Tuesday, May 18, 1999

A Laboratory-Safety Site Offers Advice and Training for Students, Researchers By JASON HUGHES While mixing chemicals, a lab technician inadvertently tips a pitcher-sized flask, sending the highly toxic concoction onto his arm and burning it badly. You are perched on a lab stool two tables away. What do you do? BOOKMARK: A laboratory-safety site explains how to avoid accidents, and how to handle the ones that can't be avoided. Well, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute wants to make sure that you know -- whether you're an institute employee, a college student in a lab course, or a professional researcher. The institute's Office of Laboratory Safety has created a World-Wide Web site, called Knowing How to Practice Safe Science, that explains safety procedures covering all kinds of situations that might occur in laboratories. In years past, the institute -- which employs some 3,000 researchers and students on more than 300 campuses -- has required its researchers to participate in laboratory-safety training that relied on two videotapes covering emergency-response methods and lab-safety procedures. Now the site will fulfill institute employees' annual safety-training requirement instead. "We were in need of something to improve the quality of our orientation for new employees in the way of laboratory safety," says W. Emmett Barkley, the director of the institute's Office of Laboratory Safety. To create the site, the institute teamed up with the Yale University Center for Advanced Instructional Media. The center built the site using content compiled by the institute's laboratory-safety office. "Knowing How to Practice Safe Science" takes users on an informative stroll through a well-equipped lab environment -- one where accidents can and do happen. The site covers such topics as handling human blood and the proper washing of laboratory glassware, and is sprinkled with pop quizzes. Start to finish, it takes most users about an hour. At the end, a 10-question test measures the user's awareness of the site's information. The site tells visitors their test results, but does not record them. Institute employees' results are retained and assessed by the laboratory-safety staff. So far, 300 institute employees -- from campus labs at Stanford and Yale Universities and from several institutions in the Boston area -- have completed the test. The remaining 2,700 institute employees are expected to have taken it by the end of the year, and Mr. Barkley believes more than 1,500 non-institute researchers will have done so as well. In its new incarnation, the training program is better serving the research staffs it is intended to help protect, Mr. Barkley says. "It reinforces safe practices that are relevant to the modern research laboratory," he says. "I think we need to continue to do that in order to insure that laboratory safety remains an integral part of one's experiences in the lab."