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- Hacker News
- No traces of the precursors. No stuff in the blood. Looks more like a stunt designed to spread panic (or likes?), than a real event. In both cases the student has a lot of things to explain.by pvaldes
- Can someone who knows a thing or two about chemistry explain why one would need to synthesize or purchase this chemical. Given that it involves a student I'll take "because of bragging rights to impress everyone" as a valid response, but wondering if it has any value is otherwise? Is it one of those "well despite its danger it's still the best at X, Y and Z and nothing else comes even close"?by rdtsc
- I forget the guy's name, but he writes entertaining articles about chemistry things he'll never mess with. I wonder if Dimethyl Mercury is one of them.
Edit: reading further down the comments, Derek Lowe is guy.
by dylan604 - It can theoretically be used as rocket fuel.by weberer
- It can be something as simple as an analytical reference.
If you’re testing for dimethyl mercury in say fish, you need a standardized sample of dimethyl mercury to run.
These references are highly dilute and thus less hazardous. But some labs prepare their own references rather than buying them.
That requires working with pure dimethyl mercury.
The hazard is manageable as long as you’re prepared. Chemists work with lots of hazardous chemicals and it can all be managed with the right preparation.
by refurb - 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?
by ggm - 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.
by philipkglass - There's also an alert on the MIT emergency page, though it doesn't mention the substance by name: https://emergency.mit.net/by peesem
- Latest update reads in part:
"Emerging information calls into question whether this compound was in fact synthesized. We are also able to disclose, with the student’s permission, that while the student remains under medical supervision, their initial blood test result, which was received today, shows no sign of exposure to mercury."
- 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.
by EA-3167 - If you look at the reddit thread, there is a horrific story:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn#Accident_and_...
by consumer451 - Dimethylmercury evaporates to a known degree. Way way more than elemental mercury.
To detect elemental mercury vapor, the air is drawn in to a controlled chamber where if present it amalgamates with pure gold as the reference (zero) material, and determined electronically.
I don't think this works with organic mercury like dimethylmercury. It is an organo-metallic compound and behaves very unlike elemental mercury.
I'd be running the AA's from the analytical labs in mercury-vapor mode, putting them on carts if necessary since they do not need gas supplies for mercury detection & measurement.
Before plasma-emission spectrometers became widespread, more people were familiar with the traditional atomic-absorption (AA) instruments.
Instead of measuring the combined emission of any elements present in the sample, the AA used the steady emission of the target element alone as reference, from a (expensive) lamp having that specific element present within its hollow cathode.
AA normally uses a clean acetylene flame to vaporize the sample, with the reference light beam passing above the flame. If the target element is present in the sample, it absorbs some of the characteristic wavelength from the beam and is detected as a negative deviation from baseline.
For trace mercury though, the flame was not good enough, so an even more expensive and complex graphite furnace was installed in place of the burner.
Either way the light beam passes through a few inches of lab air to get from the lamp to the optical detector.
And you don't need the burner or the furnace to detect things that are already vaporized.
The graphite furnace would be good to calibrate with later if you couldn't do it in advance.
I wonder if their contractor has as good detection ability as MIT itself.
by fuzzfactor - Mods censoring the post for being trolling "disrespectful to the community" is classic Reddit.
Some guy's in the hospital from handling droplets of instant liquid death and they're worried about feelings being hurt?
- Apparently the article was, in fact, trolling with inaccurate speculative 'information.'by Finnucane
- Derek Lowe mentions dimethyl mercury as the first substance that's not worth the risk:
https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/a-risk-not-worth-taki...
by nirse - some will be unfriendly or hostile towards the safety-conservative.by chislobog
- Fans of this series - and folks who are generally in this post's comments - are likely to enjoy Larry Niven's short story "A Tall Tail": https://reactormag.com/a-tall-tail/by pavel_lishin
- His "Things I Won't Work With" series on Science (https://www.science.org/topic/blog-category/things-i-wont-wo...) is fun to read. The link in the article itself now unfortunately just points to the science.org homepage so you have to do some clicking around to get to this blog series.by kylepdm
- Back in 1998, I scored a consulting job at a silicon plant outside of Salem, OR. Now I was working as a systems admin and I was expected to be responsible for the computer systems, which were basically located in the normal offices, rather than a dedicated machine room floor.
However, since it was an active silicon manufacturing plant, all employees and contractors were obligated to complete safety training sessions. And I swear now that these safety sessions were designed to weed out the faint-hearted guys who weren't serious about supporting this silicon brand.
The safety sessions were simple lectures, with some handouts and PowerPoints, and some of the chemicals they described were absolutely insidious stuff. They were colorless, odorless, and some could melt or disintegrate bone without noticeably affecting the skin or muscles. They said you would just end up with a limp and useless appendage if you spilled some of this stuff on you. Other stuff was highly toxic and you didn't want to breathe anything. Basically it was a big warning to just stay out of the manufacturing floor, especially if we didn't know what we were doing.
I never went near the manufacturing floor. It was a pretty cool job and I wish I lasted longer there. They couldn't scare me away with a safety session, since my Dad had worked for decades in Environmental Health and Safety. Dad knew all about the nastiest stuff and he was always responding to hazardous laboratory accidents. Dad made us the safest home in our ZIP code.
- Silicon fabs are definitely up there for 'regular use of scary chemicals'.by rcxdude
- Oh yeah, cleaning chemical vapor deposition chambers in semiconductor industry, that's another one from Derek Lowe: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sand-won-t-save-yo...by trq01758
- I think Hydrofluoric acid is probably the substance you're describing which leaches the calcium out of your bones. It will certainly burn you too though. It's a common byproduct from heating fluorinated gases and is sometimes used in its own right for wet etching.
As an aside, I love it when they tell you in the safety WBT what the highly toxic gas smells like.
by gavinward - Note that it seems increasingly unlikely that it was actually synthesized.
> Emerging information calls into question whether this compound was in fact synthesized.
> while the student remains under medical supervision, their initial blood test result, which was received today, shows no sign of exposure to mercury.
Taken from https://emergency.mit.edu/
by fortenforge - Plausible scenario from a comment in the science.org post linked in another thread:
> If the MIT student was doing some work with reactive stuff and mercury and got an unknown result well outside expectations out of the output they were expecting i can see them struggling through working out what it could be, coming to the conclusion Dimethylmercury was possibble as an accidental side product of what went wrong, and just pulling all the emergency handles to be safe. Given how nasty that stuff is that is exactly the kind of reaction to such a scenario you'd want someone to have.
by mortenjorck - Imagine thinking you'd killed yourself, and then breathing the intense sigh of relief when you realize you're bad at chemistry and you didn't manage to synthesize the compound correctly.
- Other "sources" (using the word loosely as their provenance is unclear)
Karen Wetterhahn's exposure and death [3] is a cautionary tale of the extreme toxicity of dimethyl mercury, and was instrumental in new safety recommendations, including strongly discouraging the use of dimethyl mercury for any purpose.> "based on the information available, this was a localized issue with only one student directly exposed. Their reported use of dimethyl mercury was unauthorized. MIT does not allow the purchase or synthesis of dimethyl mercury." [1][1] https://www.reddit.com/r/mit/comments/1w12gb9/dimethyl_mercu...
[2] https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/hazmat-crews-respond-to...
by manarth - Good video about what happened to her body: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ7M01jV058by randerson
- > Less than 0.1 mL is capable of inducing severe mercury poisoning resulting in death
Holy hell. I would've have believed it was possible for a non-biological substance to be so toxic.
- Yes, dimethyl mercury is terrifying stuff - it killed Karen Wetterhahn from a few drops that went _through_ the gloves she had on:
> The case proved that the standard precautions at the time, all of which Wetterhahn had carefully followed, were inadequate for "super-toxic" chemicals like dimethylmercury
(from the Wikipedia page [3])
by gilleain - Derek Lowe has comments about this incident,
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/alleged-dimethylme... ("The Alleged Dimethylmercury Incident")
Seems the initial reporting may have been misleading. There was apparently *no* dimethylmercury exposure, after all: and MIT doubts it was synthesized in the first place.
by peri-cl