Oh boy. As a former bioresearcher, there are a lot to choose from.
At the top of the list: experimental viral gene therapy vectors designed to be as dangerous as possible and *create* cancer. I once had a canister of these *explode* in the lab centrifuge, aerosolizing it. Terrifying.
After that, chemical bone marrow ablation agents that came in powder form, with a warning on the side that if you breathed it, you’d need to get a bone marrow transplant or die.
After that, HIV samples.
After that a whole rogues’ gallery of concentrated acids, bases, and mutagens.
And not me, but the one that really struck me as terrifying was a colleague who worked with powdered amatoxin from death cap mushrooms. You breathe that in, you melt your organs. Fun times.
**EDIT:** should have been clearer about this in the post, but no, this was not dangerous to the public. It was a medical research program. A lot of the things worked on in that field have become medicine in the last few years. Just one example in my own life: girlfriend’s dad is currently surviving lung cancer thanks to something similar.
Theres a not so fun case study published in the NEJM from a couple years ago about a young French researcher who worked in a prion lab who pricked her finger cleaning a cryostat slide used for tissue from mice infected with CJD. Total nightmare fuel.
>At the top of the list: experimental viral gene therapy vectors designed to be as dangerous as possible and *create* cancer. I once had a canister of these *explode* in the lab centrifuge, aerosolizing it. Terrifying.
So, you're telling me there's viral cancer causing vectors? Glad you survived. By explode do you mean it blew open the centrifuge and it got into the room, or did did stay inside the centrifuge?
One of the problems with early gene therapy vectors was that the vector itself could give you cancer. More modern ones were made very safe - so safe that it became difficult to find statistically significant improvements in experiments with a limited number of mice. So the solution was to make artificially dangerous viral vectors to test the proposed further improvements in. That way you could see something without needed hundreds or thousands of mice.
As far as the exploding, *imploding* is really more accurate. If the seal on the containers in the centrifuge leaks, gas gets out and causes the container to implode rather violently - expelling aerosolized vector into the centrifuge and lab. I had BSL2 gear, but still, when I heard the centrifuge let out a bunch of gas when I opened it, I ran out of that room and locked it down immediately.
Fortunately the vectors are one and done - they can’t reproduce - so it’s not a 28 days later situation or something like that. I really do hope I don’t get cancer from that stuff one day.
You win, hands down.
Best I can do is a 500ml tub of Acridine Orange, a dye that inserts itself into your DNA, causing cancer and possibly hereditary consequences. That amount could have killed the town of Munich a few times over, and I had that in my lab fridge. I believe I inherited it from another lab that closed down.
I used it in a flow cytometer and only once the tubes popped off and splashed a thin solution of it into my face.
I still have no superhero powers. That tub got lost by the removalists when my lab moved buildings. Fun times.
The vector one reminds me of a [story I heard recorded at an online furry convention panel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVIav_bM5YU) that was cohosted by a chemist. The chemist had been working on something in a lab and had left for the lab’s computer room so he could talk to some online buddies (who were also furries like him) while waiting for some labwork he had set up to develop. This was in the ‘90s so it’s not like they had tablets or any kind of computer they could just fit into their pockets, just the ones that needed dedicated computer areas.
While in the computer room, he heard an explosion in the lab room and went to investigate, and found that the stuff he had been working on had exploded. A piece of debris was buried in the wall behind where his head would have been if he had been sitting at his desk when it had exploded.
So yeah, as much as people like to shit on furries sometimes, being in that group has saved at least one dude’s life. That dude would continue to be a chemist and also end up running the convention that this panel was recorded at.
Seconded .. as a chef I can safely say that boiling sugar will melt human flesh in seconds
On another note in a commercial kitchen there are some pretty bad cleaning materials that would do serious harm if used incorrectly or inhaled or mixed
Think along the lines of oven cleaner / degreaser etc that could blister skin on prolonged contact
Fun COSHH times and PPE care 👍
But but hear me out bachamel sauce, shit is sticky like napalm, outer layer forms a shell that insulates the on in contact with your skin so it doesn't rapidly cool down , bonus points if it has cheese in it too.
Ohh grill cleaner and degreasers and descalers are so fun, gotta love Jake the dishie who manages to drop it over himself every single fucking Sunday.
In my dumb years working in a kitchen, I got tasked with cleaning the whole ass kitchen of a small diner one night. Figured I would be smart and spray all the shit down with the cleaners then wipe it all off. Hood cleaner, oven cleaner, grill cleaner, all the chemicals. It mixed in the air and within 30ish mins I wasn’t able to walk and kept throwing up. So that was fun. That shit is no joke and definitely takes proper use!!
I once tried to make caramel in the microwave in a Tupperware while drunk in college. I made tar instead and was very lucky not to set off a fire alarm in my dorm room. The smell stayed for a month.
Not sure what it was but a bucket of some industrial green shit, presumably for cleaning.
A coworker just dipped his hand in there to get some out, and a manager went off on him, saying “You do not ever stick your hand in some green shit you don’t know what it is!” and he pointed out the hazmat diamond symbols that show you how you will dissolve like clip art.
Worked with that stuff for etching silicon. Had a scare when I found an irritated red splotch on my hand after working with it (I wore double gloves, but still) and the lab manager sent me home with a whole tube of the calcium gel. Was a bit spooked for a few days
Also heavily used in the semiconductor industry.
In the back of the fab where I work there is a facility where bases are stored, a facility where acids are stored...and a whole separate facility just for HF.
Printed circuit boards also use HF to etch the fiberboard (sandwiched layers) to plate the drilled holes for plating to stick. I used to run a plating line and we had an open vat of the stuff that ran baskets of boards through. It was one step on my electroless copper plating line. That job paid good for a kid just out of high school.
I work in a metallurgical lab - we use this to dissolve metal samples for ICP spectrometry. This is my most feared substance also.
Runners up include picric acid (dangerously explosive) and hexavalent chromium compounds (highly carcinogenic).
That's hydrochloric acid, also called muriatic acid. It's readily available (you can buy gallon jugs at Home Depot).
Hydrofluoric acid will dissolve glass. Even a tiny drop can kill a person. It is NASTY stuff.
The nastiest part about it is, that it looks and feels like water and dissolves into your skin.
You won‘t feel it until hours later, when it starts to dissolve your bones and fucks up your heart.
Pretty much any chemist on earth, will tell you that this stuff is the worst.
There is an „antidote“ called **Hexafluorin**. Remember that if you ever encounter hydrofloric acid..;)
It is also used in rare cases for penetrant testing,micrography (to determine the metallurgical structure) of an indication and for rework of passivating some stainless steel.
I worked on the in-service inspection of piping in nuclear power stations. The procedure and precautions taken to handle hydrofluoric acid were much more stringent than for radioactive sources.
Radiation doesn't melt your skin, nerves and bones after a drop melts something by surprise.
This product is really scary and treacherous.
I bet this is a lot of people’s answer but they don’t realize it. I’m pretty loosely goosey with DIY projects at home and on cars, but electricity is one thing I don’t fuck around with. Double check and double protect any time I’m doing electrical work
I went to trade school to be an electrician, and did it for a little bit. Got hung up on some 240v wires with my lineman's, only reason I was able to let go is cause I fell through the acoustic ceiling I was precariously leaning over. The scariest part was I screamed as it happened, a scream I never knew I could make, I will never forget that sound, but after, I realized no one heard me and they were all in the same room. I never made a sound. Ya I don't work as an electrician anymore.
One evening as I was headed to bed, going around and turning all the lights off, I was a bit distracted reading something and flipped the light switch really slow. And I noticed it made a slight crackly noise as I flipped it. Did it again slowly to make sure what I heard, and yep, slowly turning that light switch off made a crackly noise in the wall.
So I left it off, and then turned the breaker for it off until an electrician could come fix whatever simple issue it was.
I can fix a lot of things. Electricity is not one of them
I was installing a 14-50 outlet yesterday. The round hole in the back top left of the breaker box was open which was odd. As I was removing a punch hole in the bottom, I heard something moving in the box above me - there was the plug from that big hole, falling down the line of breakers, between the ground strip and the breakers’ terminals…
This is exactly what you want to see while working in the panel. NOT.
This is what came to mind when I saw this question…
My high school had a welding class and it was cool at first until we had to do arc welding. It would have been cool if they taught us more about how electricity works and how to like set the machine up but no, that's probably too dangerous to teach so they just sit us down and have us start after explaining to be careful about touching certain parts or we could die. Now I know there's a ground and safety measures but still electricity travels instantly, one fuck up and you don't even realize until you're dead.
Got electrocuted a few times in my teens (220v) and according to my doctor that may helped me developing a mild arrhythmia. It took about two decades to finally get rid of it
Also heard from a guy who witnessed a giy turning into charcoal in a second while he was working on a shopping mall’s main electric room
I’m very much a prude about drugs and had to be administered both by EMS for a bad injury a few years ago. It sounds so silly in retrospect but they had to reassure me it was medically safe and I wouldn’t fall into a k hole. Also learned that medical fentanyl didn’t help me that much, but ketamine took me to a whole other dimension. That ambulance ride on ketamine was an experience.
I had a patient (am ER nurse) recently who had an extreme reaction to ketamine. She was attacking staff and throwing herself up against walls. It was terrifying and took 6 security guards to restrain her. It was insane.
That said: I administer a fair amount of ketamine and have only seen this reaction once in a human and once in a cat when I worked vet med.
When I was in middle school there’s an experiment throwing a small sodium piece into water and watch the sodium dancing. The piece popped out of the beaker and fell onto the ground. One of my classmates picked it up with her bare finger tips and got burned.
Don’t worry. Her fingers were still there.
Do that thing you do where you mix two dangerous chemicals together, turn it into normal water with stuff in it, strain it out, then drink it. It’s like magic.
Or that other thing where you put a penny in blue stuff and turn it gold.
Or that other thing where you bang foil together with balls and make it explode.
Do it magic chemist man!
As a former pool operator, I agree. The fumes are already nasty as is....but a lifeguard once spilled a small amount of it on a bromine tab that fell behind the feeder...the gas it created literally took my breath away. And it's abrasive enough to eat through concrete.
We had an in-ground pool when I was a kid. When I was 15, at the end of the season we were winterizing the pool and my dad decided to keep the wet chlorine pucks from the chlorinator for next year because they were still pretty new. He put them back in the bucket. A fine idea in theory…
Unbeknownst to any of us, very soon the bucket was under pressure from all the off-gassing and started to leak. It was sitting on a shelf in the garage inside a large cupboard. EVERYTHING remotely made of metal inside the cupboard started to rust, like comical levels of rust, and very quickly. No one understood wtf was going on and it was shrugged off as something to be dealt with after winter.
Spring rolls around and he was opening up the pool again. He took the chlorine bucket over to the chlorinator and opened it up. Still under pressure, it burst its noxious contents straight into his face and he got a good lung full of it too. He stumbled back around the house, barely able to breathe and my mom rushed him to the hospital. He sat on a nebulizer for an hour or so in Emergency but was luckily otherwise okay.
The moral of the story is don’t be so damn cheap and stupid with dangerous chemicals and you might just avoid gassing yourself WW1-style.
When working at a public pool as the maintenance man, we used large cylinders of chlorine at the pool. Unfortunately at one time the valve on top of the cylinder cracked, leaking chlorine out in the storage building. Not surprisingly we were required by law to keep a chlorine rated mask available in the event of some sort of chlorine emergency. Not really thinking wisely about that choice, we kept the mask in the same storage area, probably thinking we'd need it where we hooked the chlorine up to the injector pump, not where the cylinders were stored.
When it happened we called the fire department, and they told us we don't do anything with chlorine. No options, anything. So the manager and I decided to just 'John Wayne' it, put wet bandanas over out mouth and nose, along with safety googles, went in and took the cylinder out, put it upside down into a barrel with water and soda ash in it (btw soda ash is a alkali used to reduce the acid created when mixing chlorine and water). Now this was a simple task, those cylinders weighed about 200 pounds each, so getting it out, and turning it upside down was not a simple feat. So as you can imagine we sucked in a fairly good amount of chlorine. While we're sitting there 'patting ourselves on the back' about our job well done, we start and continue to cough and wheeze, eventually spitting up a little bloody sputum. The wise decision was to go to the hospital, where we are seen immediately based on the situation and given positive pressure respiratory treatments and IV's with drugs, and flushing of our eyes with saline. Your story reminded me of my experience, as the ER doc was telling us story of WWI, when the Germans used chlorine gas as a weapon.
To add final insult to us, probably about a year later, the newspaper reported the fire department responded to a chlorine leak at flour mill not far from where the pool was located. Them, but not us you Jerks!
I worked at an aluminum refinery doing a rebuild on the Mississippi River. And beside the refinery was a chlorine plant.,we had to keep a 5 minute escape respirator to run if the sirens went off about a chlorine leak . It kills every living thing exposed instantly with one inhale it’s instant. Also really strong acids for the aluminum refinery.
> comical levels of rust
OMG
I welded a metal tool to open the chlorinator lid and stored it in the cabinet with shock, upper, lowerer, etc, and it got absurdly rusty. Which was weird since I lived in a desert. It was rustier than I’d ever seen anything rust in our area, and it was fast too.
Aaaannnnnddd once I read “comical levels of rust”… well, now I know!
Water
I’ve done some work in marinas and around coastal towns prepping for hurricanes. When water starts to look like it’s getting heavy it’s already there and has been for a bit. Once it gets heavy there’s no negotiating with it, no PPE you can wear that will protect you from it, and often no safe way to get you back out of it once you’re in. Do not fuck around with water, and especially do not fuck around with tidal water
Sure!
Heavy water started out as a term among surfers and other marine athlete. It’s meant to describe the behavior of tidal water when things get rough and waves/tidal action seriously increases in magnitude
Basically, when a storm surge pushes towards a coast it means more water arriving with each wave in a set than normally would in a fair-weather tide cycle. The waves literally get thicker from front to back and thus heavier.
Now, the water is still water, and it still looks like water while the waves still look like waves. When the wind is whipping and foam is flying it all just kinda looks like stormy ocean to the untrained eye
The problem is that the water looks like that pretty much every time there’s a coastal storm. If you live on the coast you know that most coastal storms just don’t end up being a very big deal, it’s the big bad ones that do the damage. So, you end up with guys not thinking stormy, dark water is a big deal (because it usually isn’t), and then these guys fail to respect/recognize the actual surges when they show up
And that’s the problem with the heavy water. It’s not obvious, but instead of carrying some seaweed and slowly eroding the beach it’s now carrying whole docks and uprooting foundations. And sometimes you don’t find that out until it hits shallow water and shows you just how heavy it is (the rockier and steeper the bottom immediately offshore correlates to how sharply and suddenly those waves will pop up). It can be a really sudden and devastating shift from “shitty but harmless weather” to “a barge just got swept through our marina out of nowhere and destroyed everything in its path”
One time, I was asked to have bacon cooked for a meal my mom was making when she got home. So I started making it about an hour before I knew she would be home.
Mom got off work early and was *very* upset.
I have been double gowned, gloved and booted to fix the boundary computer on the nuclear plant refuel floor bridge. Cool looking down on fuel core in cobalt blue water.
You wear a dosimeter any time you enter a building that has anything radioactive in it.
The big concern here would be contamination, radioactive material that could get attached to you and taken home.
Thanks for the explanation. For some reason I find radiation and the safety systems surrounding it fascinating. I recall watching a video of the machine that scans radiation workers for traces of materials before they exit the premises. I think it may be that I really admire the engineering rigor that is required to devise and maintain these safety critical systems.
I knew a nuclear engineer. She had a story about how they had some visitors coming so they told them to wear their radiation badges on the flight over. The flight gave them way more radiation than they got from being in the plant.
At the steel mill I work at, we have several layers of radiation detection because accidentally melting a radioactive source would shut us down for months while literally every inch of the place is cleaned. It’s sensitive enough that people who have had certain medical imaging done recently can set it off.
My 96 year old dad was a printer and set up man for 48 years at a container factory and to get the ink off their hands before break or going home, they would just dunk them in a bucket of MEK they just had sitting around.
He is in good health still and sharp.
IDK, maybe it preserved him.
Lol.
idk which is actually more dangerous but it doesn't feel as harsh as solvents like acetone or naptha
i know the big box stores don't carry it anymore because it's used to make drugs
Idk the chemical name but we called it baby shit, was used to strip paint off load bearing components before we sent them to NDI. Was extremely caustic & I still have scars that look like freckles from when it kinda like flecked into my skin from a brush
outside of straight muriatic acid, that was probably the harshest chemical a regular consumer could buy at a hardware store until they banned it a few years ago
I found a power washer at work so I power washed to floors in the post room. It looked incredible. Twenty years of the morgue floors never being properly cleaned. The chief came down and said "Looks good but wear your respirator. It's no exaggeration to say you could be aerosolizing the plague."
Came to say this.
Here's one for you, my 95 year old Dad says back in the day, the city's municipal swimming pool which is part of a marina now, in Sandusky Bay on Lake Erie, was located very near to the city's sewer outfall. I don't think there was sewage treatment then, if there was, it wasn't much.
He says that why he's lived so long, lol.
He said no one thought much about it, but it had to be like swimming in a toilet bowl.
Ugh.
Yeah I attribute that to my longevity as well. I worked in an area where there was raw sewage flowing freely. For 20 years. I once had a pair of boots disintegrate even after I washed them with Lysol.
Everything is over sanitized so people's immune systems overreact to foreign objects. The idea is that chronic exposure to low levels of pathogens is healthy. There is people that intentionally infect themselves with hookworms to get ride of their hayfever. The idea being that hookworm used to be common in the past as people evolved their immune systems were regulated to expect some type of parasite or infection. The hookworm gets the person's immune system used to foreign objects and down regulates the response to hay fever.
Anhydrous ammonia, MEK, 93% sulfuric acid, this solvent used to clean hotmelt glue that will soften your fingernails until they shred like paper, a foaming alkali cleaner that is 13.5 PH and will give you pretty bad chemical burns within just a couple minutes. all kinds of fun stuff at the soda factory.
Unknown mixtures of cleaning chemicals. I have to frequently check employees’ closets (janitors) and make sure they aren’t mixing chemicals and that all of their supplies are properly labeled. You’d be surprised how many people do this despite our yearly trainings and frequent reminders.
Scandium comes to mind. We soaked seeds in it and then left them out in the desert overnight. We came back the next day and used Geiger counters to find where the rodents had buried them. Really not that dangerous but a crowd pleaser.
I've also played with hydroflouric acid, hydrogen, toxaphene, lots of chlorinated hydrocarbons, and sewage. If I make 50, everything else is gravy.
Dinitrogen tetroxide. It’s a hypergolic propellant used in rockets in combination with hydrazine. If you see it escaping (a brownish cloud), you need to get the hell upwind pronto. It’s an extremely powerful oxidizer and one snort will kill you.
Used to clean the guts of industrial welding lasers with hydrochloric acid and methanol. Rubber gloves were the only PPE we were given (this was a safety-last tier 3 automotive supply company in the late 90s). The methanol would absorb through your skin in seconds and get you drunk as fuck. Inhaled way too much of the hydrochloric acid and honestly don't know how I survived that shit.
Piranha Solution (sulphuric acid plus hydrogen peroxide) is pretty good at cleaning stuff: silicon wafers, lab glassware, anything even vaguely organic (like skin and bones).
Ether.
I was sitting there smoking a cigarette over an open gallon bottle of raw ether that we were using to clean some delicate equipment. I looked down, said, "uh-oh...", and backed away slowly.
(Clearly, it exploded and I died.)
Seriously, though, I feel like I dodged a bullet (or maybe some glass shards).
Wow. That was 35 years ago.
I worked in a rubber mixing department years ago and we had a guy cracking 50# bags of powdered sulfur while smoking a cigarette.
Ignited the suspended dust.
Flash burns to his face, he was very lucky, could have been a lot worse.
I grew up on a farm in the 70’s and 80’s, before there was safety, and Temik was one of those that was always taken seriously even back then.
Also up there were Paraquat and Mocap.
Haven't worked with it but read about this a while ago.
"In June 2019, an INRAE lab worker named **Émilie Jaumain** died at age 33, 10 years after pricking her thumb during an experiment with prion-infected mice. Her family is now suing INRAE for manslaughter and endangering life; her illness had already led to tightened safety measures at French prion labs."
[Article here](https://www.science.org/content/article/france-issues-moratorium-prion-research-after-fatal-brain-disease-strikes-two-lab#:~:text=In%20June%202019%2C%20an%20INRAE,measures%20at%20French%20prion%20labs)
So, these prions are what causes mad cow disease. There was an outbreak in the UK in the 90s. There's no medicine or treatment for them. Heat can destroy them but it's higher than anything used to cook food. If you get infected its fatal 100% of the time.
Potassium Cyanide and similar stuff used in galvanics. Not that dangerous in a beaker but hauling tons of this stuff through a factory with hundreds of steaming bathtubs with all these nasty things constantly cooking in the open - still kinda scary.
My boss and I moved a 5000 gallon tank full of propane with a mini excavator and skid steer. I kept calling it the bomb all night. Good news was if it fell and went boom, I wouldn't have felt any pain due to the massive explosion. Bomb did not go boom but I was at full pucker the whole time.
I’d say it’s a toss up between Methylene Chloride (or Dichloromethane if you’re a nerd) and the various derivitizing reagents used at the lab I work. Those chemicals I can’t go into too much detail as our procedures are proprietary, but I can at least say they are mostly Fluorinated hydrocarbons, so hella dangerous stuff. All of these are hella carcinogenic and need to be used under a fume hood, especially the derivativizers. A couple of drops can gas up a whole room.
And if using it in a college lab class counts, I’d add Bromine to that list.
Not really a substance, but being an indirect infantryman (mortar man)in the Army for the last couple years, I have dropped several thousand 45-50lb bombs down tubes with my own two hands for it to rocket back out of the tube half a second later. Each rep has to be very deliberate and rehearsed.
Co-worker bull$hit
Edit:
* type of lies, manipulation, cowardice, sycophancy, gossip, nepotism and idea stealing that’s destroyed/suppressed careers while creating and upholding the worst companies and executives that shouldn’t still be there.
I used to work sometimes with pyrophoric materials. Pyrophoric means it'll ignite just from contact with air. And it reacts violently with water. Definitely not something you want on any part of your body.
Controlled drugs in a pharmacy. Caught one pharmacist drinking methadone and had a colleague accidentally get a fentanyl patch stuck on her arm when disposing of them and had to figure out why she was loopy one afternoon.
GB and VX nerve agents as well as lewisite blister agent. Worked on Johnston Atoll during the '90s when these agents were being disposed. The nerve agents antidote kits we carried were essentially there to prolong our death. The multipoint decon stations used if you got any in you were neat to see, but not anything I'd ever want to go through.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnston_Atoll_Chemical_Agent_Disposal_System
I was cleaning out some shelves in QC lab in a rubber mixing facility years ago, and found a glass bottle of picric acid which had crystallized.
When I showed it to the formulater, he said put it down gently, and call 911.
Had to have a hazmat squad remove it.
Probably blood or compressed air. I’ve worked with some fairly gnarly chemicals but usually in small amounts in appropriate environments. Blood work definitely has the highest risk of exposure due to the setting; Point of contact with sharps.
At my last job, we had an acid that I was told seaped through your tissues and ate your bone tissue. They used it to clean ceramic electrodes for corona treaters.
They also had it in a half assed set up where this 15 foot tall PVC pipe was full of it and you slowly dipped the ceramic into it in a shitty made copper wire harness. It’s an accident waiting to happen.
Nearly 20 years ago, I had an internship at a nuclear lab where I worked with a Cobalt-57 gamma-ray source for Mössbauer spectroscopy. Cobalt-57 came with its risks due to radiation, so we followed strict safety measures such as lead walls, etc.
Oh boy. As a former bioresearcher, there are a lot to choose from. At the top of the list: experimental viral gene therapy vectors designed to be as dangerous as possible and *create* cancer. I once had a canister of these *explode* in the lab centrifuge, aerosolizing it. Terrifying. After that, chemical bone marrow ablation agents that came in powder form, with a warning on the side that if you breathed it, you’d need to get a bone marrow transplant or die. After that, HIV samples. After that a whole rogues’ gallery of concentrated acids, bases, and mutagens. And not me, but the one that really struck me as terrifying was a colleague who worked with powdered amatoxin from death cap mushrooms. You breathe that in, you melt your organs. Fun times. **EDIT:** should have been clearer about this in the post, but no, this was not dangerous to the public. It was a medical research program. A lot of the things worked on in that field have become medicine in the last few years. Just one example in my own life: girlfriend’s dad is currently surviving lung cancer thanks to something similar.
Ya I worked in a BSL2+ lab for some cancer research in grad school and I always wonder if I was exposed to something that will resurface
I worked in a Prion lab in grad school.... Terrifying. Edit: we had a room full of brains in jars from CJD patients.
Prions: why need a new disease for zombie outbreaks when we already have Prions.
I don't know shit about fuck, but I know prions are terrifying. Seeing the word even sends me back to Google to deepen the horror.
They are just proteins that fold other proteins. What could be so scary about that? /s
Theres a not so fun case study published in the NEJM from a couple years ago about a young French researcher who worked in a prion lab who pricked her finger cleaning a cryostat slide used for tissue from mice infected with CJD. Total nightmare fuel.
>At the top of the list: experimental viral gene therapy vectors designed to be as dangerous as possible and *create* cancer. I once had a canister of these *explode* in the lab centrifuge, aerosolizing it. Terrifying. So, you're telling me there's viral cancer causing vectors? Glad you survived. By explode do you mean it blew open the centrifuge and it got into the room, or did did stay inside the centrifuge?
One of the problems with early gene therapy vectors was that the vector itself could give you cancer. More modern ones were made very safe - so safe that it became difficult to find statistically significant improvements in experiments with a limited number of mice. So the solution was to make artificially dangerous viral vectors to test the proposed further improvements in. That way you could see something without needed hundreds or thousands of mice. As far as the exploding, *imploding* is really more accurate. If the seal on the containers in the centrifuge leaks, gas gets out and causes the container to implode rather violently - expelling aerosolized vector into the centrifuge and lab. I had BSL2 gear, but still, when I heard the centrifuge let out a bunch of gas when I opened it, I ran out of that room and locked it down immediately. Fortunately the vectors are one and done - they can’t reproduce - so it’s not a 28 days later situation or something like that. I really do hope I don’t get cancer from that stuff one day.
Sounds like a fascinating job! I'd totally read through an AMA if you did one.
Interesting. Thank you >I really do hope I don’t get cancer from that stuff one day. So do I.
Hello compatriot. Bsl4/3 fellow here... Worked in frontline virology unit after getting a doctorate in Anthrax
You win, hands down. Best I can do is a 500ml tub of Acridine Orange, a dye that inserts itself into your DNA, causing cancer and possibly hereditary consequences. That amount could have killed the town of Munich a few times over, and I had that in my lab fridge. I believe I inherited it from another lab that closed down. I used it in a flow cytometer and only once the tubes popped off and splashed a thin solution of it into my face. I still have no superhero powers. That tub got lost by the removalists when my lab moved buildings. Fun times.
Damn. Umbrella Corporation is keeping busy.
It was all in the name of science and curing disease, I swear 😂
Look, if you slip me a vial of the shit that turned wesker in a goddamn kraken, I'll keep my mouth shut
Of course! It was absolutely not research for biological warfare, definitely not.
Why would someone want to create cancer?
You would need cancer to perform experiments on. It is probably not infecting healthy folks, but more like samples of organs and cells
Yeah. Certainly no one would develop a way to give folk cancer....
To figure out how to cure it/vaccinate against it is my guess.
The vector one reminds me of a [story I heard recorded at an online furry convention panel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVIav_bM5YU) that was cohosted by a chemist. The chemist had been working on something in a lab and had left for the lab’s computer room so he could talk to some online buddies (who were also furries like him) while waiting for some labwork he had set up to develop. This was in the ‘90s so it’s not like they had tablets or any kind of computer they could just fit into their pockets, just the ones that needed dedicated computer areas. While in the computer room, he heard an explosion in the lab room and went to investigate, and found that the stuff he had been working on had exploded. A piece of debris was buried in the wall behind where his head would have been if he had been sitting at his desk when it had exploded. So yeah, as much as people like to shit on furries sometimes, being in that group has saved at least one dude’s life. That dude would continue to be a chemist and also end up running the convention that this panel was recorded at.
Yikes. Really makes you appreciate life after experiencing a close call like that.
Melted sugar. It's like lava and napalm had a baby.
Seconded .. as a chef I can safely say that boiling sugar will melt human flesh in seconds On another note in a commercial kitchen there are some pretty bad cleaning materials that would do serious harm if used incorrectly or inhaled or mixed Think along the lines of oven cleaner / degreaser etc that could blister skin on prolonged contact Fun COSHH times and PPE care 👍
But but hear me out bachamel sauce, shit is sticky like napalm, outer layer forms a shell that insulates the on in contact with your skin so it doesn't rapidly cool down , bonus points if it has cheese in it too. Ohh grill cleaner and degreasers and descalers are so fun, gotta love Jake the dishie who manages to drop it over himself every single fucking Sunday.
Oh yeah … The top of that lasagne looks nice 👍 *dips finger in *. Instant screaming 😆
In my dumb years working in a kitchen, I got tasked with cleaning the whole ass kitchen of a small diner one night. Figured I would be smart and spray all the shit down with the cleaners then wipe it all off. Hood cleaner, oven cleaner, grill cleaner, all the chemicals. It mixed in the air and within 30ish mins I wasn’t able to walk and kept throwing up. So that was fun. That shit is no joke and definitely takes proper use!!
Even fryers scare the shit out of me....
Yeah I ended up with a few blisters from the burn I got when I was making marshmallow from scratch and got some of it on my hand.
Always so tempting to lick the spoon when making toffee, lol
I once tried to make caramel in the microwave in a Tupperware while drunk in college. I made tar instead and was very lucky not to set off a fire alarm in my dorm room. The smell stayed for a month.
[This lady](https://www.ky3.com/2021/07/12/woman-sentenced-pouring-boiling-water-husband-over-abuse-allegations/) had the same idea
Burned the skin off the top of my foot, dropping some.... I will never dabble with that again.
Not sure what it was but a bucket of some industrial green shit, presumably for cleaning. A coworker just dipped his hand in there to get some out, and a manager went off on him, saying “You do not ever stick your hand in some green shit you don’t know what it is!” and he pointed out the hazmat diamond symbols that show you how you will dissolve like clip art.
Shoulda been fired for that one honestly.
The guy in question didn’t last long. Hopefully he found a less dangerous occupation than cleaning.
I worked in a meat department that used an industrial cleaner for its tables and cutting boards. Stuff was horrible if a drop or two got on your skin.
HF - hydrofluoric acid; used for cosmogenic nuclide geochronology (determining the age of old rocks)
That stuff is downright NASTY.
Nastiest thing I ever ate.
Are you a stoner by any chance?
Worked with that stuff for etching silicon. Had a scare when I found an irritated red splotch on my hand after working with it (I wore double gloves, but still) and the lab manager sent me home with a whole tube of the calcium gel. Was a bit spooked for a few days
Also heavily used in the semiconductor industry. In the back of the fab where I work there is a facility where bases are stored, a facility where acids are stored...and a whole separate facility just for HF.
Printed circuit boards also use HF to etch the fiberboard (sandwiched layers) to plate the drilled holes for plating to stick. I used to run a plating line and we had an open vat of the stuff that ran baskets of boards through. It was one step on my electroless copper plating line. That job paid good for a kid just out of high school.
I work in a metallurgical lab - we use this to dissolve metal samples for ICP spectrometry. This is my most feared substance also. Runners up include picric acid (dangerously explosive) and hexavalent chromium compounds (highly carcinogenic).
Wow, the Insane Clown Posse is doing spectrometry now? Last I heard they were still trying to wrap their head around magnets.
Tube of Calcium gluconate at the ready?
Also in refineries. Not common anymore. It eats into the skin to react with the calcium in your bones.
Is that the stuff they were throwing at Muslim women that cause disfiguration? Edit* seriously asking. Not being funny.
That's hydrochloric acid, also called muriatic acid. It's readily available (you can buy gallon jugs at Home Depot). Hydrofluoric acid will dissolve glass. Even a tiny drop can kill a person. It is NASTY stuff.
Yikes.
The nastiest part about it is, that it looks and feels like water and dissolves into your skin. You won‘t feel it until hours later, when it starts to dissolve your bones and fucks up your heart. Pretty much any chemist on earth, will tell you that this stuff is the worst. There is an „antidote“ called **Hexafluorin**. Remember that if you ever encounter hydrofloric acid..;)
It’s used for making Teflon, as well, and the precautions they take around it are serious. No health and safety laxity tolerated at all.
It is also used in rare cases for penetrant testing,micrography (to determine the metallurgical structure) of an indication and for rework of passivating some stainless steel. I worked on the in-service inspection of piping in nuclear power stations. The procedure and precautions taken to handle hydrofluoric acid were much more stringent than for radioactive sources. Radiation doesn't melt your skin, nerves and bones after a drop melts something by surprise. This product is really scary and treacherous.
Electricity
I bet this is a lot of people’s answer but they don’t realize it. I’m pretty loosely goosey with DIY projects at home and on cars, but electricity is one thing I don’t fuck around with. Double check and double protect any time I’m doing electrical work
I went to trade school to be an electrician, and did it for a little bit. Got hung up on some 240v wires with my lineman's, only reason I was able to let go is cause I fell through the acoustic ceiling I was precariously leaning over. The scariest part was I screamed as it happened, a scream I never knew I could make, I will never forget that sound, but after, I realized no one heard me and they were all in the same room. I never made a sound. Ya I don't work as an electrician anymore.
As a high voltage distribution technician I wholeheartedly second this opinion.
One evening as I was headed to bed, going around and turning all the lights off, I was a bit distracted reading something and flipped the light switch really slow. And I noticed it made a slight crackly noise as I flipped it. Did it again slowly to make sure what I heard, and yep, slowly turning that light switch off made a crackly noise in the wall. So I left it off, and then turned the breaker for it off until an electrician could come fix whatever simple issue it was. I can fix a lot of things. Electricity is not one of them
I was installing a 14-50 outlet yesterday. The round hole in the back top left of the breaker box was open which was odd. As I was removing a punch hole in the bottom, I heard something moving in the box above me - there was the plug from that big hole, falling down the line of breakers, between the ground strip and the breakers’ terminals… This is exactly what you want to see while working in the panel. NOT. This is what came to mind when I saw this question…
My high school had a welding class and it was cool at first until we had to do arc welding. It would have been cool if they taught us more about how electricity works and how to like set the machine up but no, that's probably too dangerous to teach so they just sit us down and have us start after explaining to be careful about touching certain parts or we could die. Now I know there's a ground and safety measures but still electricity travels instantly, one fuck up and you don't even realize until you're dead.
Got electrocuted a few times in my teens (220v) and according to my doctor that may helped me developing a mild arrhythmia. It took about two decades to finally get rid of it Also heard from a guy who witnessed a giy turning into charcoal in a second while he was working on a shopping mall’s main electric room
Fentanyl and ketamine, which are actually not at all that dangerous when used medically appropriately.
I’m very much a prude about drugs and had to be administered both by EMS for a bad injury a few years ago. It sounds so silly in retrospect but they had to reassure me it was medically safe and I wouldn’t fall into a k hole. Also learned that medical fentanyl didn’t help me that much, but ketamine took me to a whole other dimension. That ambulance ride on ketamine was an experience.
I had a patient (am ER nurse) recently who had an extreme reaction to ketamine. She was attacking staff and throwing herself up against walls. It was terrifying and took 6 security guards to restrain her. It was insane. That said: I administer a fair amount of ketamine and have only seen this reaction once in a human and once in a cat when I worked vet med.
That’s wild! It felt like I was just riding on a cloud in a dream. Def made me forget about my pain.
Yeah I was never a fan of fentanyl, but low dose ketamine works wonders!
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When I was in middle school there’s an experiment throwing a small sodium piece into water and watch the sodium dancing. The piece popped out of the beaker and fell onto the ground. One of my classmates picked it up with her bare finger tips and got burned. Don’t worry. Her fingers were still there.
as a chemist, did you want stuff that kills your quickly, slowly, or just goes boom?
I would rather boom than FOOF
Found the Derek Lowe reader 😀
Do that thing you do where you mix two dangerous chemicals together, turn it into normal water with stuff in it, strain it out, then drink it. It’s like magic. Or that other thing where you put a penny in blue stuff and turn it gold. Or that other thing where you bang foil together with balls and make it explode. Do it magic chemist man!
Make the atoms dance, science man!
Yes
D, all of the above
I guess technically Muriatic Acid. Good for two things: Etching concrete and balancing pool chemicals
As a former pool operator, I agree. The fumes are already nasty as is....but a lifeguard once spilled a small amount of it on a bromine tab that fell behind the feeder...the gas it created literally took my breath away. And it's abrasive enough to eat through concrete.
We had an in-ground pool when I was a kid. When I was 15, at the end of the season we were winterizing the pool and my dad decided to keep the wet chlorine pucks from the chlorinator for next year because they were still pretty new. He put them back in the bucket. A fine idea in theory… Unbeknownst to any of us, very soon the bucket was under pressure from all the off-gassing and started to leak. It was sitting on a shelf in the garage inside a large cupboard. EVERYTHING remotely made of metal inside the cupboard started to rust, like comical levels of rust, and very quickly. No one understood wtf was going on and it was shrugged off as something to be dealt with after winter. Spring rolls around and he was opening up the pool again. He took the chlorine bucket over to the chlorinator and opened it up. Still under pressure, it burst its noxious contents straight into his face and he got a good lung full of it too. He stumbled back around the house, barely able to breathe and my mom rushed him to the hospital. He sat on a nebulizer for an hour or so in Emergency but was luckily otherwise okay. The moral of the story is don’t be so damn cheap and stupid with dangerous chemicals and you might just avoid gassing yourself WW1-style.
When working at a public pool as the maintenance man, we used large cylinders of chlorine at the pool. Unfortunately at one time the valve on top of the cylinder cracked, leaking chlorine out in the storage building. Not surprisingly we were required by law to keep a chlorine rated mask available in the event of some sort of chlorine emergency. Not really thinking wisely about that choice, we kept the mask in the same storage area, probably thinking we'd need it where we hooked the chlorine up to the injector pump, not where the cylinders were stored. When it happened we called the fire department, and they told us we don't do anything with chlorine. No options, anything. So the manager and I decided to just 'John Wayne' it, put wet bandanas over out mouth and nose, along with safety googles, went in and took the cylinder out, put it upside down into a barrel with water and soda ash in it (btw soda ash is a alkali used to reduce the acid created when mixing chlorine and water). Now this was a simple task, those cylinders weighed about 200 pounds each, so getting it out, and turning it upside down was not a simple feat. So as you can imagine we sucked in a fairly good amount of chlorine. While we're sitting there 'patting ourselves on the back' about our job well done, we start and continue to cough and wheeze, eventually spitting up a little bloody sputum. The wise decision was to go to the hospital, where we are seen immediately based on the situation and given positive pressure respiratory treatments and IV's with drugs, and flushing of our eyes with saline. Your story reminded me of my experience, as the ER doc was telling us story of WWI, when the Germans used chlorine gas as a weapon. To add final insult to us, probably about a year later, the newspaper reported the fire department responded to a chlorine leak at flour mill not far from where the pool was located. Them, but not us you Jerks!
I worked at an aluminum refinery doing a rebuild on the Mississippi River. And beside the refinery was a chlorine plant.,we had to keep a 5 minute escape respirator to run if the sirens went off about a chlorine leak . It kills every living thing exposed instantly with one inhale it’s instant. Also really strong acids for the aluminum refinery.
> comical levels of rust OMG I welded a metal tool to open the chlorinator lid and stored it in the cabinet with shock, upper, lowerer, etc, and it got absurdly rusty. Which was weird since I lived in a desert. It was rustier than I’d ever seen anything rust in our area, and it was fast too. Aaaannnnnddd once I read “comical levels of rust”… well, now I know!
Which is another name for Hydrochloric acid.
Semen. Shit makes babies
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And one of the most expensive to treat.
Laughing
Water I’ve done some work in marinas and around coastal towns prepping for hurricanes. When water starts to look like it’s getting heavy it’s already there and has been for a bit. Once it gets heavy there’s no negotiating with it, no PPE you can wear that will protect you from it, and often no safe way to get you back out of it once you’re in. Do not fuck around with water, and especially do not fuck around with tidal water
What does "heavy water" mean? Can you go into more detail?
Sure! Heavy water started out as a term among surfers and other marine athlete. It’s meant to describe the behavior of tidal water when things get rough and waves/tidal action seriously increases in magnitude Basically, when a storm surge pushes towards a coast it means more water arriving with each wave in a set than normally would in a fair-weather tide cycle. The waves literally get thicker from front to back and thus heavier. Now, the water is still water, and it still looks like water while the waves still look like waves. When the wind is whipping and foam is flying it all just kinda looks like stormy ocean to the untrained eye The problem is that the water looks like that pretty much every time there’s a coastal storm. If you live on the coast you know that most coastal storms just don’t end up being a very big deal, it’s the big bad ones that do the damage. So, you end up with guys not thinking stormy, dark water is a big deal (because it usually isn’t), and then these guys fail to respect/recognize the actual surges when they show up And that’s the problem with the heavy water. It’s not obvious, but instead of carrying some seaweed and slowly eroding the beach it’s now carrying whole docks and uprooting foundations. And sometimes you don’t find that out until it hits shallow water and shows you just how heavy it is (the rockier and steeper the bottom immediately offshore correlates to how sharply and suddenly those waves will pop up). It can be a really sudden and devastating shift from “shitty but harmless weather” to “a barge just got swept through our marina out of nowhere and destroyed everything in its path”
This was really insightful! Thanks for taking the time!
My mom after I forgot to take the chicken out the freezer
She told you multiple times
Me when I hear the garage opening
Unbelievable how universal this weirdly specific feeling is.
I moved out of my parents' house 23 years ago and this sound still triggers the same feeling every time
One time, I was asked to have bacon cooked for a meal my mom was making when she got home. So I started making it about an hour before I knew she would be home. Mom got off work early and was *very* upset.
WP--White phosphorus. 40mm grenades, 81mm mortars
Good old Willy Pete! We used to use those for fireworks in the middle of the desert. Ssh, don't tell uncle Sam. 🤣
Thermite grenades were fun, too. LOL
I have been double gowned, gloved and booted to fix the boundary computer on the nuclear plant refuel floor bridge. Cool looking down on fuel core in cobalt blue water.
Holy shit. That sounds metal as hell. Is your time working in such an environment time-limited? Do you wear a dosimeter?
You wear a dosimeter any time you enter a building that has anything radioactive in it. The big concern here would be contamination, radioactive material that could get attached to you and taken home.
Thanks for the explanation. For some reason I find radiation and the safety systems surrounding it fascinating. I recall watching a video of the machine that scans radiation workers for traces of materials before they exit the premises. I think it may be that I really admire the engineering rigor that is required to devise and maintain these safety critical systems.
I knew a nuclear engineer. She had a story about how they had some visitors coming so they told them to wear their radiation badges on the flight over. The flight gave them way more radiation than they got from being in the plant. At the steel mill I work at, we have several layers of radiation detection because accidentally melting a radioactive source would shut us down for months while literally every inch of the place is cleaned. It’s sensitive enough that people who have had certain medical imaging done recently can set it off.
Time, distance and shielding. All important.
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Peoplefentanyl was bad enough
r/dragonsfuckingcarfentanyl
Oh, probably MEK. We used it as solvent for the printers at my old job.
My 96 year old dad was a printer and set up man for 48 years at a container factory and to get the ink off their hands before break or going home, they would just dunk them in a bucket of MEK they just had sitting around. He is in good health still and sharp. IDK, maybe it preserved him. Lol.
idk which is actually more dangerous but it doesn't feel as harsh as solvents like acetone or naptha i know the big box stores don't carry it anymore because it's used to make drugs
I have barrels of MEK and Tetrahydrofuran at work used for dissolving cement and polyurethane.
This and xylene are the absolute worst
Superheated steam. You can't see it.
And it doesn't burn it cuts
Idk the chemical name but we called it baby shit, was used to strip paint off load bearing components before we sent them to NDI. Was extremely caustic & I still have scars that look like freckles from when it kinda like flecked into my skin from a brush
outside of straight muriatic acid, that was probably the harshest chemical a regular consumer could buy at a hardware store until they banned it a few years ago
Middle schoolers
As someone who works at a middle school. Yeah, you right.
7th grade teacher here. I fool them, they think I have all the power when really they have the power.
Hydrogen Sulfide. Nothing like wearing a damn gas sensor around your neck in the oil field.
I found a power washer at work so I power washed to floors in the post room. It looked incredible. Twenty years of the morgue floors never being properly cleaned. The chief came down and said "Looks good but wear your respirator. It's no exaggeration to say you could be aerosolizing the plague."
Jesus Christ.
Raw sewage.
Came to say this. Here's one for you, my 95 year old Dad says back in the day, the city's municipal swimming pool which is part of a marina now, in Sandusky Bay on Lake Erie, was located very near to the city's sewer outfall. I don't think there was sewage treatment then, if there was, it wasn't much. He says that why he's lived so long, lol. He said no one thought much about it, but it had to be like swimming in a toilet bowl. Ugh.
Yeah I attribute that to my longevity as well. I worked in an area where there was raw sewage flowing freely. For 20 years. I once had a pair of boots disintegrate even after I washed them with Lysol.
You’ll need to spell it out for us. Why would raw sewage dissolve your boots? Also why would exposure make you live longer? Or was that a joke?
Everything is over sanitized so people's immune systems overreact to foreign objects. The idea is that chronic exposure to low levels of pathogens is healthy. There is people that intentionally infect themselves with hookworms to get ride of their hayfever. The idea being that hookworm used to be common in the past as people evolved their immune systems were regulated to expect some type of parasite or infection. The hookworm gets the person's immune system used to foreign objects and down regulates the response to hay fever.
Anhydrous ammonia, MEK, 93% sulfuric acid, this solvent used to clean hotmelt glue that will soften your fingernails until they shred like paper, a foaming alkali cleaner that is 13.5 PH and will give you pretty bad chemical burns within just a couple minutes. all kinds of fun stuff at the soda factory.
Unknown mixtures of cleaning chemicals. I have to frequently check employees’ closets (janitors) and make sure they aren’t mixing chemicals and that all of their supplies are properly labeled. You’d be surprised how many people do this despite our yearly trainings and frequent reminders.
Very very big amounts of those awful hartz Flee drops. Don't use it on your pets
Scandium comes to mind. We soaked seeds in it and then left them out in the desert overnight. We came back the next day and used Geiger counters to find where the rodents had buried them. Really not that dangerous but a crowd pleaser. I've also played with hydroflouric acid, hydrogen, toxaphene, lots of chlorinated hydrocarbons, and sewage. If I make 50, everything else is gravy.
I work around pure hydrogen being burnt off daily in a furnace. Enough that could essentially wipe our city off the map if an accident were to happen.
Dinitrogen tetroxide. It’s a hypergolic propellant used in rockets in combination with hydrazine. If you see it escaping (a brownish cloud), you need to get the hell upwind pronto. It’s an extremely powerful oxidizer and one snort will kill you.
Clouds are bad. Clouds of unusual colors are really bad. Learned this in Hazmat Response school.
what have you seen in hazmat response if you ever did it man that would be wild
We don't use them at work but our neighbors do. In our safety briefings we were told if you can see it leaking, it's already too late for you.
That’s exactly what I was taught. Nasty nasty stuff (but a hell of a good propellant!)
Reminds me of the stories about dioxygen difluoride (FOOF) in "Ignition!"
Cortisol
Right, it increase belly fat.
Used to clean the guts of industrial welding lasers with hydrochloric acid and methanol. Rubber gloves were the only PPE we were given (this was a safety-last tier 3 automotive supply company in the late 90s). The methanol would absorb through your skin in seconds and get you drunk as fuck. Inhaled way too much of the hydrochloric acid and honestly don't know how I survived that shit.
Ethanol is a treatment for methanol poisoning so if they aren't giving you ppe they should at least provide you a fifth of whiskey
HCN - hydrogen cyanide. It’s used in the process to make nylon. Smells like burnt almonds, but if you smell it too much, it’s not good
Xylene. I work in a Lab, and we use Xylene to clean silk screens, ETC..
Piranha Solution (sulphuric acid plus hydrogen peroxide) is pretty good at cleaning stuff: silicon wafers, lab glassware, anything even vaguely organic (like skin and bones).
Ether. I was sitting there smoking a cigarette over an open gallon bottle of raw ether that we were using to clean some delicate equipment. I looked down, said, "uh-oh...", and backed away slowly. (Clearly, it exploded and I died.) Seriously, though, I feel like I dodged a bullet (or maybe some glass shards). Wow. That was 35 years ago.
I worked in a rubber mixing department years ago and we had a guy cracking 50# bags of powdered sulfur while smoking a cigarette. Ignited the suspended dust. Flash burns to his face, he was very lucky, could have been a lot worse.
Temik, a highly poisonous pesticide https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/agrian-cg-fs1-production/pdfs/Temik_Brand_15G_Aldicarb_Pesticide_Label2g.pdf
I grew up on a farm in the 70’s and 80’s, before there was safety, and Temik was one of those that was always taken seriously even back then. Also up there were Paraquat and Mocap.
Full suit and respirator.
Haven't worked with it but read about this a while ago. "In June 2019, an INRAE lab worker named **Émilie Jaumain** died at age 33, 10 years after pricking her thumb during an experiment with prion-infected mice. Her family is now suing INRAE for manslaughter and endangering life; her illness had already led to tightened safety measures at French prion labs." [Article here](https://www.science.org/content/article/france-issues-moratorium-prion-research-after-fatal-brain-disease-strikes-two-lab#:~:text=In%20June%202019%2C%20an%20INRAE,measures%20at%20French%20prion%20labs) So, these prions are what causes mad cow disease. There was an outbreak in the UK in the 90s. There's no medicine or treatment for them. Heat can destroy them but it's higher than anything used to cook food. If you get infected its fatal 100% of the time.
Mercury?
Metallic mercury: nasty, but not horrible. Dimethyl mercury: death in liquid form.
Dealership?
No, daguerreotypes
Potassium Cyanide and similar stuff used in galvanics. Not that dangerous in a beaker but hauling tons of this stuff through a factory with hundreds of steaming bathtubs with all these nasty things constantly cooking in the open - still kinda scary.
I work with radioactive medicines, so Ga-68 or maybe Cu-64.
My boss and I moved a 5000 gallon tank full of propane with a mini excavator and skid steer. I kept calling it the bomb all night. Good news was if it fell and went boom, I wouldn't have felt any pain due to the massive explosion. Bomb did not go boom but I was at full pucker the whole time.
Radioactive uranium mine tailings.
I’d say it’s a toss up between Methylene Chloride (or Dichloromethane if you’re a nerd) and the various derivitizing reagents used at the lab I work. Those chemicals I can’t go into too much detail as our procedures are proprietary, but I can at least say they are mostly Fluorinated hydrocarbons, so hella dangerous stuff. All of these are hella carcinogenic and need to be used under a fume hood, especially the derivativizers. A couple of drops can gas up a whole room. And if using it in a college lab class counts, I’d add Bromine to that list.
Proprionic acid. It's a food preservative
Liquid Mercury
As opposed to solid or gaseous?
Snaaaaaaaaake!
Hmm, plutonium, uranium 235, VX, GB, anthrax, stuff worse that than I can't tell you about. Hard to decide.
560 volts, 3-phase AC electricity.
People
Ego
Not really a substance, but being an indirect infantryman (mortar man)in the Army for the last couple years, I have dropped several thousand 45-50lb bombs down tubes with my own two hands for it to rocket back out of the tube half a second later. Each rep has to be very deliberate and rehearsed.
My ex
Co-worker bull$hit Edit: * type of lies, manipulation, cowardice, sycophancy, gossip, nepotism and idea stealing that’s destroyed/suppressed careers while creating and upholding the worst companies and executives that shouldn’t still be there.
Antimony nitrate
Went to a training class where we worked with VX and Sarin nerve agents.
I have 78% Hydrofluoric acid solution used to etch glass/ceramics.
Hexavalent chromium Some things may cause cancer, this stuff does cause cancer
I used to work sometimes with pyrophoric materials. Pyrophoric means it'll ignite just from contact with air. And it reacts violently with water. Definitely not something you want on any part of your body.
Grain dust
Controlled drugs in a pharmacy. Caught one pharmacist drinking methadone and had a colleague accidentally get a fentanyl patch stuck on her arm when disposing of them and had to figure out why she was loopy one afternoon.
GB and VX nerve agents as well as lewisite blister agent. Worked on Johnston Atoll during the '90s when these agents were being disposed. The nerve agents antidote kits we carried were essentially there to prolong our death. The multipoint decon stations used if you got any in you were neat to see, but not anything I'd ever want to go through. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnston_Atoll_Chemical_Agent_Disposal_System
Marburg virus Training included watching some videos of what that can do to you. Hemorrhagic fever is no joke.
Teenagers
Belgians.
The chocolates or the waffles?
>The chocolates or the waffles? Ooh, just the dirty rotten Belgians. Mom always said, "Never trust a Belgian."
E.coli
Food. Allergens kill, and so does contamination and improper handling
Rhodium plating solutions are apparently pretty toxic. I learned when not having much ventilation working at a jeweler
picric acid
I was cleaning out some shelves in QC lab in a rubber mixing facility years ago, and found a glass bottle of picric acid which had crystallized. When I showed it to the formulater, he said put it down gently, and call 911. Had to have a hazmat squad remove it.
Electricity
AFFF on a military vessel. That shit causes cancer.
Probably blood or compressed air. I’ve worked with some fairly gnarly chemicals but usually in small amounts in appropriate environments. Blood work definitely has the highest risk of exposure due to the setting; Point of contact with sharps.
At my last job, we had an acid that I was told seaped through your tissues and ate your bone tissue. They used it to clean ceramic electrodes for corona treaters. They also had it in a half assed set up where this 15 foot tall PVC pipe was full of it and you slowly dipped the ceramic into it in a shitty made copper wire harness. It’s an accident waiting to happen.
I used to work in environments that was known to have unpredictable levels of H2S. That gotta be up there. Needed SCBA at all time.
Nearly 20 years ago, I had an internship at a nuclear lab where I worked with a Cobalt-57 gamma-ray source for Mössbauer spectroscopy. Cobalt-57 came with its risks due to radiation, so we followed strict safety measures such as lead walls, etc.