Today, I got to teach two grad students the Art of Distrusting Beryllium & Prior Workers. As people who is responsible for bad things, they need to develop both respect and Suspicious Bastard skills.
“Seriously?!?”, “FUCK!”, and “Why would they even do that?” got said a lot as I told stories.
They are my new disciples. Beryllium Twitter (me) must grow.
I also had to teach “Beryllium is a very different kind of toxic bad than arsenic and cadmium. Sometimes poisons are much more immediate and you don’t need to worry about cancer risk.”
[muttering] Stupid radioactive GaAs and arsine decon.
I give one of them credit for stopping and asking “Wait. You do rad and laser shit. Why do you know this?”
ANSWER: Every experience informs another, makes you weirder and available for even weirder things. This is the “Yes, And…” life.
Both of them are good scientists and humans. Wherever they go next in their careers are going to be lucky to get them. I hope I’m lucky enough that their successors are at least as diligent and willing to learn.
A neighboring lab at Cal was moving into a new space. Mid demolition the EH&S crew figured out the entire lab had been heavily contaminated with a mutagen. Probably the first real "oh fuck" experience that professor had with budgeting
Reminds me of an almost-incident at a college one city over from the one I went to in the early 90s. They’d just built a new science building and had students carry their chemical storeroom to the new building and THEN called in a chemist to do inventory.
1/2
Yes, but it isn't normally acutely toxic. It can kill you much faster than mesothelioma, but it ain't proper a metabolic poison like arsenic, cadmium and cyanide..
These discussions make me feel immense relief that I am no longer dealing with (even obliquely) contaminant remediation.
And yet... I will never forget the series of arguments I needed to have to maintain stipulations for funded arsenic testing of drinking water wells near an oil project.
bless. bless their hearts. “because it was the wild west and they were mad lads and ladies” is not really the answer you ever *want* to those questions and yet so often it is.
Honestly, I didn't know until today that beryllium was so toxic. I figured because of its position on the periodic table that it was probably fine.
I learned the same thing that two grad students did today, it seems.
Boron is right next to carbon, it must be fine too…
This is an important lesson that position on the table gives you some general idea as to chemical behavior. Toxicity is something else.
Being close to but not quite something your body needs can be WHY something is toxic. Some of the toxicity of lead is because it chemically mimics calcium, I think.
Yeah, apparently what makes beryllium so toxic is that it can replace magnesium in chemical reactions coupled with its ion having a really strong charge, so it is disruptive to body processes.
[squints]
That is not typically what beryllium does to people. Acute beryllium exposures are a titch difficult to make happen but not impossible. We normally regard beryllium in the same realm as asbestos with Chronic Beryllium Disease. Different mechanism, very similar to asbestosis.
Totally separate fields, but picking up projects midway can be truly eye-opening in some of the decisions that got made.
I know time, training, and resources can all be factors, but sometimes it feels like people are literally just following steps with no real understanding of what the end goal is.
Yep, it's almost always reversed. And, maybe in that case it didn't matter, but there will be more cases, and if you don't know how you done goofed, you're just going to keep doing it until the failure is too catastrophic to ignore.
(Though your catastrophic failures are almost certainly worse)
Never trust the person who worked on something previously, If they were on the ball it would be fixed! this goes double when the last person was yourself.
"Always write your code with the person who will have to read and fix it three years from now in mind. If you do not, they will find you. Most of the time, that person will be you, and you know where you sleep."
As an aside, Kineticist also feels like about as perfect of a label for you as there could be given your work.
This thread was also especially eye-opening in terms of the poisonous things an Evil™️ Kineticist could do too 😬
Damn Brush-Wellman salesmen told people exactly what they wanted to hear.
The nature of how very much beryllium wants out of that alloy is an unfortunate discover people keep making over and over in different ways.
