. In January, the House of Representatives’ science committee asked the Government Accountability Office to look into sexual harassment involving federally funded researchers at agencies including the NSF, NASA, the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health. 

I think this is instructive to those who are interested in getting funding agencies to pursue academic lab safety as a priority. While professional societies and universities have their place in suggesting voluntary guidelines for safety practices, there's nothing quite like Congressional pressure to move items from policy proposal to policy. 

Eight years ago today, Sheharbano (Sheri) Sangji died of her injuries sustained while running a reaction with tert-butyl lithium in the laboratory of Professor Patrick Harran at UCLA. My thoughts and prayers are with her friends and her family.

Seven years ago today, Sheharbano (Sheri) Sangji died of her injuries sustained while running a reaction with tert-butyl lithium in the laboratory of Professor Patrick Harran at UCLA. My thoughts and prayers are with her friends and her family.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) today announced that its Section on Chemistry has voted not to move forward with the nomination of Patrick Harran as a Fellow, following re-review of his nomination. 

On December 18, the AAAS Council approved the Chemistry Section steering group’s request to conduct a complete re-evaluation of Dr. Harran’s nomination after it became apparent that an initial review of nomination materials had not included all relevant information. Members of the nomination reviewing committee recently became aware of a 2008 case involving the death of a technician in the UCLA laboratory of Dr. Harran. 

The AAAS Council Subcommittee on Fellows, which is empowered to review the nomination and election process, is also considering changes to the Fellow review process for subsequent nominations. 

In a tradition dating to 1874, election as a Fellow of AAAS—the world’s largest general scientific society—is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers that recognizes efforts to advance science or its applications. 

Under AAAS bylaws, Fellows are nominated either independently by three existing AAAS Fellows, as in Dr. Harran’s circumstance, or by the elected leadership of topical membership Sections. Following review by the relevant topical sections, Fellows are then ratified by elected members of the AAAS Council, without interference or influence by AAAS staff. Fellows are honored in an induction ceremony at the AAAS Annual Meeting.

Fascinating. 

...Harran’s attorney, Thomas O’Brien, declined to directly address the fellowship controversy. 

“Professor Harran has always taken full responsibility as supervisor of the laboratory in which this tragic accident occurred,” O’Brien said. “He remains committed to pushing for increased safety in academic laboratories as he continues his groundbreaking research.”

...UCLA officials said in a statement that Harran has “a well-deserved reputation as one of the most creative and influential synthetic organic chemists of his generation” and should receive the fellowship. 

“The December 2008 laboratory accident was a terrible tragedy and Prof. Harran and the Regents remain dedicated to improving lab safety and abiding by all the terms of their agreements with the District Attorney,” it said. “It is our belief, however, that the understandably strong feelings that surround this tragic accident should not negate Prof. Harran’s important work and this substantial honor.”

I think the adjectives and adverbs are doing yeoman's work in these statements.

A total of 347 scholars were selected this year; they will be honored Feb. 13, 2016, at the AAAS annual meeting in Washington, D.C. UCLA’s new fellows are: 

Patrick Harran 

Harran, UCLA’s Donald J. and Jane M. Cram Professor of Organic Chemistry, builds new chemical compounds in creative ways and uses those molecules to drive research in biology and medicine...

Over at The Safety Zone, Jyllian notes the Daily Bruin's reporting comments from AAAS' press office:

Ginger Pinholster, AAAS director in the office of public programs, said the AAAS fellow selection process is based strictly on scientific achievement. 

“(Selection as a fellow) doesn’t reflect behavior or other issues,” Pinholster said. 

Pinholster added the AAAS administrative members who oversaw the selection process for the fellowship were unaware of the charges against Harran.

I don't really buy the "we didn't know" defense, although stranger things have happened before. I think they simply judged it as "not relevant", which is... interesting, disappointing and a good demonstration of the hierarchies at work in academic science. Younger folks, take note.

(It would be interesting to know about the past and present of AAAS fellows; I presume there is the normal distribution of human failings spread amongst them.)

UPDATE: Courtesy of Jyllian Kemsley, the Sangji family responds, calling for the revoking of the fellowship. "We respectfully request that you refuse to honor the unsafe science conducted by an unethical scientist."

UPDATE 2 (201512110357p): AAAS director of the Office of Public Programs Ginger Pinholster tweets that there will be a statement on the Harran/AAAS fellowship next week.

My thoughts on Dr. Naveen Sangji's comments at ACS Boston got long enough that I decided to write a separate post about it.

The silent ivory tower: First, she is absolutely right that the academic chemistry community has closed ranks. There have been few prominent chemists who have directly criticized either UCLA or Professor Harran. (From an online perspective, it's especially silent.) I don't run in academic circles anymore (not that I really ever did), so it's hard to say what kind of conversations about Prof. Harran's or UCLA's culpability have taken place during group meetings and the like.

New details on the incident: I'd like to hear more details that Prof. Harran asked her to perform the tBuLi syringing without the appropriate equipment (what equipment would that be? Certainly one could unpack a cannula and a graduate cylinder.) Personally, I think it's more likely that Prof. Harran asked her to do the syringe transfers and that he never thought that anything bad could have taken place.

Her interactions with the ACS Board: I am curious to hear about her interactions with the ACS Board of Directors to see if they'd make a public statement. How would someone even begin to pressure the board to act? E-mail? I can't imagine that they ever would have. They seem to shy away from that sort of controversy.

The policy proposal: Dr. Sangji believes that the ACS should advocate for the NIH to include an evaluation of a PI's safety record on funding proposals. While I agree that funding is certainly the only true coercive power that the NIH has over the universities, I repeat the same criticism of this potential policy that I have long made (when it was brought up by Beryl Benderly, back in 2009): How is it possible to accurately judge a PI's safety record? How do you get accurate data? How could you possibly avoid the inevitable sweeping under the rug of near-misses and actual safety incidents in order for professors, postdocs and students to continue to get funding? If I was a graduate student that had an accident and I knew that going to the emergency department for stitches meant that I'd be jeopardizing the future funding of my PI and my coworkers, I'd be sewing cuts up myself to avoid the potential damage to my career.

Apart from my policy critique, I believe that Dr. Sangji has a fundamental misunderstanding of the ACS and its relationship to the academic community. It's an organization that derives most of its Society-wide funding from ACS Publications, a publishing house which gets its work product, for free, in raw form from the academic community and then charges those same academics for access to its journals. Why would ACS ever decide to jeopardize this relationship over what is (in the ACS headquarters' eyes, I suspect) an internal employee safety dispute of its chief customer?

If there is one thing that I have learned over the past 6 years of watching the American Chemical Society attempt to deal with the mess that is chemist employment in the United States, it is this: it does not have tremendous power. While I wish that it held power over the chemical industry, it does not. While I wish it held power over academic chemistry, it does not. In fact, I would say that the only actual power it holds is its ability to extract revenue from universities via its subscriptions.*

To be sure, the ACS is an influential organization. However, how much sway does it have with NIH? Who does Francis Collins listen to more? ACS or the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology? Can anyone point to a single example in the last 10 years where the ACS has had any effect on governmental action at the state or federal level? (Maybe the federal Sustainable Chemistry Research and Development Act of 2015?)

Here's my suggestion for how Dr. Sangji could achieve her goals:

• Influence Congress to pass a law mandating that graduate students are employees from an occupational safety perspective and 
• Get federal OSHA to place academic laboratory safety as one of its top enforcement priorities.

Pressing her sister's memory on each and every member of the American Chemical Society is tremendously important from a cultural perspective, but in this nation of laws, it's Congress that holds the true power.

*And this power may be declining over time!

‘We still await an outcry from university scientists at the loss of the life of a young scientist,’ she added. ‘Where are the letters from the award-winning researchers and Nobel laureates condemning the university and the principal investigator (PI) for the deliberate disregard of safety?’ 

Naveen went on to reveal new details about the case, relaying Sheri’s remarks in the hospital that Harran had asked her to perform large-scale experiments without appropriate equipment, which was packed away in boxes. ‘Sheri stated quite clearly at the burn centre that Patrick Harran had explicitly instructed her to carry out three transfers of 50 cc of t-butyl lithium using a 60 cc syringe,’ Naveen said. As for her sister’s failure to wear a lab coat during the fatal experiment, Naveen said she was likely never issued such equipment. 

In 2009, Naveen requested that the ACS Board make a public statement condemning Harran’s behaviour, which she claims includes destruction of evidence and refusal to make full disclosure. The organisation’s executive director and CEO at the time, Madeline Jacobs, declined to publicly comment on the matter. Naveen urged ACS’ current executive director and CEO, Thomas Connelly, to make such a statement, and go even further. 

Specifically, she wants Connelly to write an open letter to the head of the NIH, Francis Collins, advocating for that a PI’s safety record be considered in the agency’s peer review process. 

‘The ACS has tremendous power, and with that there is responsibility to protect the young scientist you hope to nurture,’ Naveen stated. ‘What the NIH adopts, other funding agencies will follow.’ She said that PIs are busy, and funding is chief among their priorities. ‘Tie funding and safety together, and change will happen overnight – future generations of scientists will be better protected than Sheri was,’ Naveen asserted.

More on this soon.  

Six years ago today, Sheharbano (Sheri) Sangji died of her injuries sustained while running a reaction with tert-butyl lithium in the laboratory of Professor Patrick Harran at UCLA. My thoughts and prayers are with her friends and her family.

Judge George G. Lomeli said in court that he had reviewed reports submitted by the DA’s office and determined that Harran is complying with all terms of the agreement. 

Lomeli set the next status check for May 21, 2015. 

In the June deal, Harran agreed to complete community service and pay a $10,000 fine. After five years, if Harran has complied with all terms of the agreement, the DA’s office will drop all charges. 

After the hearing, Deputy DA Craig W. Hum said that his office receives reports from Harran’s attorneys detailing what the chemist has done to comply with the agreement. Investigators for the DA’s office then verify the claims in the reports. 

The UCLA chemist has paid the $10,000 fine to the Grossman Burn Center. He also has developed and started teaching a chemistry course for South Central Scholars, a volunteer organization that helps prepare Los Angeles area high school students for college. In court, Thomas O’Brien, Harran’s attorney, said that the chemist had started his first several hours of nonteaching community service at the UCLA hospitals. Harran must complete 800 hours by the end of the five-year term of the agreement.

I'm appreciative that C&EN is staying on this case.  

After UCLA chemistry professor Patrick Harran walked out of court in June, his lawyers issued a news release hailing the "first-of-its-kind" deal that all but freed him from criminal liability in a 2008 lab fire that killed a staff researcher. 

The "deferred prosecution agreement" that allowed Harran to avoid pleading guilty or no-contest to any charge might have been a novel resolution, as his attorneys said.
But it certainly didn't come cheap. 

Top-tier law firms hired to defend him and the University of California against felony charges in the death of Sheharbano "Sheri" Sangji charged more than 7,700 billable hours and nearly $4.5 million in fees, according to documents obtained by The Times through a California Public Records Act request. 

Nearly five dozen defense attorneys, paralegals and others billed for work on the case, the records show. One attorney charged $792,000 in fees and at least four other lawyers billed more than $500,000 each — all for pretrial work....

...Sangji's sister, Naveen, has called the sanctions against Harran and UCLA "barely a slap on the wrist." She noted that previous safety violations in his lab were not corrected before her sister's death and that UCLA had ignored the "wake-up calls" of earlier accidents in other labs. 

On Wednesday, she decried the nearly $4.5 million in legal fees — enough to buy 86,000 lab coats. 

"Had UCLA spent even a tiny fraction of this money and effort on laboratory and chemical safety training and fire resistant gear … Sheri might still be with us today," she said. 

There's a lot to say about the Sangji case and I've still yet to say it (partially because I'm still formulating my thoughts about it.) It is remarkable to me how enthusiastically UCLA defended Professor Harran from these charges -- it would be fascinating to know if they've ever defended an employee in this manner before. I think the answer is "no". Deborah Blum cogently pointed out on Twitter that it was probably fighting the precedent more than anything else -- I think that's probably the case.

Nevertheless, a remarkable amount of money to be spent. Boy, I'm in the wrong business. 

As you might expect, the official statement from UCLA plays up the improvements in lab safety put into place in the wake of the accident and points to the creation of the UC Center for Laboratory Safety, which has been holding workshops and surveying lab workers on safety practices and attitudes. 

I’m afraid, however, judging from the immediate reaction I’ve seen at my own institution, that we have a long way to go. 

In particular, a number of science faculty (who are not chemists) seem to have been getting clear messages in the wake of “that UCLA prosecution” — they didn’t really know the details of the case, nor the names of the people involved — that our university would not be backing them up legally in the event of any safety mishap in the lab or the field. Basically, the rumblings from the higher administrative strata were: No matter how well you’ve prepared yourself, your students, your employees, no matter how many safety measures you’ve put into place, no matter what limitations you’re working with as far as equipment or facilities, if something goes wrong, it’s your [posterior]* on the line.

One of the very interesting aspects of the case is how vigorously UCLA and its entire administrative apparatus has defended Professor Harran. Nary a contrary leak nor a whispered rumor have made it into the press. But it isn't a surprise that other institutions are less excited about spending what must have been millions of dollars defending principal investigators from labor law violations. 

Here's Michael Torrice and Jyllian Kemsley's full story on last Friday's hearing in the #SheriSangji case. The most important part, in my opinion, is an explanation on the part of the Los Angeles District Attorney's office as to what they were thinking: (emphasis mine):

...The DA’s office didn’t negotiate a deal with Harran until after his preliminary hearing to ensure there was a public record of what happened in the accident, says head deputy DA Craig W. Hum. 

...As part of the community service mandated by the agreement, Harran must develop and teach an organic or general chemistry course for the South Central Scholars, a volunteer organization that helps prepare Los Angeles inner-city high school students for college and graduate school. 

The DA’s office worked with the organization to put together a project that would be “enough of a drain on Harran’s time and energy to be a significant punishment while giving a huge benefit to the organization,” Hum says. 

Harran must also complete 800 hours of community service in the UCLA hospital system. This service cannot involve teaching, and could include jobs such as delivering food to patients. “We wanted him to do something outside of his comfort zone,” Hum says. 

...Overall, Hum says he understands the Sangji family’s position that the agreement is inadequate. But he also thinks that the settlement is likely close to any sentence that Harran might have received had he been convicted. “There was no way that any judge was going to punish him by sending him to jail,” Hum says.

There are likely lots of policy reasons that someone convicted of labor law felonies would not be sentenced to prison (i.e. California criminal justice budgets are tight, and prison is ~reserved for violent offenders.*) Also, I'd be curious to know if judges are subject to the same prejudices that bloggers are: that "professors who make serious and irresponsible mistakes are too nice and of the wrong socio-economic status to go to prison."

UPDATE: An extra tidbit about Harran's potential teaching duties.

*Drug law offenders notwithstanding

PAUL HASTINGS OBTAINS FIRST-OF-ITS-KIND RESOLUTION IN UCLA CRIMINAL PROSECUTION 
Monday, June 23, 2014 

Los Angeles - Paul Hastings LLP, a leading global law firm, obtained a first-of-its-kind deferred prosecution agreement on behalf of firm client Dr. Patrick Harran, a UCLA biochemistry professor who faced four felony criminal counts arising out of a tragic laboratory accident on campus in 2008.  Under the terms of the Agreement, Professor Harran will devise and teach a summer chemistry course for underprivileged youth and perform other community service over a period of five years.  

Unlike standard deferred prosecution agreements, which require the accused to plead guilty or no contest to the charges before a probationary period begins, Professor Harran was not required to enter a plea to any criminal charge.  So long as no material safety violations occur in his laboratory during the course of his community service obligations, the charges against Professor Harran will be dismissed with prejudice. 

The case is believed to be the first-ever prosecution of a professor arising out of an incident in an academic laboratory; and the settlement highlights Paul Hastings innovative handling of the case...

Couldn't be more clear if they made themselves a trophy and threw a parade. Should be noted that this is a press release, so they're going to be triumphal, even if they got just an eighth of a loaf. (I'm pretty sure they got a lot more than that.)

Note that they say "the syringe she was using malfunctioned." That is an unsupported assertion. 

Jyllian Kemsley does a little mythbusting on the #SheriSangji case and has these concluding thoughts:

Why did C&EN put in the resources to follow this case so closely for so long? Because we believed that no one could properly learn from the incident unless they knew the details of what happened. I find it more than a little disturbing that people at UCLA–and apparently even lab safety officers at UCLA–do not know the correct details and try to write off the incident as someone who should have known better making poor choices behind her adviser’s back, alone at midnight on a holiday weekend. That’s not what happened. 

And while I’m at it, to those who think Harran was scapegoated for managing his lab the same as most other synthesis labs in the country: The appropriate response here is not to say, “Harran did the same as everyone else, what’s the big deal?” The appropriate response is to say, “Harran did the same as everyone else, and a young researcher DIED. What can we do to ensure that never, ever happens again?”

 Great questions. Read the whole thing.