Deaths caused by university lab blasts have some scientists in China concerned about a lack of oversight and standardized safety protocols, especially in teaching labs.
Firemen at the site of an explosion at Beijing Jiaotong University in 2018.Credit: Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty
The deaths of two people following a laboratory explosion at a Chinese university in October have raised alarm among researchers. The full circumstances that led to the deaths at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA), in Jiangsu province, are not yet known — but they come amid wider concerns about safety in university teaching labs in China.
The deaths are the latest in a series of fatalities caused by explosions in academic laboratories in China, often involving students in chemistry departments, that have been reported in recent years. Some researchers are optimistic that the situation is improving. But others say China’s government needs to do more to improve safety.
In the recent incident, nine people were injured and two died as a result of an explosion just before 4 p.m. in the NUAA’s College of Materials Science and Technology, according to a 24 October post by the university on the social-media network Weibo. The NUAA said this week that an investigation was ongoing, but declined to answer Nature’s questions regarding the safety of its laboratories.
Earlier this year, on 31 March, a graduate student was killed following an explosion at the Institute of Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Previous lab blasts led to deaths of three students conducting a sewage-treatment experiment at Beijing Jiaotong University in December 2018; one death in the chemistry department at Tsinghua University in Beijing in December 2015; and one death in a chemistry lab at the China University of Mining and Technology in Xuzhou in April 2015.
It’s not possible to say what the cause was of any individual explosion and death without a full investigation report — none of which have been made public except for the incident at Beijing Jiaotong University — and some may not have been caused by negligence or lack of safety procedures.
‘Renewed safety concerns’
But a study1 that focussed on safety in graduate and undergraduate teaching labs, and was published online last month, claims that ‘the past two decades have seen a rise in university laboratory accidents in China.’
Led by researchers at the China University of Petroleum in Qingdao, the team looked at 110 publicly reported lab accidents in China between 2000 and 2018, finding that they had led to 102 injuries and 10 fatalities. But researchers think that the true number of accidents is likely to be significantly under-reported, as its likely some incidents are never made public.
The authors of the study note that the number of graduate students enrolled in laboratory-related disciplines in China ballooned from 90,000 in 2000 to about 5.3 million in 2019 — and the number of labs grew along with them, which they say may be part of the reason accidents have increased in number.
After the Nanjing blast, Chinese state news outlet Global Times said the incident had triggered ‘renewed safety concerns,’ adding that ‘Chinese chemists have been calling for improvements to lab safety at research institutions following previous incidents, which reflect systematic negligence of safety.’
Saad Javed, a systems scientist at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology who has studied and worked at the NUAA, worries that little has been learnt from the string of accidents at Chinese universities, and that more needs to be done to improve university governance to prevent future incidents.
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics was the site of a laboratory explosion in October.Credit: Yang Bo/China News Service/Getty
Nature asked the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing Jiaotong University, Tsinghua University and the China University of Mining and Technology if problems with safety may have been linked to the incidents at their institutions and whether there is a wider problem with safety in university labs in China, but all either declined to answer or did not respond.
Very few countries keep detailed records on numbers of university lab accidents. But in many countries deaths seem to be rare. In the United States, for example, the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board listed only one fatality related to a chemical incident at a university between 2001 and mid-2018. According to the Laboratory Safety Institute, which maintains an informal online memorial wall for researchers killed in labs, Germany and France each had one fatality from a lab incident over the same period, while the UK had none.
Safety is an issue globally
However, China has far more students than many other countries, so it’s difficult to say if it has a larger number of lab-related deaths per capita and researchers note that lab safety is an issue in many countries. Some also question the idea that incidents are becoming more frequent in China and argue that serious accidents were probably happening 15–20 years ago as well, but they just weren’t reported publicly before the rise of the Internet and social media.
Still other researchers in China who spoke to Nature say that some universities don’t place enough emphasis on lab experience and training for students, and some senior staff may even not have had enough safety training. Some institutions ‘don’t produce students with basic practical skills required to work in any research lab with hazards’, says one experimental physicist in China, who didn’t want to be named.
Yang Guang-Fu, a chemist who studies pesticides at Central China Normal University in Wuhan, agrees that there is a severe shortage of staff with safety expertise, that rules are poorly enforced and that the administrations of some Chinese universities don’t attach enough importance to safety.
Jason Chruma, an organic chemist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, who was a professor and then an assistant dean at Sichuan University in Chengdu from 2012 to 2020 says that some government safety regulations are not clear, are interpreted differently from place to place and are difficult for the government to enforce.
Although he can’t comment on current practices, Chruma says that during his time at Sichuan University he sometimes saw safety issues first hand, such as students conducting chemical reactions in hallways because there weren’t enough fume hoods in busy labs.
Sichuan University didn’t respond to Nature’s questions regarding the safety of its laboratories.
According to the November study, the 2018 explosion at Beijing Jiaotong University — which led to the deaths of three students and destroyed an entire laboratory — was caused by the ignition of 66 kilograms of improperly stored magnesium dust. The authors report that this was the first university lab accident in China for which a detailed investigation was conducted and the results were reported on a government website.
Security guards cordon off the building where a blast occurred in a chemistry lab at Tsinghua University, Beijing, in 2015.Credit: Chen Yehua/Xinhua/Alamy
Optimism of improvements
Some researchers are optimistic that the safety situation is improving, as it has in many countries in recent decades.
‘Compared with 20 years ago, lab safety in China has definitely made significant progress,’ says Samuel Yu, director of the Health, Safety and Environment Office at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He says big improvements include the addition of safety features such as fume cupboards and emergency showers. This ‘is most obvious in the leading universities’, he says.
Denis Simon, who was executive vice-chancellor of Duke Kunshan University in Jiangsu province from 2015 to 2020, agrees that ‘this is a country that has come a tremendously long way in improving the protocols’. But he says that China needs more specialists with a career focus on lab safety, and that grant awards should require certification of lab safety protocols for funded projects.
However, Yu doubts there is a simple solution to the problem in China. ‘The fatal lab accidents that we are aware of usually have multiple faults adding up to the tragic outcome, so I don’t think there is a single magic bullet,’ he says.
The concerns over university teaching labs in China follow a debate over whether the COVID pandemic might have started in a lab in China. But Gigi Gronvall, a biosecurity specialist at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who has visited labs in China, says that there is no reason to think that the problems flagged in student chemistry labs in China reveal anything about the biological research labs that handle dangerous pathogens.
‘I wouldn’t necessarily assume that those same problems are occurring with biological organisms,’ she says. Even the kind of non-teaching biological research labs that do quite advanced experiments don’t use dangerous pathogenic organisms, which typically require extensive safety training and follow more stringent safety standards.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03589-x
