MIT building contaminated with powerful neurotoxin dimethylmercury
Comments
peesem
ggm
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?
philipkglass
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.
ggm
Thanks! 40+ years ago I worked in a marine biology lab as a dishpig for seawater analysis and we had fun times when the annual clear out found a gallon jug of benzene at the point of panic about benzene being replaced by toluene.
kadoban
The wording of the announcements, sounds like a student synthesized it. Can't imagine why, hopefully it wasn't a fatal mistake.
manarth
> "Can't imagine why"
EA-3167
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.
consumer451
If you look at the reddit thread, there is a horrific story:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn#Accident_and_...
EA-3167
Yeah that was awful, but in her case she was unaware of the poisoning for months iirc. Then again I don't really buy that chelation therapy works that well for something as absurdly toxic as this even if you found a safe and workable ligand.
I guess the student just needs to hope their exposure was incredibly minute, otherwise they really have only a hard death to look forward to.
dimethylmercury
There are some new results for treatment with selenium and acetyl cysteine. MGH is probably the best place to get treatment for this. We’ll have to wait and see, and there is not any information out about the extent of exposure. Prior cases all seem to have only sought treatment upon getting symptoms, so I am cautiously optimistic about this case
There's also an alert on the MIT emergency page, though it doesn't mention the substance by name: https://emergency.mit.net/