Important Research Wisdom

No BBotE and shipping talk today. When people ask how I got into safety work or how to improve the safety culture in their research labs (industry is much easier to fix), I like to share this wisdom from my undergraduate advisor:

“Working safely is not just something you do in addition to your research to keep the administration off your back; safe research is reproducible, high quality research. It is a mark of professionalism. When you walk into a lab that looks like Frankenstein’s, the quality of the research is likely to be, and certainly will be perceived to be, as erratic and irreproducible as a mad scientist’s. It’s a damn good thing journals don’t inspect labs before accepting submissions because very little would get published.” -Dr. Alfred Hochstaedter, UCSC, 1997

Fred was very famously a bull in the china shop who had a bad habit of destroying apparatus and making messes everywhere he went. He wasn’t a bad man breaking things out of carelessness, rather he’s just built on a large German scale that wasn’t particularly suited to fine and delicate work. He was much more at home out in the field, smashing rocks in a scientific manner, than he was in the lab reducing rocks to their component elements. But he also recognized this in himself and did his best to find people to work with him in the lab that understood the collective effort of science extends down all the way to keeping the floors clean and trash emptied.

A “fuck you, got mine” attitude and putting blinders on to the hazards around you or, worse, inconsiderately not thinking of the people who share your space doesn’t have much of a place in science. Really, it doesn’t have much of place anywhere. Do you want your name to be cursed by the people that come after us for leaving behind a legacy of space and gear that can’t be used? The feeble excuse of “When I got my space, I had to clean it up from my predecessor’s work with my start up money” is just perpetuating abuse and calling it a rite of passage.

So, if you needed a New Year’s resolution may I suggest the Happy Camper Rule: clean as you go, take good notes to tell those who follow where you’ve been, and leave your space better than you found it for others to build on.