"Emerging information calls into question whether this compound was in fact synthesized. We are also able to disclose, with the student’s permission, that while the student remains under medical supervision, their initial blood test result, which was received today, shows no sign of exposure to mercury."
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.
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.
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
Dimethylmercury is (or was, at least historically) used as a reference material for nuclear magnetic resonance (a common analytical method used in chemistry):
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.
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.
If the lab is going to check for trace benzene in the water, ideally you would have some pure material for reference purposes.
Put that in perspective against industrial quantities where a hardhat operator opens the hatch on a very full compartment of a chemical tanker, looking at their mirror image reflecting up from the surface of a few hundred tonnes of cargo a few feet below.
Which is then carefully sampled and delivered to a lab where they check for trace water in the benzene.
The synthesis attempt was not for this. It's unclear what they were attempting and it's impossible that they didn't know the stakes. Their lab develops fundamental organic methods.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 54.2 ms ] thread"Emerging information calls into question whether this compound was in fact synthesized. We are also able to disclose, with the student’s permission, that while the student remains under medical supervision, their initial blood test result, which was received today, shows no sign of exposure to mercury."
I hope it was worth working with such a notoriously unsafe compound against regulations and all sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn#Accident_and_...
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.
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.
Put that in perspective against industrial quantities where a hardhat operator opens the hatch on a very full compartment of a chemical tanker, looking at their mirror image reflecting up from the surface of a few hundred tonnes of cargo a few feet below.
Which is then carefully sampled and delivered to a lab where they check for trace water in the benzene.