Welcome to the first lab for the semester. Hopefully everyone has had a chance to read the safety measures on page one of the lab manual There is a sign in sheet making its way around. Once you've read that, sign in to tell us that you've read the safety instructions What I'm going to do is go around the room and each table is going to come up with a safety situation to share with the group and we will discuss why it's important and then if we miss anything I'll go over the remaining safety item
s so that we all know where we stand for the rest of the semester. Let's start with Table One in front of me Can you tell me one safety item that you know about from reading the information. "GOOGLES". Excellent, goggles. We require you wear goggles when you work in the lab room. Why do we need goggles? To protect your eyeballs. Yes. You only have one pair, or two eyeballs and you're not going to grow anymore. So you have to protect the eyeballs that you have. We have goggles for everybody, I'm
going to show you where they are In this bin. Goggles are important. What's really important about goggles is that you wear them correctly. You'ld think that would be pretty easy, right? But here is what I see all the time.. This is protecting your hairline really well but it's not protecting your eyeballs, and that's what the googles need to be protecting So if I yell at you in the middle of an experiment and point to your goggles it's probably because you've got them up here. People do it all
the time, it's easy to forget, but they need to be over your eyeballs to protect them since those are pretty precious. If you have your own you can use your own goggles too. Ok, Table number 2, What's your safety thing? Student: "Long hair should be tied back" Excellent, yes. Why? "So that it doesn't touch any substance that we are working with Yes, that's a really good point. She went straight to the "touching substances". If you have long hair it can fall forward and it can drip into whatever
we are using, and you want to protect yourself from your experiment, but also you want to protect your experiment from you You don't want to be contaminating your experiment with whatever is coming off your hair. And also bunsen burners. We do use open flames for some of our labs and hair can trail off and can burn and, honestly, it doesn't smell very good, and we don't want to smell your burning hair and we also want you to be safe, so that goes for hair, and it also goes for floppy clothes. If
you have long floppy sleeves, that kind of thing is not a good thing to wear on lab day. Similarly for other clothes that you are attached to, we do use things that stain, they're called "Stains" and they will stain your clothes if you get them on there, so don't wear things that you are particularly attached to and keep your hair, long jewelry and floppy sleeves out of the way. Ok, good. Another safety thing from the back table. Student: "No open toed shoes." Yes, why do you need close-toed sh
oes?.. Yes, to protect your feet. Right. What is the most likely thing that is going to happen? Yes, substances could fall, yes, you could spill something. It could be something chemically dangerous. more likely it's going to be something hot, but also one of the biggest things is glass. You spill something, or a glass beaker falls, it's going to shatter and there is going to be glass around. You don't want to stab your toes with shards of glass We need to make sure we have close-toed shoes to p
rotect ourselves from chemical spills and glass. If you forget your shoes, we have the "Shoes of Shame". They are in a giant box outside, they are very stylish - they are from Goodwill, I have all sizes, and all colors, so if you don't have close toed shoes you will be wearing those. So just throw a pair of trainers or sneakers in the trunk of your car so you are prepared for lab day. Back table, something else... [Student speaks indistinctly] Excellent. Yes, if you have something go wrong if yo
u cut yourself, or whatever, please let me know we have to do incident reports, we need to make sure you are well taken care of we need to follow the procedures for that, and I need to know. So, please let me know if something happens Ditto for breakages. If you break something a beaker, a thermometer, a cylinder, whatever, we are not going to get mad at you. Unless you were doing something really silly, like tossing it across the room. Stuff is going to fall, stuff is going to roll and stuff is
going to break. We need to know for several reasons. 1. we can replace it. so that you have a complete set, and so that the students who come in after you have a complete set. 2. So that we can dispose of it correctly. That's the more important reason, really. Broken glass has to get put in the right place. It does not go in the regular trash bin. Those trash bags are really thin and glass will just poke through them, and that can scratch and hurt our janitorial staff and that is not what they
are here to deal with. So, if you break glass we will clean it up properly, there is a dustpan and brush underneath the sink in the back corner, most labs will have that, and there is also a Glass Waste Box underneath the corner bench, and that is where the broken glass goes. It doesn't matter if it's just a single microscope slide or a giant cylinder, we clean it up and it all goes in the broken glass box it does not go in the regular trash. So just let us know... Usually we will hear a "crash"
and everyone will look... "Who Broke Something???!" but let us know if that happens. Next, something else...? Student: Follow directions carefully from your instructors Yes, the instructions that I give you, the instructions that are written on the board, and the instructions that are in the lab manual, they are all there for a reason, these labs have been run before, and we know where things tend to be problematic, so we have step by step information to help you go along smoothly, so please ma
ke sure that you read ahead, that you've done your pre-lab so you know what's coming and that you are using everything smartly and safely. Something else? Student: Keep open flames away from flammable material. Yep, be aware when we have open flames, sometimes we have the bunsens going, remember that you have hair, you have clothes you've got papers, don't pass your lab manual to your partner over the top of the bunsen. Be aware, be cognizant of your surroundings when you have an open flame. And
also watch the underside of this shelf make sure your bunsen burner is out in the middle of the desk. Ok, so we've been around the room once. But there are a few more things we haven't touched on yet. Anybody else like to throw any other safety items out there? They may or may not be discussed in the lab manual. Student: No food or drink Yes, No food or drink.... [laughs] as we sit here with cereal packets on the tables... these are empty! They are for examples We don't have food or drink in th
e lab. There are several reasons why this is a rule Firstly, you can contaminate your experiment with your food and drink, you could drop things Secondly, you don't want to be putting stuff near your mouth when your hands have been touching various chemicals so you just want to take that temptation completely away and not have food or drink at your bench. Thirdly, you don't know if the person who was sitting at your bench, in here before you was the "A" student who when they accidentally spilled
their E. coli culture cleaned it up perfectly and followed all the correct steps, or if you're sitting at the bench of the "C/D" student who mushed it around with a paper towel, threw it away, and didn't really know what to do. We don't know what happened in here before we came in. You do not want your M&M's lying out on the table. So that's another reason. Another little story that happened to me way back in graduate school when I was doing 100's of experiments I was breaking the rules, sittin
g there with my cup of tea, because I'm in England, so it's tea, and I had my solutions and my tea and I'm pipetting, 120 times on a big tray filling 120 things with a pipette, drinking.... pipetting... drinking.. pipetting... and I was in such a zone that I barely caught myself about to pipette from my tea and drink from my solution. It's like one of those brain farts where you put something in the microwave, when you meant to put it in the fridge. It can happen, so you don't want to have your
solution and your water bottle side by side. I can get confusing. So here's what we do. I understand that this lab runs from 11 - 1:40. It's right over lunch and we are all going to be getting hangry, me included so if you need to have a snack, that's absolutely fine, but you need to keep your snacks and water bottles in the cubbies over here or in your backpack and then you can go outside and grab a drink or whatever you need, but do not bring them back to your bench. Leave food and drink in yo
ur backpack, or the cubbies You can go out, you can go to the restroom, you can go eat, you'll find there will be breaks in the work that we do so you'll have time to do that What else? Anything else? [Student talks indistinctly] Yes, if you have an questions about materials that we are going to be touching or using bring them to me. We have information about all the chemicals, if you want to be informed. I have a few more items to cover, We are crowded in here, especially up the middle and we d
o put stuff out on the back counter when we are all sharing it, so we will be walking and moving around the room a lot. So backpacks need to be underneath the benches or in the cubbies. Stash them away now. Backpacks are the worst since you can get your foot caught in the straps and you can go flying when you're carrying something hot or glass. So everything needs to be pushed away or in the cubbies but the front door. And that will be the same every week. We also have some safety equipment We h
ave the goggles for your personal use and we also have fire extinguishers and fire blankets underneath the sink over there. All labs will have access to those. We have fire exits to the outside there, but if there's a raging inferno right there, you're going to go out that other door and down the corridor to get out, so there are two fire exits on either side, and then we also have our emergency shower which I have never had to use, but it does work and we test it every semester, So if anyone ge
ts chemicals on them that we need to wash off, we can use that, and there is also an eyewash station, which will rinse chemicals from your face. OK, i think we have covered the whole range of safety points. Does anyone have anything else to share or questions? Student: Do we have to wear long pants or can we wear shorts? I don't require long pants in this lab in Biology 181 we generally don't use anything more hazardous than an onion... but chemistry and other labs may have other rules.
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