From so simple a beginning…

If you are a chemist, there’s some things you would rather avoid. Making quantities of nitrogen triiodide is something that’s strongly discouraged for example, as I can tell from my own experience. When I was a bathroom chemist during my middle school days, I used to experience oodles of glee in dissolving my mother’s copper-containing safety pins in nitric acid and watching the resulting wisps of nitrogen dioxide float away in the small unventilated room with a single window. I kept up this activity for a long time, primarily because I wanted to make laughing gas- nitrous oxide. The trick as it turned out was very simple; use dilute instead of concentrated nitric acid with copper.

It was when I entered graduate school that I was startled to read in the Merck Index about the deadly properties of nitrogen dioxide. Apparently the gas shows no immediate effects, but one fine morning you can just fall to the ground and die of edema. In addition it can initially numb your nose, precluding further detection. Maybe the insidious brute has already shaved off a few years off my life. I won’t really know. The point is that lab work in chemistry is a deadly serious activity, even though its routine nature gradually makes it seem rather casual. It was dumb luck that my gungho bathroom explorations did not at least take out an eye.

A coterie of methods for careful use of lab reagents have developed over the years to handle such volatile beasts. One such method consists of carefully drawing out a highly toxic or flammable liquid from a bottle using a syringe whose needle is inserted into the bottle through an airtight rubber septum. Before you insert the needle, you insert another needle connected to a tube that delivers an inert gas- usually nitrogen or argon- through a cylinder. As the bottle fills up with this gas, positive pressure is developed that makes it easier for the liquid to enter your syringe.

But even this well-trodden technique used by hundreds of students can results in a disaster, as was tragically demonstrated a few days ago by the death of a 22-year old lab assistant who was trying to suction some tertiary-butyl lithium into a syringe. In the list of “things that you won’t work with”, this would probably figure high. It instantaneously ignites upon contact with air and almost nothing can put out the resulting fire. Unfortunately it’s a rather useful reagent that can do things that other regents won’t accomplish. Nobody knows what quantity of this hideous substance the assistant was siphoning out. She had even worn the all-important safety goggles and gloves, although not a lab coat. Somehow the lithium squirted out onto her arms and hands and instantly caught fire. Her sweater caught fire too. She did manage to get to a shower, but after two agonizing weeks, she is now dead. I think it must have been her sweater that spelt her doom and not the lithium itself.

But this incident demonstrates that no matter how much scientists might jest about lab procedures, they should please take them very seriously. The loss of a single student with all her life ahead of her is not remotely worth all the merry tales about daredevil reagent handling.

Link: Mitch