Memories of explosions

by KOMUnews

How Much is the PI To Blame?
[Via In the Pipeline]

Chemjobber has a post up on the responsibility of the professor in the Texas Tech explosion case. I have to agree with him: if you’re going to get grant money to have your group work on energetic materials, you have…

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I did my postdoc in a chemistry lab developing the chemistry for synthesizing DNA. My war story deals with a graduate student being shown how to distill something noxious – probably did by hydrazine involved. Anyway, the postdoc was showing him proper procedure, contrary to how the postdic usually did it. This involved using a blast shield between the distillation apparatus in the hood and the closed hood sash.

After getting the heating mantle up to the right temperature, the postdoc explained how they could not let the flask go to dryness. Then the two them went to lunch.

You can guess what happened. Luckily I was in another room but a graduate student was not so lucky when the flask did go to dryness. The explosion shot the blast shield into the sash, pushing both well into the room. The poor graduate who was not even involved in that project had hearing loss for several days.

One reason I am glad I did not work in a chem lab as a career. The other reason was the discovery of a 2 kilogram bottle of picric acid on a lab shelf – which no longer had a protective layer of water on top. A shelf that was about 10 feet from my workspace. I carefully walked out of the room – I still get chills that I moved the bottle out of the way while I was looking for something else before I noticed what it was – and notified the proper people.

I did not go back until the bottle had been removed.

Killing innocent men?

More Police Lab Corruption
[Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars]

Balko has a disturbing article about a crime lab in North Carolina where corruption may have sent innocent men to their death.

Greg Taylor served 16 years in prison after he was falsely convicted of murdering a prostitute in Raleigh, North Carolina. He was released in February by a special three-judge panel after it was discovered the blood police claimed to have found in his SUV wasn’t blood at all. In the wake of that debacle, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper ordered two retired FBI agents to conduct an investigation on the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) crime lab. The report came out last week, and it is damning.

The report found that SBI agents withheld exculpatory evidence or distorted evidence in more than 230 cases over a 16-year period. Three of those cases resulted in execution. There was widespread lying, corruption, and pressure from prosecutors and other law enforcement officials on crime lab analysts to produce results that would help secure convictions. And the pressure worked.

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I hope the estates of those guys who were executed have some outlet to find justice. The prosecutors were writing reviews of the lab analysts. The labs duty was apparently to get the DAs whatever they needed to convict. About 15 cases a year. This should send a chill down anyone’s spine:

In another case, an attorney for a woman accused of killing her mother was shocked to learn that the lab’s DNA tests on blood found at the crime scene matched his client. He called the lab and asked them to retest. They refused. He was finally able to obtain a court order for a new test. It was negative. It turned out that a lab technician had swapped the sample provided by his client with blood taken from the crime scene.

Horribly bad science done to convict people.

Perhaps the estates can sue the prosecutors involved or the state. But immunity for corruption should not be be allowed to occur without real consequence.