Laboratory safety, a sub-discipline of chemistry, significantly overlaps with organic, inorganic, analytical, biochemical and other sub-disciplines, and yet it has not received its due attention. Since the turn of the 20th Century, laboratory safety developed from an idea to a recognized area of need in the education for chemists and other laboratory-based scientists. This has been driven in large part by the industrial sector of chemistry that realized that being unsafe was very detrimental to its business. With passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 and its laboratory standard regulation, and the Resource and Conservation Recovery Act of 1976 and its chemical waste regulations, employers with laboratories were required to consider the safety of lab workers and compliance with federal laws and regulations. While the need for compliance was and is important, the focus on compliance brought about an unexpected and unrecognized effect � the neglect of a basic education in laboratory safety.  Education in basic laboratory safety enables chemistry (science) students to deal effectively and independently with laboratory safety. This presentation will briefly describe the development of laboratory safety since the early 1900s through today, and present a vision of laboratory safety in the future.

Laboratory safety and safety education: Past, present, future

248th National Meeting (2014)

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