Karen Wetterhahn famously died after being exposed to dimethylmercury. She was a chemistry prof, and had been using the recommended personal protective equipment while working with the substance, but the 1-2 drops that landed on her glove permeated very quickly and then entered her body through her skin; she begin showing symptoms of exposure several months later, and was dead within a year.
it was only after she died that the authorities realized how quickly that stuff can soak through latex gloves. How is that possible? How could latex gloves have been recommended as adequate PPE without anyone having tested them to be sure?
Which goes to my question: given that they were shown afterwards to be remarkably ineffective, what was the basis for recommending such gloves as PPE for dimethylmercury in the first place?
Mistakes get made. The difference between just screwing around and science is writing it down. The key thing is that, unlike in institutions that don’t learn from their mistakes, no future chemistry professor is going to work with dimethylmercury ignorant of the dangers. (and the ones with adequate funding for safety gear will obviously use something like a rubber suit or whatever, with the protective layers tested this time)
A dirty not-so-secret about toxicology is that little is known about the vast majority of chemicals, even those millions of people work with every day. Case in point - pick a random safety data sheet. Here’s one for EDTA, an extremely common chemical used as a chelating/sequestering agent in cosmetics, medicine, and industry.
The lack of information in the SDS is not unusual, and due to its frequent use, this one has more information than many compounds used in research. Sadly, we’ve adopted a very find-out-about-it-during-widespread-use strategy towards chemical safety, and it costs lives.
It seems odd that she would have been the first one in recent history to be poisoned. How easy would it be to misdiagnose someone dying of mercury poisoning?
Tons of people have died from mercury poisoning. But elemental “thermometer” mercury is much, much safer than this dimethylmercury stuff. Orders of magnitude safer. You can pick it up, touch it, mess around with it. Just don’t swallow it. Or do, it takes years of this to kill you.
Seems strange they were more worried about fogging film than the ghastly toxicity of the stuff, and were assuming it would leak out into the local air. Odd…
You know, Eastman Kodak used to care quite a bit about photographic film. I hear they might even have manufactured some as a side hustle to their industrial chemical business.
In all seriousness, mercury vapor hypersensitizes silver halide photographic film. Eastman Kodak used to make hypersensitized film (using forming gas, not mercury vapor) for astrophotography. So this representative would likely have been quite aware of the effect mercury can have on photographic film.
I’d speculate that anything that threatened to mess with Eastman Kodak’s cash-cow film business would be a non-starter regardless of any other risks.
If all mercury compound synthesis was already off-limits, the toxicity of any particular compound doesn’t much matter, does it?
Think of it like incest with one’s syphilitic father: the “incest” part makes most people recoil even before they consider Dad’s STI screen.
If you continue reading, while nobody was crazy enough to burn dimethylmercury, they were ordered to test-fire a rocket motor injected with elemental mercury, in New Jersey (for which purpose they constructed an exhaust scrubber). At the last minute, the test setup was taken over by China Lake and fired in the desert, without any scrubber.
While poisonous, this was usually in the form of metallic mercury or mercury chloride, most of which was excreted after being swallowed. These were not in the same category of instant fatal mercury poisoning as dimethyl mercury.
I don’t think you understand. It’s not whether something is dangerous - we often know that. It’s how things are dangerous.
The purpose of SDSs is not only to inform the user of whether something is toxic/hazardous/etc., but to provide more information on the types of toxicity and the hazards posed. For many compounds, the number of “no information available” entries (see the EDTA example I posted above for a fairly innocuous and commonly used chemical) complicates work with these compounds. What is the compound’s evaporation rate at standard temperature and pressure? We don’t know. What is its decomposition temperature? We don’t know. Is the compound hazardous as a chronic toxin or just acutely toxic? Until just a couple years ago, I was the Biosafety Officer at a small university, and this was the sort of information we would seek out when compiling our biosafety and chemical hygiene plans, but the limited information available meant that we likely were unaware of the risks posed by the compounds we worked with.
The US policy of ‘use until you find out what’s wrong with it’ can be directly contrasted with European Union policy, which changed in the mid-2000s with the REACH regulations. An excerpt from REACH’s wikipedia summary:
As I said, you can know something is dangerous, but if you don’t know how it’s dangerous, you might find out in the worst way possible. Wikipedia implies that Wetterhahn’s latex gloves were the best known safety measure at the time, and mentions that subsequent investigations proved them inadequate. Presumably 1990s-era MSDSs (the earlier name for SDSs) mentioned the need for gloves, but perhaps the type of glove required was unspecified or unknown.
