-
Asked by anon-254469 on 14 May 2020.
-
Emma Daniels answered on 14 May 2020:
Hi Jenny! Thankfully I’ve never had a burn from a chemical. There are a lot of safety precautions in place in labs to help prevent this from happening. We must always wear long trousers and closed shows, a lab coat, gloves, safety goggles, and long hair must be tied back! I also do most of my work in closed vessels inside a fume hood, so I’m well protected from accidents.
-
-
Laura Devlin answered on 14 May 2020:
Hello! I have been very careful in the lab and I have not got any burns from chemicals. It is important that before starting the experiment and working with nasty chemicals healthy and safety assessments are undertaken to make sure we are wearing the correct things when handling these chemicals (i.e googles, gloves, lab coat, trousers), doing them in a safe environment (i.e fumehood) and that we have a procedure in place for accidents, which details the first aid plan and clean up protocol. Importantly we only use nasty chemicals if there are no other alternatives, and the experiment is necessary.
-
Leanne Milton-Harris answered on 14 May 2020:
Hi Jenny!
Thankfully no, we’re always extremely careful and wear PPE to protect us in the labs. I did once get to do some experiments using a chemical that is so reactive it catches fire on contact with air though! It’s called tertiary butyl lithium, and it’s very very flammable! But when we’re working with these dangerous chemicals, we keep them in a hood away from ourselves and we take extra care to stay safe!
-
Alex Holmes answered on 14 May 2020:
Hi! like everyone else has said, when working in a lab you have to wear protective equipment like goggles, lab coat, gloves and sometimes visors and working in fume hoods that suck anything dangerous away from you.
Even so, one time I did get burnt by a chemical – but it wasn’t anything more exciting than nitrogen, which makes up about 80% of the air we breathe! In the lab, we use liquid nitrogen (about -196 degrees!) to freeze things quickly and I had some spilt on my leg by accident. It was so cold it burnt me through my lab coat and jeans. Luckily it didn’t do any lasting damage, but we had to fill out a lot of health and safety forms reporting the accident.
-
Judith Sleeman answered on 14 May 2020:
Fortunately not: as with everyone else we have extensive safety procedures in place and use labcoats/gloves/goggles when needed. The worst burn I got was from UV light, rather than a chemical. I was cutting a band of DNA from a gel placed on a UV light box and didn’t notice there was a small gap between the sleeve of my labcoat and my glove. I ended up with a very sore patch of ‘sun-burn’ on the underside of my wrist that blistered quite badly. We use a blue light box now, instead of UV, which is much safer!
-
Eleanor Williams answered on 14 May 2020:
Thankfully not but one time I did manage to drop hydrochloric acid on my trousers (it somehow missed the labcoat I was wearing!) which burnt a very small hole through them. I also gave myself a minor freezer burn when I was sorting out the -80 freezer because I wasn’t wearing thick enough gloves and held onto some of the stuff inside it for too long while trying to find something I needed.
-
Alena Pance answered on 15 May 2020:
I used to ‘burn’ my warts with liquid nitrogen, which of course is extremely cold, so I was in fact freezing them. But the extreme cold ends up being very similar to a burn.
-
Sarah Montgomery answered on 21 May 2020:
I don’t think I’ve ever had a chemical burn, but I’ve definitely had a “burn” from a -80 freezer where we store cells! A normal freezer is at -20, and -80 is about the temperature of Antarctica in winter, so if you touch the inside of the freezer without wearing proper gloves then you can very easily get a cold burn. Unfortunately the insulated gloves we have are very thick so it can be difficult to dig out the sample you want, so sometimes we don’t bother putting them on, and this has predictable consequences…
Comments