That's $15,000 Down the Drain

Coming in at #4 on the PI's list of "most read" stories today is the sad situation of a UW pharmacology prof who dumped some seriously nasty stuff down the sink to avoid the $15,000 in clean-up fees his lab would have had to pay to dispose of it properly. I'm not defending what he did, but feel compelled to point out something that those not in academia may not be aware of: for a research-driven lab, $15,000 is a helluva lot of money.

That is one graduate student's research salary for an entire year (or at least, it was close to that when I was in an incredibly similar lab at the University of Illinois in the late 90s). A company wouldn't even blink at spending 15K to deal with a nuisance, and clearly it is comedy to even talk about what that amount of money amounts to in the context of our current government's spending habits.

But for someone doing core scientific research, an undertaking that our government continues to devalue and ignore (unless it is "controversial" research, of course), that is enough money to allow him to even consider doing something foolish. Granted, most people would stop there and he didn't, and that is deeply unfortunate, but when billions of dollars go missing in Iraq and we still can't clean up our own nuclear waste properly in this country, I'm frustrated by the implied scorn heaped on this one individual. Sure, every newspaper and TV outlet will be shaking their heads as they report this, but will any of them be thinking "Hey, it took just $15,000 for a respected, veteran professor at the UW to do something like this. Money is that tight for a lab at a large university? Wow." Perhaps that's where the real story is, people.

And lastly, it is unclear whether he was put in an awkward situation not of his own doing, based on this perplexedly obtuse statement in the PI article: "The liquid was not used in his research, but was found in his lab." So had he ever purchased said liquid, or was it "dumped" in his lab by someone else and he got caught with it? And why isn't Professor Storm saying anything about that one way or the other? C'mon PI, a random listing of facts with a zinger like that left hanging in the middle of your article is deeply frustrating.

"Drain" photo from Flickr user karlakp.

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By Courtney in News on March 8, 2007 10:46 AM

Comments [rss]

yahlmeh bischez

Mike, having worked in "the same building as this guy" doesnt really amount to much, does it -the building contains the longest contiguous hallway in the U.S., as well as the hospital, surgical suite hundreds of classrooms etc. Dunno what you mean by lab researchers making a lot more than 15k, when I started grad school at UW they gave me 16k/year. After 6 years I was making about 20. Storm runs his lab at capacity and has several foreign postdocs who are not eligible for NIH training grants, so he has to pay them out of his own funds. An unexpected 15k fee could literally mean having to let a postdoc go. Do I need to explain to you what happens to a postdoc's career when he/she is unceremoniously "let go"? Years of graduate school and postdoc'ing for meager pay and long long hours get flushed down the toilet - the postdoc gets nothing, and his/her career is not likely to recover - postdoc'ing is a freaking tight rope and if it don't go perfectly you end up a research assistant prof in Alabama or some other god-forsaken place. Excuse me, what exactly are "funds the college budgets to each professor for lab operations"? Don't tell you think the University gives the lab money. You've got it perfectly backwards. Professors are required to contribute a large percentage of their grant money to the University and department for so-called "indirect costs", to pay for things the U or dept. deems necessary. Storm would have had to pay the 15k from the remainder of his own grants. The only person that was in any danger during this caper was Storm himself. He panicked and decided to lie about it, which was just downright stupid. That's really the bottom line... 15k dollars is an obscene amount of money to charge someone for "disposal" of this stuff. One other thing - several news stories point out that the ether "was not used for his research". What they fail to make clear is that the ether, in fact, was not even purchased by his lab. The canisters were in the lab when he moved there from the D-wing of the health sciences building back in about '99. The previous occupants of the lab, which was run by Edwin Krebs (Nobel Prize 1992), were the true owners of the ether - they didn't want to deal with the stuff and just left it there. No excuses, what he did is against the law, but he really got the shaft and is being made an example. Every PI and his brother tells grad students and post docs to just dump things down the sink - if it ain't radioactive or a biohazard, most ppl assume it will be diluted infinitely.

David F.

Yup. I've often wondered if the structure of academic science contributes to the selfishness a lot of people experience in labs. University scientists are trained to perceive of others in their field as competitors who are looking to steal their beautiful ideas and "scoop" them before they can publish. If you have a great result, you are counseled to keep it to yourself until the paper comes out, and so on. In the extreme case, I've seen labs (and I bet you have, too!) where grad students are given the same project to work on separately by the principal investigator in order to speed up getting results--pitting "colleagues" on opposite sides of the bench against each other.

And yet, and yet, changing that structure in a single lab to more of a kumbaya-let's-all-holds-hands regime is like unilateral disarmement....

Anyway, this was a great, thought-provoking post, Courtney. Thanks for raising it up out of the noise.

Courtney

I'm certainly not trying to invoke sympathy, like I said, his actions were foolish (and dangerous) and as you point out, even worse in the context of being a role model for other researchers in training. It's just that the dollar number kept jumping out at me--why not pay the disposal fee? Maybe as Mike suggests, he is just a cheap bastard and a selfish jerk. Regardless, the whole thing just struck me as sad, for lack of a better word.

David F.

In agree with you about the funding issues--thanks to the current administration, the NIH is as tight as a hunter's trap these days. But...I've seen too many scientists cavalierly handling nasty stuff to have any sympathy for this guy. The crime is more egregious for a professor who is, by his actions, supposed to be modeling the behavior we expect of the scientists-in-training in his lab.

20 Irony points for this: "His lab research involves memory and the brain."

Mike

Unfortunately, having worked in the same building as this guy at UW for several years now, I've seen that their lab researchers make a hell of a lot more than $15,000 a year (certainly more than me). With the amount of money these professors rake in in government grants, he can well afford the disposal fees on this, or could at least follow measures to plan how to budget the disposal by talking with the school. Many of these guys are just cheap bastards who will take whatever they can from the university in order to save their own funding. The money wouldn't have come out of an NIH grant since those are closely monitored, but it probably would have come from funds the college budgets to each professor for lab operations. He just didn't want to ante up. Either way, no excuse for pouring this shit down the drain and putting the building in danger of an explosion at the same time! What a jackass!I think this guy deserves everything he gets.