Research productivity is not a hostage to good safety in the lab

Despite tighter safety rules at the University of California (UC) following the death of UC Los Angeles research assistant Sheri Sangji in January 2009, there has been no significant decline in research output at chemistry labs there. That’s the finding of a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) that debunks a ‘common view among academic researchers’ that ‘safety is a tax on research productivity’.

Although this fatal accident appears to have had no serious impact on the type of research UC labs conduct, it did lead a small subset of labs that worked with dangerous materials to be more cautious, the NBER paper concludes. The analysis is based on the activities of nearly 600 chemistry labs affiliated with the UC system between 2004 and 2017.