The Sacrifices of Science

When it is your job as a scientist to explore, discover and at times even challenge the basic laws of nature, it’s inevitable that nature will sometimes bite back (in some instances quite literally, as we will see).

Historically, the pursuit of scientific knowledge has sometimes come at immense personal risk, whether it be working with explosive substances, hazardous chemicals or dangerous biological species, and several famous (and not so famous) figures have lost their lives in this noble pursuit over the years.

While safety standards have definitely improved immensely in recent decades (I’m reminded of my High School chemistry teacher sticking her head into the fume cupboard and performing experiments with ungloved hands, while adding a perfunctory “kids, don’t do this at home” disclaimer), there are still a number of surprisingly recent cases of lives lost—and very close calls—in the laboratory and other scientific workplaces.

So, in honour of International Worker’s Day (a.k.a. Labour Day, a.k.a. May Day) celebrated today, May 1^st, in more than 100 countries, I decided to have a look at some of the most famous, tragic, daring and outright reckless cases of scientists who risked life and limb on the job.

A Brief History of International Worker’s Day

But before we get to that, let’s start with a brief history of International Worker’s Day and its relation to the fight for physical safety at the workplace.

If you’re lucky enough to live and work in the so-called “First World”, worker’s rights today is little more than getting off work in time to get to your Hot Yoga class, or having an ergonomic chair so your butt doesn’t get too stiff from sitting on it all day. But thing weren’t always this cushy, and the concept of worker’s rights is intimately linked to physical safety.

The average industrial worker in the 1880’s for example, worked 10 to 16 hours a day, 6 days a week, and most industrial accidents happened in the final hours of a shift, when exhaustion was at its peak. So, the concept of an 8-hour day was about more than leisure time or work-life balance; it was preventative measure against the risk of mutilation or death.

Before the establishment of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) in 1970—the reluctant culmination of decades of labour unrest—an average of 38 workers died on the job every day in the U.S., a figure which is shockingly high for today’s standards.

Incidentally, the reason Worker-s Day is celebrated on May 1^st has nothing to do with spring, but is due the protest organised on the May 1^st, 1886, by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, in which over 300,000 workers across the U.S. went on strike.

But this is a science blog, after all, so let’s move on to the advances in health and safety standards in scientific laboratories and medical research.

The Evolution of Safety in Scientific and Medical Research

The improvements in occupational health and safety in scientific and medical research are a direct results of the OSHA Act of 1970, although it took a decade or two before many became standardized and legalized. Up until the 1980s, for instance, lab safety was largely regulated internally by academic institutions themselves.

Advances include the Bloodborne Pathogens Standard, enacted in 1991 on the heels of the HIV/AIDS scare, which required research labs to provide Hepatitis B vaccinations for free and mandated the use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), and the Needlestick Safety and Prevention Act of the year 2000, which required labs and hospitals to use needles that retract or shield themselves.

The early 2000s saw the advent of the Biosafety Levels (BSL) codification system, which classified the biological agent threat and corresponding safety measures into four categories from 1 (low risk microbes like non-pathogenic strains of E. coli) to 4 (high-risk, life-threatening pathogens like the Ebola, Marburg and Lassa viruses).

Still later advances include the move towards active surveillance, such as Baseline Blood Draws, where scientists working with high-risk pathogens now often have their blood drawn and stored before they start work, in order to have a baseline comparison to determine if any future illness is a lab-related infection or not.

It is the testament to how far we have come in the improvement of health and safety standards in the lab that a national moratorium on research into a specific pathogen was enacted in France in 2021, in response to the tragic death of researcher Émilie Jaumain (more about that later).

With that short history lesson out of the way, lets get on to some specific examples of scientists who have given their lives (or come very close to doing so) to this noble quest for knowledge we call science.

Famous Historical Deaths in Science

The Pioneering Dames of Radioactivity

I will touch only briefly on the famous example of Marie Curie (1867–1934), who died of aplastic anaemia due almost-certainly to her decades-long exposure to ionizing radiation, and her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie (1897–1956), who also died of radiation-induced leukaemia after continuing her mother’s research, before moving on the case of Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958), a lesser known but equally tragic case of suspected radiation poisoning.

Rosalind was a physical chemist and a leading expert in X-ray crystallography, a technique used to determine the crystalline structure of molecules. She spent the better part of the early 1950s at King’s College London, refining X-ray crystallography techniques in order to capture high-resolution images of DNA. This dedication culminated in her famous "Photo 51," which provided critic evidence of the double stranded helical structure of DNA and is now recognised as one of the most significant images in the history of science.

Unfortunately, this dedication also involved spending hour after hour in close proximity to the X-ray source (Photo 51 alone required 100 hours of bombarding the sample with an X-ray beam), without any of the lead-glass shielding and protective protocols that are in place today, and her untimely death from ovarian cancer at the age of only 37 is largely attributed to this exposure.

To add and even more tragic twist to her tale, her early death may have cost her a place in the Watson, Crick, and Wilkins Nobel-Prize-winning team of in 1962. Although she is widely believed to have deserved it, the Nobel Committee does not award prizes posthumously.

Such was her dedication to science, however, that she continued to work until weeks before her death, despite undergoing multiple surgeries and experimental chemotherapy, although in later years she dedicated her significant scientific skills to a no less hazardous, but at least less carcinogenic field of study: viruses.

The Brave Boys of Nuclear Physics

But it wasn’t just the ladies risking their lives for nuclear science. During the infamous Manhattan Project—the development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos (I will resist the urge to digress into a rant on the Evils of the Empire)—two male scientists lost their lives to acute radiation poisoning in two separate work accidents on the same plutonium core (which later became known as the "Demon Core", for reasons that require no further explanation).

Harry Daghlian (1921–1945) was building a neutron reflector around the core by manually stacking tungsten carbide bricks on top of each other. Things went according to plan until he accidentally dropped one brick too many onto the core, causing it to go supercritical. To stop the reaction and avoid disaster he was forced to reach in manually to disassemble half the pile, and paid for it with acute radiation poisoning that ended his life 25 days later.

Less than a year later the same plutonium core took the life of Louis Slotin (1910–1946), when the screwdriver he was using to separate two beryllium hemispheres also serving as neutron reflectors slipped, causing the two hemispheres to come together and core to become supercritical. His quick reaction in pulling them apart again saved his colleagues, but exposed him to fatal dose of radiation, which took 9 days to kill him.

Both deaths served as a stark demonstration of the reckless nature of manual critical mass testing and led to stricter safety protocols in nuclear research. But while is unsurprising that many of the earlier deaths in science were due to nuclear radiation, as the biological sciences grew in scope and importance, another invisible threat started to take over as a significant cause of workplace deaths in science.

Microscopic Critters and Small Slips with Big Consequences

No matter how careful you are or how many measures are put in place, accidents happen. And when you’re working with pathogens, the slightest slip can have fatal consequences. Here are just some of the more recent high-profile laboratory deaths that have taken place in the biotechnology space, and how they have changed safety protocols.

The Rhesus Macaque and the Fatal Drop

Elizabeth Griffin (1975-1997) was working as a research assistant at the Yerkes National Primate Research Centre when she was tasked with helping to move a rhesus macaque, during which a single tiny droplet of fluid from the monkey splashed into her eye.

Unfortunately, this was enough was enough to infect her with the Cercopithecine herpesvirus 1, which is harmless to macaques, but has a fatality rate of 70% in humans if not treated immediately. The 22-year-old died six weeks later from complications related to the virus.

Her family founded the Elizabeth R. Griffin Foundation in her memory, which became a global leader in advocating for biological safety and the use of personal protective equipment (PPE).

The Molecular Genetist and the Plague

Another case that made the headlines was that of Malcolm Casadaban (1949-2009), an associate professor of molecular genetics from the University of Chicago, who died following an unknown accidental exposure to a laboratory strain of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the plague.

What makes this case interesting is that the strain was an attenuated one, which means it was genetically weakened to make it non-lethal. An autopsy revealed that Casadaban had undiagnosed hereditary hemochromatosis, a condition which allowed the bacteria to bypass the genetically engineered “safety mechanisms” and make it lethal specifically to him.

The peculiarities of this particular case served to highlight the importance of screening researchers for genetic conditions that could make them more vulnerable to certain disease or pathogens that would not otherwise affect the general population.

The Curious Case of Meningitis

Three short years later Richard Din (1987-2012), a young researcher from the Northern California Institute for Research and Education, died 24 hours after going home with “flu-like” symptoms. At the time of his death, he was working on a vaccine for Neisseria meningitidis, the bacterium that causes meningitis.

His death prompted the temporary closure of the lab and a major investigation by OSHA and the CDC, resulting in stricter requirements for working with live meningitis cultures. While vaccines exist for some strains of meningitis, they did not cover the specific strain he was researching, and he was likely exposed to the bacteria via an aerosolized droplet during a procedure, despite following standard protocols.

The Prion and the Tiny Cut

Finally, one of the most recent tragedies in the field of pathogen research is that of Émilie Jaumain (1986–2019), who died at age 33 of a variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), nine years after the initial exposure in a lab.

As a 24-year-old technician at the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE) in France, she was performing an experiment with mice that had been genetically modified to be susceptible to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), more commonly known as "mad cow disease", when she cut her thumb through two layers of gloves while cleaning laboratory equipment used to process the tissue samples.

The incident was particularly horrific because initial symptoms of severe neck and shoulder pain only started to appear more than seven years later, long after she thought she was in the clear, and gradually progressed to anxiety, hallucinations, memory impairment, and paralysis over a two-year period before her death.

Following a similar case involving another lab worker in 2021, a three-month moratorium on prion research was introduced in France, which ultimately led to stricter safety measures in French laboratories, including the use of plastic tools and cut-resistant gloves.

The above are all cases of accidental exposure to danger, by scientists who where unaware of the risks they faced and were doing their best to work as safely as possible (well, except maybe for the guys messing around in nuclear reactors with screwdrivers and bare hands).

But sometimes you get scientists who are so passionate about their medical research that they willingly expose themselves to unknown risks, to make advances that would otherwise be impossible. Luckily the examples to follow all survived their forages into self-experimentation, and some were even richly rewarded for their troubles.

Close Calls of the Downright Reckless

The Bacteria Broth

Australian physician Barry Marshall was convinced that stomach ulcers were caused by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori, at a time when the medical establishment attributed them to stress and spicy food. So, in 1984, after failing to prove his theory in animal models, he went all in and drank a "broth" filled with bacteria cultured from a patient.

Within days he developed severe gastritis, with all the joys that go with it, including agonizing stomach pain and vomiting. On the upside, he recovered after dosing himself with antibiotics, was able to prove his theory and was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his trouble.

The Black Widow Bite

Nowadays we all know that the "Black Widow" spider is best avoided, although non-lethal, but back in 1933, there was still some debate about whether a bite from the dark little lady would kill you or not. It took the dedication (or lunacy, depending on how you look at it) of one doctor, Allan Blair, to settle the debate.

How? By letting a Black Widow bite him for a full 10 seconds (to ensure the venom was fully delivered) and then documenting the symptoms for the next two days. Well, technically he only did the documentation himself for the first two hours, after which his assistant had to take over because he was feeling so rotten.

While it wasn’t quite Nobel Prize material, once he got over the excruciating muscle spasms, clammy sweats and vomiting, he did get a cool publication out of it… and survived to see it in print.

The Not-So-Accidental Overdose

And last but not least, there’s the pioneer of psychedelics, Albert Hofmann, who performed a controlled experiment with LSD on himself after his accidental discovery of the drug in 1943. There’s no need to elaborate on the story of his bicycle ride back home, which is by now world famous, but what many people don’t realise is just how massive a dose he took. The psychotic state it produce was so strong that he at one stage feared he had permanently broken his mind or was on the verge of slipping into a fatal coma.

Luckily this wasn’t the case, and he went on to inspire an entire generation of hippies, not to mention all the legitimate medical research currently being done on the healing power of psychedelics in depression, anxiety and other mental disorders.

The Bravest of the Brave

So there you have it folks: if you’re looking for examples of professions that require courage, fortitude and dedication, coupled every now and again with a daredevil streak, forget firefighters, policemen or deep-sea divers. Look no further than the unassuming scientists in their white lab coats. Who knows what dangers may be lurking within those inconspicuous test tubes they clasp in their hands?