One of the challenges in lab safety is that the lab se...

One of the challenges in lab safety is that the lab setting becomes very familiar to people who work in it day in and day out. “When you do something over and over, your perception of the risk may change even though the risk itself doesn’t change,” says Lawrence M. Gibbs, associate vice provost for EH&S at Stanford. His department tries to use information about incidents to remember researchers not to get too comfortable. In that way, hopefully something positive can come out of Sangji’s death. “It was a tragic, tragic incident,” Gibbs says. “We all have to learn from it and use it as reinforcement to help people understand the potential risks of working with high-hazard materials in this environment.