Team:SMS Shenzhen/Safety

Safety

I Introduction

Safety often plays a extremely significant role in our investigation and experiments. We not only care about how is our project going, but also care about safety throughout our researches. All of us consider that lab safety has priority to all other material. Therefore, we attach huge importance to both inside and outside our lab.

II Inside—Lab Safety

Our laboratory is classified as biosafety level 1, according to the World Health Organization Laboratory Biosafety Manual (Third Edition), which means it has no or low individual and community risk, and microorganism inside is unlikely to cause human or animal disease.

Our team members who work in laboratory are required to wear protective laboratory clothes, closed-toed footwear, and unauthorized person can never enter our laboratory working areas. While working, gloves should always be worn at all the time, and used gloves should be disinfected before throwing into specific lab-use trash can. Besides, it is strictly prohibited to eat or drink any stuff that is in laboratory. We also use several way to prevent hurt to our researches. For example, since EtBr can do harm to researchers, we use gene color, which is a safer dye for DNA. Hence, it is harmless to human being.

All of students in our team have already trained to work and do researches safely in laboratory. In the safety training, our teacher discussed the importance with students, and expounded the aftermath of working with no regard to safety. Therefore, all of us understand the significance of working properly and the consequence of working incorrectly.

In addition, we regard to facility safety as well. For instance, when using centrifuges, we must carefully balance the buckets and trunnions by weight and make sure everything is correct. After using ultraviolet rays for vertical clean benches, students should wait for 5 minutes before using it, due to safety reason.

III Outside—Environmental Safety

We not only deal with inside—laboratory safety, but also care about outside—environmental safety. All used things should be checked to see if they can pour directly into the sink. For used bacteria, we use high-temperature sterilization to sterilize them before throwing away. Since no high-risk bacterium or microorganism is used in our laboratory, our laboratory doesn’t affect environment harmfully.

IV Mistakes & Improvement

Instead of those safety rules, we also find out that we still have a long way to go. First of all, since most of the laboratories in US have emergency eyewash, we definitely should have some inside our laboratory as well, so that we can respond calmly in an emergency and know what to do if dangerous chemical is unfortunately mixed into students’ eyes. Second, now we don’t have any safety facility to deal with fire, thus we must build a fire hydrant inside our laboratory.

V Reference:

WHO Laboratory Biosafety Manual (Third Edition), World Health Organization, 2004

(http://www.who.int/csr/resources/publications/biosafety/WHO_CDS_CSR_LYO_2004_11/en/)

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