4 ms·

> At the risk of putting myself on a watchlist, They already know that, so They have an eye on certain kinds of labware, different precursors, and such. And The

> At the risk of putting myself on a watchlist, They already know that, so They have an eye on certain kinds of labware, different precursors, and such. And They already have antidotes to some of these poisons. Errm, maybe They Do. On the other hand, I used to work in an organic chemistry research lab, and at least within my ex university's context, we could basically order anything we wanted from the standard chemical suppliers without anyone batting an eyelid. Pre-signed but otherwise blank order forms were freely handed out, you just filled in what compounds you wanted and handed it over, two days later it arrived and you collected it from Stores. I personally ordered a compound for a reaction I was planning and it was only after it arrived - when I read the safety data sheet - that I realised just quite how toxic it was. I backed carefully away from that particular bottle, and left it in the fridge, still sealed. Then found another - safer - way to do the reaction instead...

dekhn 5y ago
Is that toxic bottle still sealed, in the fridge, after you've left the institution? I've had to deal with a few EHS situations like that.
- danuker 5y ago
  How did you deal with it? I would expect they don't take returns.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    You call your university's EHS department and tell them as much about what you know about the contents of the bottle (which may not be what is on the label). They seal off the lab, remove it, and using what they can determine about the contents, destroy it safely.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    The same thing that happens when someone quits. The people finding these things have the same skill sets and access to the same handling/disposal facilities as the people leaving these things so it's very much a "oh my former coworker forgot to/didn't have an opportunity to dispose of X before departing, I'll just do it myself in the same manner he would have". Furthermore, these people have lives, they go on vacation and cover each other. The institutional knowledge of how to handles dangerous organic things necessarily exists in the institutions that do so.
    - dekhn 5y ago
      No bench chemist should attempt to cleanup this stuff. Go to your university or company EHS, and if you don;'t have that, your city does. The history of chemistry is filled with responsible and intelligent organic chemists who nonetheless died terrible deaths. EHS has strategies to avoid this.
      - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        Humor us all and think another few steps ahead. And what's EHS gonna do? They're gonna CC the guy who's office is right beside yours because (surprise surprise) the departments and teams who's work results in them having weird nasty stuff buried in the back of the walk in fridge are the same people who know how to handle it. EHS is just a coordinator. They don't have subject matter in everything. So they contact the experts. If your biology department fridge with Space AIDS(TM) in it it's because your department is the experts so you'll be getting the call.
        dekhn 5y ago
        Yes, I know how these things work, as my coworkers were those EHS people. The point is that they had training, and they are working within an official university context (laws, etc).
        throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        So why not save everyone the week of back and fourth emails while nothing gets done and ask them directly how they want to deal with it rather than putting tons of people on blast and substantially constraining their options by bringing intra-organization politics into the mix?
        QuercusMax 5y ago
        Sounds like a great way to get Normalization of Deviance[1]. One senior person says "I know how to dispose of this, so it's OK if I don't go through proper channels." Then the next person, following their lead without understanding the implications, says "Joe Senior over there disposed of something scary they found without wasting time going through EHS, so I'll do the same." Maybe it goes fine for a while, but eventually you'll end up with a situation where you've poisoned the groundwater or released dangerous chemicals into the air, because nobody is following the proper channels any more. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
- logifail 5y ago
  > Is that toxic bottle still sealed, in the fridge, after you've left the institution? Quite possibly! The previous occupant of my bench area (and hence adjoining fridge space) left some barely-labeled custom radioactive compounds(!!) in the fridge me to find shortly after I took over that space, so I know how that feels. After consulting suitably-trained personnel, the contents of the vials were then disposed of ... by pouring down a standard sink, with lots of running water. Those were the days :eek:
emaginniss 5y ago
Right, and if you had ordered 3 barrels of the stuff, you'd get a visit from the feds.
- logifail 5y ago
  > 3 barrels of the stuff Barrels? Based on what the LD50 was / what the data sheet said, the bottle I briefly had in my hands - and yes, they did start shaking - would have done for a good proportion of the residents of a small city had it managed to be spread around in a form that would have been ingested. Chemistry labs are typically well-stocked with quite a lot of fairly unpleasant things. They're also the places where a lot of genuinely amazing and potentially live-saving work gets done!
  - tetsusaiga 5y ago
    You can't just tease us like this! If not the actual chemical... maybe an analogue or something? Chemistry is one of my great fascinations lol.
    - hoseja 5y ago
      Maybe azides.
    - kortex 5y ago
      Not GP but one time we did a cyanation reaction (attaches a -CN group) in the pilot plant involving trimethylsilyl cyanide (TMS-CN). We had what looked honest to god like an 8lb propane tank of the stuff ("cyanide and cyanide accessories" lol), with an air-free delivery siphon, typical for air-free, pyrophoric, and toxic reagents. Normally we'd do this in the high potency suite but the reaction scale was too big so we did it in the conventional GMP pilot plant. Bunny suits and cyanide meters for all three chemists. I calculated that dose-wise, it was enough to kill tens of thousands, were it directly delivered, however if it were merely vaporized, it would only kill those in the immediate area, and would hydrolyze quickly. There's a great article linked elsewhere in thread about the ineffectiveness of chemical weapons, I've added it for convenience because it's a great read. Air is big, the distance-cubed law really dilutes any toxic agent beyond dangerous limits quite fast (comparing pound for pound lethality of conventional explosives). https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/ https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
david422 5y ago
> I backed carefully away from that particular bottle, and left it in the fridge, still sealed. Then found another - safer - way to do the reaction instead... I've wondered how manufacturing plants handle this. You back away because you're afraid of touching the stuff - how does a giant factory that produces and ships the stuff handle it?
- 323 5y ago
  The same way other dangerous stuff is made? There is plenty of dangerous chemicals made on a huge scale - sulfuric acid, cyanide, explosives, ...
- detaro 5y ago
  It clearly can be handled, the question is what's the procedure to handle it correctly and do you trust your procedure? Manufacturer or someone regularly working with this kind of thing does know and trust, if you suddenly realize it wasn't quite what you signed up for backing off is clearly the better choice than trusting your guess at procedure. But risk can be managed a lot. Although certainly over-confidence can also happen on the other end, e.g. if something that's quite similar to other dangerous things you work with suddenly has an additional trap. And Safety Datasheets are notorious for not necessarily representing actual in-use risks well.
marcosdumay 5y ago
"They" are not proactive, because they know people hiding bad things need time and coordination. So, only taking notice (and notes) and investigating strange patterns is enough. But also a lot of what the GP says doesn't apply, because on the case of terrorism, "They" is either the police or random people, so "They" definitively do not have antidotes or training on how to handle known poisons.
Enginerrrd 5y ago
Flourine compound? Organic heavy metal? I'm curious.
jhart99 5y ago
I've also worked in chemistry research labs and there are certain compounds (in the US) at least that will need approval. Anything on the DEA precursor list will do it. There are certain chemicals that are dual use for chemical weapons and chemotherapy synthesis (things to make melphalan for example). Those required some extra forms to order.

dekhn 5y ago

Is that toxic bottle still sealed, in the fridge, after you've left the institution? I've had to deal with a few EHS situations like that.

danuker 5y ago
How did you deal with it? I would expect they don't take returns.
- dekhn 5y ago
  You call your university's EHS department and tell them as much about what you know about the contents of the bottle (which may not be what is on the label). They seal off the lab, remove it, and using what they can determine about the contents, destroy it safely.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  The same thing that happens when someone quits. The people finding these things have the same skill sets and access to the same handling/disposal facilities as the people leaving these things so it's very much a "oh my former coworker forgot to/didn't have an opportunity to dispose of X before departing, I'll just do it myself in the same manner he would have". Furthermore, these people have lives, they go on vacation and cover each other. The institutional knowledge of how to handles dangerous organic things necessarily exists in the institutions that do so.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    No bench chemist should attempt to cleanup this stuff. Go to your university or company EHS, and if you don;'t have that, your city does. The history of chemistry is filled with responsible and intelligent organic chemists who nonetheless died terrible deaths. EHS has strategies to avoid this.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      Humor us all and think another few steps ahead. And what's EHS gonna do? They're gonna CC the guy who's office is right beside yours because (surprise surprise) the departments and teams who's work results in them having weird nasty stuff buried in the back of the walk in fridge are the same people who know how to handle it. EHS is just a coordinator. They don't have subject matter in everything. So they contact the experts. If your biology department fridge with Space AIDS(TM) in it it's because your department is the experts so you'll be getting the call.
      - dekhn 5y ago
        Yes, I know how these things work, as my coworkers were those EHS people. The point is that they had training, and they are working within an official university context (laws, etc).
        throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        So why not save everyone the week of back and fourth emails while nothing gets done and ask them directly how they want to deal with it rather than putting tons of people on blast and substantially constraining their options by bringing intra-organization politics into the mix?
        QuercusMax 5y ago
        Sounds like a great way to get Normalization of Deviance[1]. One senior person says "I know how to dispose of this, so it's OK if I don't go through proper channels." Then the next person, following their lead without understanding the implications, says "Joe Senior over there disposed of something scary they found without wasting time going through EHS, so I'll do the same." Maybe it goes fine for a while, but eventually you'll end up with a situation where you've poisoned the groundwater or released dangerous chemicals into the air, because nobody is following the proper channels any more. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
logifail 5y ago
> Is that toxic bottle still sealed, in the fridge, after you've left the institution? Quite possibly! The previous occupant of my bench area (and hence adjoining fridge space) left some barely-labeled custom radioactive compounds(!!) in the fridge me to find shortly after I took over that space, so I know how that feels. After consulting suitably-trained personnel, the contents of the vials were then disposed of ... by pouring down a standard sink, with lots of running water. Those were the days :eek:

emaginniss 5y ago

Right, and if you had ordered 3 barrels of the stuff, you'd get a visit from the feds.

logifail 5y ago
> 3 barrels of the stuff Barrels? Based on what the LD50 was / what the data sheet said, the bottle I briefly had in my hands - and yes, they did start shaking - would have done for a good proportion of the residents of a small city had it managed to be spread around in a form that would have been ingested. Chemistry labs are typically well-stocked with quite a lot of fairly unpleasant things. They're also the places where a lot of genuinely amazing and potentially live-saving work gets done!
- tetsusaiga 5y ago
  You can't just tease us like this! If not the actual chemical... maybe an analogue or something? Chemistry is one of my great fascinations lol.
  - hoseja 5y ago
    Maybe azides.
  - kortex 5y ago
    Not GP but one time we did a cyanation reaction (attaches a -CN group) in the pilot plant involving trimethylsilyl cyanide (TMS-CN). We had what looked honest to god like an 8lb propane tank of the stuff ("cyanide and cyanide accessories" lol), with an air-free delivery siphon, typical for air-free, pyrophoric, and toxic reagents. Normally we'd do this in the high potency suite but the reaction scale was too big so we did it in the conventional GMP pilot plant. Bunny suits and cyanide meters for all three chemists. I calculated that dose-wise, it was enough to kill tens of thousands, were it directly delivered, however if it were merely vaporized, it would only kill those in the immediate area, and would hydrolyze quickly. There's a great article linked elsewhere in thread about the ineffectiveness of chemical weapons, I've added it for convenience because it's a great read. Air is big, the distance-cubed law really dilutes any toxic agent beyond dangerous limits quite fast (comparing pound for pound lethality of conventional explosives). https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/ https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...

david422 5y ago

> I backed carefully away from that particular bottle, and left it in the fridge, still sealed. Then found another - safer - way to do the reaction instead... I've wondered how manufacturing plants handle this. You back away because you're afraid of touching the stuff - how does a giant factory that produces and ships the stuff handle it?

323 5y ago
The same way other dangerous stuff is made? There is plenty of dangerous chemicals made on a huge scale - sulfuric acid, cyanide, explosives, ...
detaro 5y ago
It clearly can be handled, the question is what's the procedure to handle it correctly and do you trust your procedure? Manufacturer or someone regularly working with this kind of thing does know and trust, if you suddenly realize it wasn't quite what you signed up for backing off is clearly the better choice than trusting your guess at procedure. But risk can be managed a lot. Although certainly over-confidence can also happen on the other end, e.g. if something that's quite similar to other dangerous things you work with suddenly has an additional trap. And Safety Datasheets are notorious for not necessarily representing actual in-use risks well.

marcosdumay 5y ago

"They" are not proactive, because they know people hiding bad things need time and coordination. So, only taking notice (and notes) and investigating strange patterns is enough. But also a lot of what the GP says doesn't apply, because on the case of terrorism, "They" is either the police or random people, so "They" definitively do not have antidotes or training on how to handle known poisons.

Enginerrrd 5y ago

Flourine compound? Organic heavy metal? I'm curious.

jhart99 5y ago

I've also worked in chemistry research labs and there are certain compounds (in the US) at least that will need approval. Anything on the DEA precursor list will do it. There are certain chemicals that are dual use for chemical weapons and chemotherapy synthesis (things to make melphalan for example). Those required some extra forms to order.