Content note: chemical accident
As a chemist, I’ve worked with some hazardous shit. I’ve analyzed explosive scatter and nerve agent. You can’t scare me by saying “it’s a chemical.” Life is chemicals, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Then there are bastard chemicals that are giant fucking nopes, and some deadly stories about them hit far too close to home.
Today’s Moment of Science… Tertiary butyllithium.
An annoying number of “why does this bullshit happen” questions in chemistry can be answered with “polarity and/or electronegativity.” It’s the chemistry version of checking ‘C’ on a standardized test. The utter fuckery of tert-butyllithium is no exception.
Lithium is like “please take this electron, it’s making my s orbital look fat.” Because of this, the compound doesn’t just exist as it’s recorded on paper in neat and tidy (CH3)3CLi form. In real world conditions the molecules try to get as chemically comfortable as possible and join forces to make a tetramer, sharing electrons in a way that makes everyone calm the fuck down.
That is, until something else enters the picture.
Like the tiniest goddamn smidge of air.
Tert-butyllithium is a pyrophoric little douchebag that catches on fire when exposed to air or water. Making the situation potentially more hazardous? It’s generally stored in chemicals that are likewise highly flammable. Because of course the shit that reacts violently to air is all ‘bring on the hexane bath.’
It has some incredibly useful applications in research and industry, but if you’re going to handle it? File under “do not, under any circumstances, fuck around to find out.” Safely handling the chemical has different protocols when experiments scale up in size, and requires specialized training. Handling five grams of the stuff is more than a smidge easier than handling a liter of it.
When I met my husband, we were both quite familiar with the chemical because of the same incident, but for very different reasons. As an analytical chemist, I’d heard about this incident when I attended an OSHA training course. As an organic chemist, knew about it because it happened at his grad school, when he was there, under the tutelage of his own advisor.
Sheri Sangji was a research assistant at UCLA working under Patrick Harran. She’d been trained on handling small amounts of the tert-butyllithium. Then, without proper training, she was tasked with doing a significantly larger experiment.
She wasn’t wearing the appropriate lab coat. Worse, she was wearing a polyester sweater.
(I’m recommending that you don’t google why this is fucking horrible if you don’t already know).
When Sangji was drawing tert-butyllithium up from the safety of its original container, the syringe’s plunger came flying out. Tert-butyllithium was sprayed onto her hands and chest. Of the two people nearby in the lab, one tried to smother the fire, the other ran to find Harran. Nobody thought to put her under the lab’s safety shower. She incurred third degree burns on over forty percent of her body.
Sheri Sangji died eighteen days later.
After an exhaustive investigation showing lapses in both general safety training and proper training for this chemical, Harran narrowly avoided prison time.
In the course I attended, they told us that the ambulance arrived to find Patrick Harran outside smoking a cigarette.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, suggesting that chemicals can be tamed, but human monsters are forever.
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