MIT building contaminated with powerful neurotoxin dimethylmercury

18 pointsposted 13 hours ago
by peesem
(reddit.com)

9 Comments

ggm

12 hours ago

Why were they working with an unauthorised potent neurotoxin? MIT didn't "permit" this, although you could ask how student supervision allows it to arise.

Is there some interesting aspect which danger aside might motivate this or was it just a dick move? Were they possibly motivated for bad reasons, seeking to commit harm?

philipkglass

12 hours ago

Dimethylmercury is (or was, at least historically) used as a reference material for nuclear magnetic resonance (a common analytical method used in chemistry):

https://sites.northwestern.edu/ohalloran/199hg-nmr-standards...

This MIT incident was in a chemistry building that has been in use since 1970, so it could have been accidental release of an old, unused container or sample tube of the material.

ggm

9 hours ago

Thanks! 40+ years ago I worked in a marine biology lab as a dishpig for seawater analysis and we had fun times when the annual clear out found a gallon jug of benzene at the point of panic about benzene being replaced by toluene.

kadoban

10 hours ago

The wording of the announcements, sounds like a student synthesized it. Can't imagine why, hopefully it wasn't a fatal mistake.

manarth

an hour ago

  > "Can't imagine why"
"There's no point banning it, it's easy to make – let me show you. Hold my beer."

EA-3167

13 hours ago

Wow, I wonder if chelation therapy early enough can reduce the damage to the student's nervous system. I'm not aware of how quickly organic mercury crosses the BBB once it enters the bloodstream, but my guess is "faster than you'd like".

I hope it was worth working with such a notoriously unsafe compound against regulations and all sense.

consumer451

8 hours ago

If you look at the reddit thread, there is a horrific story:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn#Accident_and_...

EA-3167

7 hours ago

Yeah that was awful, but in her case she was unaware of the poisoning for months iirc. Then again I don't really buy that chelation therapy works that well for something as absurdly toxic as this even if you found a safe and workable ligand.

I guess the student just needs to hope their exposure was incredibly minute, otherwise they really have only a hard death to look forward to.