• Mac@mander.xyzEnglish
      6·
      13 days ago

      We can also eat lead, dispose of oil in gravel pits, and put asbestos back in manufacturing!
      Make America Toxic Again!

  • casmael@lemm.ee
    12·
    14 days ago

    Memory unlocked:

    My grandfather was a chemist who worked for the British government in the post war years researching reinforced concrete. I remember him relating a curious anecdote about a colleague of his who would wash his hands every day with some kind of toxic substance. My grandfather said ‘I told him that he should stop using that stuff to wash his hands, but he wouldn’t listen. Of course eventually he became very ill.’ It would seem odd for a scientist in a government research department to use something like this, but I wonder if it was a similar product that the chap was using. Curious.

    • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      22 hours ago

      It was probably benzene. Benzene is an amazing cleaning agent, if not for the fact that’s it’s both super volatile and super carcinogenic.

      I’m a chemist by training. During my master’s degree I had an old professor who helped write several national safety regulations, fighting for several rules back in the 80’s when “workplace safety” meant “don’t leap out the window unless there’s a fire”. But he’d also clean lab tables (after hours) with benzene from a giant brown stoppered bottle he kept in his desk drawer, and he had the habit of turning his head sideways when working with volatiles, because you didn’t want any flammable gasses to contact the pipe you were always smoking while in the lab.

      He joked that no amount of benzene was going to outcompete nonstop smoking from age 13, and he only quit when it was banned in the lab. He was the person who always told us that chemists died 10 years younger than everyone else, but not to worry, that was mostly because of his generation was skewing the stats, and we’d be fine.

      He also died two years into retirement, from cancer of the everything.