As media continue to cover the tragic case surrounding the death of a research lab assistant following a 2008 accident in a UCLA’s chemistry lab, Dave Finster, Wittenberg professor of chemistry and the college’s chemical hygiene officer, is working diligently to ensure that lab accidents of any kind never happen again.
“Thirty-five years ago, it’s hard to remember how little safety was taught,” Finster said. “Fortunately, in the chemistry community over time, there has been a heightened sense of safety.”
That change in thinking, one could argue, stems from Finster’s own advocacy efforts, which earned Wittenberg the 2012 NIOSH/CHAS College and University Health and Safety Award for the most comprehensive laboratory safety program in undergraduate higher education. The recognition places the university alongside Princeton University, Wellesley College, MIT and Williams College, which previously earned the award.
To assist in teaching lab safety within higher education, Finster recently partnered with a national expert in lab safety, Robert Hill, who has worked with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for about three decades as a chemist and safety officer. Together, Hill and Finster co-authored a textbook titled Laboratory Safety for Chemistry Students.
The book provides a more pro-active approach to lab safety and includes key RAMP reminders at the end of each of the 70 sections of the book.
“RAMP stands for Recognize the hazard, Assess the risk, Minimize the risk and Prepare for emergencies,” Finster explained.
Finster and Hill’s book has since been called the new “gold standard” in the area of chemical lab safety by Ralph Stuart, a leading safety expert at Cornell University, and it was named among 36 titles on the 2011 list of “Outstanding Academic Titles” published by Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
"We felt that writing a textbook about laboratory safety would provide an important resource for chemistry faculty as they educate their students about chemical safety and remove the common complaint, and excuse, that no resources are available," Finster said.
Uniquely designed to accompany students throughout their four-year undergraduate education and beyond, progressively teaching them the skills and knowledge they need to learn their science and stay safe while working in any lab, the book uses a principles-based approach as it treats lab safety as a distinct, essential discipline of chemistry.
"As students progress through the text, they'll learn about laboratory and chemical hazards, about routes of exposure, about ways to manage these hazards, and about handling common laboratory emergencies," according to the book. "Most importantly, they'll learn that it is possible to safely use hazardous chemicals in the laboratory by applying safety principles that prevent and minimize exposures.”
“We see the analysis of laboratory safety as part of the critical thinking that characterizes higher education,” Finster added. “This is not just memorizing rules.”
In addition to reinforcing and building safety knowledge and a culture of safety in the lab, the book also makes the teaching of lab safety easy because it’s convenient to integrate sections of the book into pre-lab discussions about safety topics that are related to the experiment being performed.
"The goal that Bob and I established several years ago has been realized: to write a not-too-expensive textbook that could be used in chemistry courses nationwide to enhance safety education of chemistry and other science students. We believe we've succeeded."Written By: Karen Gerboth ’93
Photos By: Erin Pence '04
