MIT building contaminated with powerful neurotoxin dimethylmercury

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ggm•about 2 hours ago

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•about 2 hours ago

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.

kadoban•10 minutes ago

The wording of the announcements, sounds like a student synthesized it. Can't imagine why, hopefully it wasn't a fatal mistake.

peesem•about 3 hours ago

There's also an alert on the MIT emergency page, though it doesn't mention the substance by name: https://emergency.mit.net/

EA-3167•about 3 hours ago

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.

MIT building contaminated with powerful neurotoxin dimethylmercury

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Discussion (5 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews