Within the aged labyrinth of the Molecular Sciences Building in South Campus, a painful memory still resonates ““ one that prompted revisions in laboratory safety at UCLA in recent years.
Andrew Lech has spent the past six years walking those same hallways as a chemistry research assistant.
The chemistry graduate student said he still thinks of the day in December 2008 when Sheharbano “Sheri” Sangji, a research assistant in a UCLA lab, suffered second-degree and third-degree burns in a chemical fire, and died weeks later.
“I think about the accident a lot when I’m working,” Lech said. “I can imagine how horrible it was for Sheri, and for her family. I think I’m going to be thinking about that for a long time.”
Since the lab fire, UCLA has revised much of its lab safety protocol and implemented new policies. But the incident is still spurring changes at the university level and the wider UC system.
Sangji’s death re-surfaced in the media in the past nine months after the Los Angeles District Attorney filed felony charges against the UC Board of Regents and Sangji’s supervisor, Patrick Harran, in relation to her death.
Late last month, the regents struck a deal with the district attorney.
Under the settlement, all charges against the UC Regents were dropped in exchange for a few measures, including the UC’s continued commitment to improving laboratory safety and the establishment of a $500,000 scholarship in Sangji’s name at the UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law for students studying environmental law. Sangji received an acceptance letter to the school before her death.
But UCLA will not have to implement any new policies under the settlement because it has already taken steps and continues to improve lab safety, said Craig Merlic, a professor of chemistry who has been the chair of the department’s safety committee for about four years.
Soon after Sangji’s death in January 2009, UCLA took immediate steps to improve laboratory safety across its campus, Merlic said.
In January 2009, Chancellor Gene Block established a campus-wide laboratory safety committee ““ comprised of faculty members from different research fields ““ to address and remedy issues of lab safety at UCLA. The committee meets once every quarter, Merlic said.
While safety committees already existed for specific types of research, such as animal and radiation research, this is the first committee dedicated to lab safety across all of UCLA’s research facilities, Merlic said.
The first policy coming out of the campus-wide committee was the Personal Protective Equipment Policy, which mandates that all UCLA researchers wear protective eye-covering, long pants, lab coats and other protective equipment. Sangji was not wearing a protective lab coat during the lab fire incident.
The path to improving lab safety procedures, however, wasn’t always free from roadblocks for UCLA.
In February 2010, the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health fined the university about $68,000 for alleged laboratory safety violations after Sangji’s death. The agency reviewed UCLA’s lab safety procedures in August 2009 and found that policies mandating protective clothing and adequate training for lab researchers, among other things, had not been implemented, according to a California Division of Occupational Safety and Health report.
Nearly two months after the citations, the UCLA department of chemistry and biochemistry made it a requirement for all chemistry researchers to wear blue flame-resistant lab coats in chemistry labs at all times, Merlic said.
The chemistry department recently implemented a new policy mandating that anyone working in chemistry labs cannot wear clothes made of synthetic fabrics under their lab coats, Merlic said. Sangji was not wearing a lab coat over her synthetic sweater when the stopper of her syringe ““ filled with t-butyl lithium, a highly flammable, air-sensitive chemical ““ came undone, causing liquid to spill out and ignite her sweater.
James Gibson, the director of the UCLA Office of Environmental Health and Safety, said his office standardized laboratory inspections as a result of the incident. Previously, inspections were subjective depending on the inspector, he said.
Instead of once-a-year inspections, which was the norm prior to the lab fire, officials from the UCLA Office of Environmental Health and Safety inspect UCLA laboratories a minimum of twice-a-year ““ more often if the lab contains hazardous materials, Merlic said. Anytime an inspector finds violations in a lab, the research assistants and lab supervisor have 48 hours to correct serious violations, such as a research assistant without a lab coat, Merlic said. For non-serious violations, such as an incomplete spill clean-up kit, labs have 30 days to correct the error, he said. Inspectors keep coming back until the violations are addressed, he added.
As a student, Lech said he has noticed improvements in the frequency of inspections.
Lech said, however, the most senior members of the lab often answer the inspector’s questions, which can sometimes lead to the rest of the research assistants not being as knowledgeable about the lab.
The university acknowledged that the new policies were not enough to bring UCLA’s lab safety up to code ““ there also needed to be research to back up the policies.
Gibson, the vice chair of the campus-wide committee, said he realized there was a lack of research focused on lab safety practices and saw the need for the UC Center for Laboratory Safety. Established in March 2011, the UC-wide research center is based in Westwood and is dedicated to finding out the best practices for lab safety.
Nancy Wayne, associate vice chancellor for research at UCLA and chair of the UC Center for Lab Safety advisory board, said the UC center is currently reviewing proposals for different laboratory safety research projects from across the nation and the world. The center’s advisory board will choose some of the proposals, which came out of a workshop at UCLA in March of this year, to receive grants to research best practices for lab safety.
The UC recently created a lab safety manager position to help the 10 UC campuses meet the requirements of the settlement agreement, if the universities haven’t already, said Brooke Converse, a UC spokeswoman.
The settlement agreement from last month only dropped the charges against the UC Regents.
Harran, a UCLA chemistry professor, still faces three felony counts in relation to Sangji’s death. Harran is accused of failing to provide adequate chemical safety training, failing to provide procedures for correcting unsafe work conditions in a timely manner and failing to require appropriate clothing for the research being done, according to the felony complaint.
Harran is set to re-appear in court on Sept. 5.
As the case against Harran moves forward and UCLA continues to improve lab safety policies, the chemistry community at UCLA has fundamentally changed, Lech said.
“Even though she was only passing through, she was one of us while she was here,” Lech said. “It’s difficult to enumerate all the ways this has changed things.”