In January, 1997, David Nierenberg was a physician at Dartmouth‐Hitchcock Medical Center, specializing in toxicology. Chemist Karen Wetterhahn was placed in his care. When she arrived at the hospital, Karen was slurring her speech and having difficulty balancing and with coordination. What David soon learned was that her symptoms were all due to a few tiny drops of a compound called dimethylmercury. Today’s episode focuses on two lab accidents that had a profound impact on research communities, and that inspired changes that have likely saved the lives of scientists and other workers since. The first story is that of Karen Wetterhahn who, in the 1990s was a professor of chemistry at Dartmouth College whose lab focused on heavy metal toxicity. The other story is about fatal prion protein exposures in France that led to a temporary moratorium in 2021.
Transcript of this Episode
David Nierenberg: I met Karen Wetterhahn when she was first admitted to the hospital … and after about a week she could see that her condition was getting worse day by day by day.
Sam Jones: That’s physician David Nierenberg. In January, 1997, David was at Dartmouth‐Hitchcock Medical Center, where he still practices today, specializing in internal medicine, clinical pharmacology, and toxicology. He was the physician in charge of the care of Dartmouth chemist Karen Wetterhahn.
David Nierenberg: Here I am, 27 or whatever it is, years later, and I can remember every detail like it was yesterday.
Sam: When she arrived at the hospital, Karen was slurring her speech and was having difficulty balancing and with coordination. What she soon learned was that her symptoms were all due to a few tiny drops of a compound called dimethylmercury.
David Nierenberg: And she said to me, wherever this goes, I want other chemists and people who work in labs… I want them to learn from this so that labs in the future are safer, and you have my blessing and my permission to discuss this case. If I'm going to be sick and if I'm going to die, make sure other people don't die of the same thing.
Sam: Welcome to Tiny Matters, a science podcast about the little things that have a big impact on our society, past and present. I’m Sam Jones and I’m joined by my cohost Deboki Chakravarti.
Deboki Chakravarti: Today’s episode focuses on two lab accidents that had a profound impact on research communities, and that inspired changes that have likely saved the lives of scientists and other workers since. The first story is that of Karen Wetterhahn, a story well known in much of the chemistry community, and for good reason. In the 1990’s, Karen, was a professor of chemistry at Dartmouth College whose lab focused on heavy metal toxicity.
David Nierenberg: She was interested in metals that were contaminating the environment. And she wanted to be able to measure mercury in environmental samples. So a loon who died in a lake or frogs that died in a pond, or plant life, or the bottom sediment that was dredged out of a pond. Was it contaminated with arsenic or mercury?
Deboki: On the day of her accident, Karen was setting up an experiment that included measuring mercury in a sample using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy, or NMR, a technique that gives you information about a chemical compound's structure and atomic interactions. She needed a mercury sample that had a known amount of the element as a control. So she purchased a very thin capillary tube filled with a form of mercury called dimethylmercury from a well respected life sciences company.
There are a few forms of mercury: elemental, ionic, and organic. Dimethylmercury is an organic form of mercury.
Christie Sayes: And these organic species can range from large dyes and large molecules that we use for particular chemistries in the industrial processes. Or they can bind to really small molecules like the one we're talking about today, dimethylmercury, where it's just a simple methyl group that's covalently bonded to the metal ion itself.
Deboki: That’s chemist Christie Sayes, a professor at Baylor University in the Department of Environmental Science.
Christie Sayes: Our bodies do an excellent job at having different layers of protection, different barriers to keep exogenous materials like contaminants and pollutants outside of our bodies, away from our vulnerable lungs as we breathe them in, or our circulatory system through our dermis or even our brain through the blood brain barrier. But there are some really small materials and substances and chemicals that can penetrate those barriers.
Deboki: But no one, including Karen, knew that about dimethylmercury.
On August 14, 1996, she followed every protocol to a tee. She worked in a fume hood which removed the risk of aerosol exposure. She also wore a lab coat and gloves.
David Nierenberg: She was wearing the gloves that were recommended that everybody wears in their labs. And then she was able to pipet it from the little tiny glass vial, suck it up into a pipette in the fume hood, and drop it into one of her little tiny capillary tubes that she could use as her standard in spectrophotometry. In the process of doing that pipetting, because this liquid is much more slippery than water, as she was holding the pipette and moving it, she noticed several drops fall onto her left hand that she was holding the little vial.
Sam: She wasn’t all that worried. She was following protocol.
David Nierenberg: She resealed the vial, she sealed the vial she had been using, and with paper towels, she cleaned up the little bit that spilled and kept it in the fume hood, which was working.
Sam: And in her lab notebook that day, ever the diligent scientist, she made an entry noting the small spill that she had cleaned up and then she went home for the day. What no one knew at the time was that dimethylmercury can easily seep through latex gloves in just a few seconds. Another thing people didn’t realize was that symptoms can take a while to show up. It wasn’t until about 5 months after the accident that Karen arrived at the hospital and met David.
David Nierenberg: What she first noticed was she started stumbling and losing her balance walking in a hallway, a narrow hallway like your closet. She would weave over and bump into the clothes on the left, and then the clothes on her right. Or walking down the stairs, she noticed her balance was very poor, and she used to zip down the stairs, but now she had to walk deliberately and slowly and hold onto the banister.
Deboki: Karen was an accomplished horseback rider and her balance had become so bad that she was afraid to ride her horse. Then, she started slurring her speech.
David Nierenberg: And when I met her and asked her to sign her name, her elegant penmanship, which I could see in all of her previous writing, was now sloppy penmanship. So there were three lines of evidence that her coordination was acutely and rapidly deteriorating for unclear reasons.
Sam with David: Right. Well, because in my mind, of course, I'm not a medical doctor, but you'd wonder, does someone have a brain tumor? Like there could be a number of things that would be going on. And so how did you sort of navigate that, and at what point did she say, actually, I was working with dimethylmercury in the lab. I wonder if I actually had an exposure that I didn't realize?
David Nierenberg: Well, I was a toxicologist, and she did mention to me after we talked about a lot of things, “Oh, by the way, I don't think this is relevant, but there was this little spill in the lab.” Which introduced the concept of exposure to a type of mercury compound.
Deboki: They sent off Karen’s blood for heavy metal analysis. As they waited for results, David began to dig deeper. But there just wasn’t much information out there about organic mercury compounds, including dimethylmercury. He did find two cases though that were related to monomethylmercury. The first was in Japan, in the city of Minamata.
In the 1950s and 60s, people in Minamata Bay were experiencing severe neurological symptoms including tremors, vision impairment, and cognitive decline. These symptoms were later found to be caused by industrial wastewater from a nearby chemical factory. The wastewater contained mercury which bioaccumulated as methylmercury in fish and shellfish in the bay, an important part of the local diet. Ultimately thousands of people became sick, experienced irreversible neurological impairment, and even died of what came to be called “Minamata disease.”
Sam: The other case David found in his research happened in Iraq. Starting in 1971, farmers and their families experienced more than 6,500 cases of methylmercury poisoning, which killed 459 people by 1972. The poisoning was caused by grain that had been treated with mercury-based fungicides. The grain had been imported from the United States and Mexico, and it was never intended for direct consumption — it was supposed to be planted. But the warning labels were written in Spanish, which the people in Iraq couldn’t read, and so they ground the wheat into flour to make bread.
David Nierenberg: And I found reports from 1971 in Iraq about patients two or three or four months after they ate that bread, having almost exactly what Karen Wetterhahn had. And then it showed problems with vision, which she then developed. And then it showed that a fairly high percentage of them would go on to die.
Sam: As soon as Karen’s blood test results were back it was clear: she had severe mercury poisoning. David placed her on an oral chelating agent called dimercaptosuccinic acid, or DMSA. Chelating agents, generally speaking, are chemical compounds that tightly bind to metals. DMSA will bind to mercury as well as other metals including lead and arsenic, forming a complex that will be excreted in someone’s urine.
Deboki: Although DMSA had been FDA approved for metal toxicity, there was no laboratory evidence in people as to how effective it would be for mercury poisoning specifically, although there was compelling evidence in mice. But when Karen started taking it, DMSA turned out to be really effective at clearing out the mercury.
David Nierenberg: The chelation started working virtually immediately. And by that I mean the chelating compound circulating in the blood, covalently bound to mercury that was in the blood, then traveled to the kidney, and then was peed out. So when we measured the amount of mercury each day in her urine, it increased from a tiny bit of mercury each day in her urine to almost a hundred or a thousand times more.
Deboki: David told us that although the chelation therapy was working really well, Karen was still deteriorating. And people wondered, how could you get this sick five months after a tiny exposure to some drops onto your gloved hand?
David Nierenberg: Whatever fell onto her hand made it through the glove instantly, went down through the skin very quickly into her subcutaneous fat, and then was slowly absorbed into her blood, and then it took five months to get to her brain and kill enough brain cells that she became symptomatic.
Sam: Although it took five months for the mercury to kill enough of the part of Karen’s brain that controls movement, speech and coordination, it probably started killing neurons in that region quickly. But there are still more questions than answers as to exactly how dimethylmercury is so devastatingly toxic.
Christie Sayes: At the end of the day, we don't know any precise mechanisms other than the fact that I think the evidence is pretty conclusive that methylmercury and dimethylmercury is way more likely to cross the blood-brain barrier than certainly a lot of other chemicals, but even more so than just mercury by itself.
And so the fact that the methyl mercury, the organometallic complex, allows it to permeate and penetrate through dermal layers, through their blood brain barrier, through other barriers like lung fluid or even in pregnancy, the placenta, this is what makes it super, super scary. And some people even call this a super toxin or super toxicant itself. So it's super toxic. It can distribute all throughout the body, all throughout the environment, and its metabolism and excretion takes forever to get out of the system.
David Nierenberg: It was at this point that she said, you know, if I should die from this, I want you to spread the word that methylmercury compounds are highly toxic and we need to really change how we handle them in laboratories.
Deboki: Soon Karen wasn’t able to speak, could barely see, and imaging showed that many of the lobes of her brain were shrinking, meaning her brain tissue was dying. She was transferred to Mass General Hospital in Boston to see if there was anything else that could be done. There wasn’t. And shortly after arriving, she lapsed into a coma that she sadly didn’t wake up from. She died on June 8, 1997 at just 48 years old, leaving behind friends and family, including her husband and two children.
Sam: David told us they did a thorough sweep of the lab, testing surfaces and also other lab members. The only place they found dimethylmercury was in the fume hood and on the speaker of Karen’s telephone, showing that the compound had likely made it to her lungs and she was actually breathing it out. David and his colleagues wondered if she could have been exposed more than once, but a test of Karen’s hair showed those tiny drops were her only exposure.
Hair analysis is an excellent method for pinpointing the time and number of exposures a person has to a chemical. That’s because hair grows at a consistent rate and, as it does, incorporates substances from the environment and a person’s body. Analysis of strands of Karen’s hair showed just one peak in mercury trapped in hair proteins part way down her head. Based on how far down the hair strands that was, it was clearly from the time of the accidental lab exposure. David and his colleagues reached out to chemical companies and asked them to stop selling dimethylmercury.
David Nierenberg: And whatever you do, do not ship it in a glass vial through the post office. If you drop that package and it breaks, everyone in the room is going to be exposed. It turned out the chemical was manufactured in a mom and pop laboratory that specialized in manufacturing and synthesizing specialized chemicals like dimethyl mercury in his garage…And we called them and said, please stop making this chemical. It's so toxic, and we had this case. And he said, well, some people are buying it for various experiments, so I'm going to keep making it. And I said, well, watch out.
Sam: David told us that not long after this conversation, the person accidentally dropped one of the glass vials in his garage and that was finally enough for him to get freaked out and stop producing the highly toxic compound.
David Nierenberg: I thought that was the end of this chemical. But about two years ago, I got an email from a PhD chemist in India…and I'm paraphrasing here, but he wrote, dear Dr. Nierenberg, I am a PhD graduate student in chemistry here in India, and my colleagues and I want to do experiments using dimethylmercury that we can get synthesized here in India. Do you think if I wear gloves, I would be safe or would I die like the patient that you saw, because we read your journal article. And I wrote back and said, basically, you can't be serious. So I said, I strongly advise you not to use that chemical in your research. It's too toxic. As far as I know, that's the last communication was a couple of years ago that relates to this case.
Deboki: Christie had a lot to say on how environmental health and safety or EH&S is an essential part of the work any scientist does, and how tests have really improved to understand any compound a person is working with and the risks it poses.
Christie Sayes: If there is a new material or even an existing material, we routinely go through tests to make sure that we understand what the skin or the dermal penetration or permeation might be. And then on top of that, when you're wearing protective equipment, personal protective equipment like gloves or a respirator or a lab coat, for instance, we test to see what is the penetration of permeation through those personal protective equipment as well.
Further to that, we've started with best practices in the chemistry industry and in graduate school and undergrad labs and in industry, we start working with double gloves. Sometimes the gloves are just the same, gloves just doubled up. Sometimes it's gloves made of two different materials. So there are these gloves that are really plastic lined and they're impenetrable to almost anything. Then on top of that, you put thicker Teflon gloves on top of that to be able to protect you against any sort of penetration at all.
Deboki: Gloves have also gotten longer, going up beyond the wrists. Lab coats have as well, with wristbands sewn into them so that they stay put when you’re moving around during an experiment.
Christie Sayes: I've been so fortunate to grow up from my training all the way now as an adult, as a full professor, it's always been a cornerstone. EH&S has always been a cornerstone in any different laboratory. If I'm in consulting industry, if I'm working with government or international colleagues and partners in other academics, in the departments, across the universities, everybody keeps health and safety as a cornerstone. It's not viewed as a nuisance. It is not viewed as an annoyance. This is something that faculty want for their students. This is something that managers want for their employees.
Sam: Deboki, had you heard of Karen’s story before?
Deboki: I can’t remember hearing it, and it feels like a story I would definitely remember!
Sam: I first learned of the story when I was in high school, probably from my dad who went to Dartmouth in the 70s, which of course was long before Karen Wetterhahn’s death. And it really, really stuck with me. I actually didn’t realize how much of an impact it made on the chemistry community and lab safety community until I started looking into it for today.
Now we’re going to pivot, but not too much because, like we mentioned at the top of the episode, we have two lab accident stories to tell you. But this one is far more recent and doesn’t have to do with a heavy metal. It has to do with proteins called prions.
Deboki: We covered prions in July, 2023, in episode 39, which we’ll link to in the show notes. But here’s a very brief crash course.
Candace Mathiason: The term prion itself stands for proteinaceous infectious particle. And so a prion is actually the prion protein, which is a normal cellular form of the protein in all mammalian species, and it's this protein that has misfolded and starts to aggregate upon itself that causes the prion disease.
Deboki: That’s Candace Mathiason, a professor at Colorado State University in the department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology. She directs the Infectious Disease Research and Response Network.
With prion disease, when a misfolded prion comes into contact with a normal prion, it causes it to also misfold, like a domino effect. The accumulating misfolded proteins begin to kill off nervous tissue within the brain, creating holes, and leading to neurodegenerative disease. This manifests as difficulty walking and speaking, dementia, and ultimately death.
Sam: There are a number of forms of prion disease but the one most of us have probably heard of is mad cow or bovine spongiform encephalopathy — also called BSE. The oldest of the prion diseases is called scrapie, which occurs in sheep, and then there’s the disease Candace primarily focuses on, called chronic wasting disease, which is found in cervid species, including deer and moose.
Candace Mathiason: And this is a disease that is highly infectious, easily transmissible. It's the most easily transmitted of all of the prion diseases. And then of course the human prion diseases, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in particular, and this is a disease that has been transmitted, we believe it was transmitted from mad cow disease or BSE infected cattle to people consuming those cattle, the species barrier was broken and these individuals developed what we know is called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
Sam: There are different types of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or CJD. There’s the variant form that Candace just mentioned, which has been linked to consumption of beef from cows with BSE, but there are other forms of CJD as well, including genetic CJD, where risk is inherited, sporadic CJD, which arises with no obvious cause, and iatrogenic CJD, where a person develops the disease through a blood transfusion or, for example, contamination of medical instruments used during surgery. And here’s where we get to the accident.
In 2021, in France, a retired laboratory worker who worked with biological tissues infected with prions was diagnosed with CJD. In July of that year, five institutions placed a 3-month moratorium on prion research in the country to study the possibility that the worker was exposed during the job and to evaluate the need for new preventative measures. In November, the worker died.
Deboki: But this actually wasn’t the first case of a lab worker being — or likely being — infected. A couple of years earlier, in 2019, another person had died of CJD. Her name was Émilie Jaumain. In 2010, she had been working with mice that expressed the mutant human prion protein. While working with the mouse brain tissue, she accidentally stabbed through two sets of latex gloves with the sharp forceps she was using to handle the sections of brain.
According to an interview in Science with her widower, she began worrying about the exposure right away and kept telling her doctors about it. But it wasn’t until November 2017 that she started to experience symptoms, developing a burning pain in her right shoulder and neck that spread down the right side of her body. In January, 2019, she began suffering from memory impairment and hallucinations. By mid-March she was diagnosed with probable variant CJD. After she died in June, 2019, at just 33 years old, a postmortem analysis confirmed CJD.
Sam with Candace: As someone who has been in this field for a long time who's obviously very close to other researchers in the field, what do you remember about that time?
Candace Mathiason: Yeah. We all took a collective step back I think when that happened and reviewed our protocols that we have in lab. I think that's when conversations increased in laboratories, more and more consistent over time and more people took the approach of having a centralized individual that does training and a contact person, which for us, that's that same person. Our lab manager serves as that training component as well as a contact if an accident were to occur or a spill occurs in the lab. That person takes on that role overall. But honestly, I think it helped us redefine how important PPE is in working with infectious agents and how prevention is where we should be heading when it comes to working with prion diseases, all infectious diseases, but in particular prion diseases.
Deboki: This is an incredibly important field of research, but how do we do it safely? For starters, Candace says they work under Biosafety Level 2 or BSL2 guidelines, which includes personal protective equipment or PPE, research area design requirements, along with appropriate training and protocols for various situations.
Candace Mathiason: All of the prions are worked under BSL2 guidelines, but we've put a plus sign behind that, meaning that everything that goes into our prion labs doesn't come out unless it goes under high temperature, high pressure decontamination. Any animal tissue goes under incineration or alkaline digestion. So while we're working in the laboratory, we wear lab coats, foot coverings, eye coverings, gloves are the main things we work with in the lab. We do all of our aerosolization within a biosafety hood. We also have what are called bio-bubbles that allow us to put equipment inside those enclosures so that as we're amplifying, much like one might amplify by PCR, we can amplify protein by different assays that we contain all that material within a bio-bubble. That helps. We have a lab manager who does all of our training so that we know everyone's getting the same training across, whether it's undergraduate students coming in or graduate students coming in or other research personnel that are coming in, we all get the same training from one individual. That allows us then to have a little better understanding versus the telephone game that could happen over time.
Sam with Candace: Yeah that’s smart. The regulations that you have in your lab, are those the standard in, say, the United States, or is it kind of up to the individual lab?
Candace Mathiason: Yeah, I think there's a standard, because for chronic wasting disease…so any of the non-human prions, we have to have USDA approval to have those in our laboratory. And so we're scrutinized at three-year intervals through the USDA permits, and they ask for all of these. So here in the United States, everyone that's working with the mammalian prions would be using very similar protocols coming into a laboratory.
Deboki: The regulatory guidance other countries receive varies, but Candace says there’s a real sense of community within the field.
Candace Mathiason: The prion field is a very small field, and so these are like my family. These are people that I gather with at least once a year to better understand what's going on in the field scientifically, but also from a biosafety perspective. All of the folks that I know that are working in the field work under very similar guidelines as the U.S. BSL-2 facilities for oversight of regulation in day-to-day work with prions, no matter whether they're human or non-human prions.
Deboki: But what is possible if someone is exposed?
Candace Mathiason: There are no treatments for prion diseases, so again, it's the prevention. If an accident were to occur for a pinprick or a needle stick or something, you try to do like you would do any other infectious disease. Dilution is the solution. You try to rinse it off, you try to squeeze out blood coming out of that if it actually penetrated the skin, and then we do a bleach protocol on top of that over time, but again there’s no treatments for prions.
Deboki: Sam, the whole time we’ve been talking about this, I’ve been remembering what it was like to work in a lab with chemicals and biological entities that are also so commonplace that you can forget they can be dangerous. And even when you think you’re being careful, it doesn’t take much for an accident to happen, just like in the cases of Karen and Émilie.
Sam: Totally, and that’s why prevention is so key. All of the researchers we talked to really brought home how important it is for us to make sure we talk about these events, even when they’re unbelievably sad, because they’re such important wake-up calls that have led to multiple fields of research being safer.
Sam: Are we tiny show and telling?
Deboki: We are.
Sam: Let's do it.
Deboki: I think mine, it's not related, but it is in some ways kind of loosely...
Sam: In the same universe.
Deboki: Yeah. Did you know that our wounds take longer to heal than other mammals? And it might be because we're less hairy than them?
Sam: Really?
Deboki: Yeah. Yeah. I had no idea.
Sam: I would sort of think the opposite, like hair would get in the way for some reason.
Deboki: Right? Yeah. It feels like, oh, wouldn't you just want all this nice open space for all the cells to get closer together? Well, so here's what's happening. So a researcher was studying wild baboons in Kenya, and they noticed that their wounds seem to heal much faster than her own wounds. She's like, I see them getting in little scraps with each other, and the cuts that they get, they seem to heal fine compared... Or faster just compared to my own.
And so she wanted to see if that was actually true. She observed it, but it's like, is that actually the case? So she's part of this study that looked at healing in humans and compared it to rats, mice, and several different primates. So these were vervet monkeys, Sykes' monkeys, baboons and chimpanzees. And so for the human subjects, they were looking at patients who had skin tumors removed, and they saw how long it took for the wound to shrink and they compared that to wounds on the animals. And so they found that the human wounds healed at a rate of around 0.25 millimeters each day. Meanwhile, the animal wounds averaged at around 0.61 millimeters per day.
Sam: Oh, wow.
Deboki: Right?
Sam: That's much faster.
Deboki: For sure. And so they connected this to the hair. And why? Because like you said, you and I were both like that feels off. It feels like hair would actually make the wounds... It feels like it gets in the way, but actually the roots of our hairs, they have follicles that actually hold stem cells and the stem cells make hair, but they're hypothesizing they can also grow new skin that would make the wounds heal faster. So, yeah.
Sam: I love that. That's so interesting. I love when a counterintuitive thing is sort of explained to me.
Deboki: Yeah. Yeah. It's so weird.
Sam: Okay. Well, I also have a kind of fun one today. I feel like we've been on a roll. Well, I don't know actually.
Deboki: We had the bummer day, and then today we're now back to no bummers. But I guess today, we were talking about some heavy stuff today, so I think it's nice to do something a little different.
Sam: Yeah, we're ending on a lighter note for sure. Okay. So I'm going to tell you about slime from velvet worms and how it could be important for sustainable material design.
Deboki: Oh, fun.
Sam: So velvet worms are these very cool caterpillar like animals found in the Southern Hemisphere in humid forests. They can be very pretty. I mean, there's a range. I'm going to send you a link to one right now that's really cute. And it's pretty closely related to a tardigrade, which you'll be able to see in this photo, which I will also link too for our listeners.
Deboki: Let's see. Oh. It is really cute.
Sam: It is really cute.
Deboki: I wasn't expecting it to be that cute.
Sam: I know. Some are not quite as cute. There's a range, but I love that one. I think it's so cute.
Deboki: Yeah.
Sam: So anyway, they can be very pretty. We'll have a link. You can also look it up as long as you're not driving right now. And so what they do is they use slime to capture prey, and when they eject the slime, it really quickly hardens into fibers that are apparently as strong as nylon, but then those fibers can dissolve in water. Then researchers have also found that it can go back to being a fiber, so it can kind of do this back and forth between the two forms. So now researchers have figured out, or at least they're hypothesizing, how this works. So they used protein sequencing and structure prediction with an AI tool called AlphaFold, which maybe you've heard of, because it actually won a few researchers the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry.
And what they found was that proteins in the slime seem to link these other large structural proteins during fiber formation. And so the idea now is to instead of using synthetic fibers and plastics that rely on petroleum-based molecules, which are of course not sustainable, to use something like this slime that could later be dissolved, but they of course need to figure out how to modify it enough that it's not just dissolving in water.
But it was funny in the press release, the scientists seemed very confident saying, "obviously a plastic bottle that dissolves in water would have limited use, but by adjusting the chemistry of this binding mechanism, we can get around the issue." So that's confidence there. But yeah, I mean, I think this isn't the first time that we've talked about sustainable materials, sustainable polymers, that kind of thing. There's just this huge effort towards sustainability, particularly in chemistry, and it's so interesting just seeing what people come up with.
Deboki: Yeah. Yeah. And especially coming from a cute little worm, I wouldn't have expected that.
Sam: I know. Adorable.
Deboki: Thanks for tuning in to this week’s episode of Tiny Matters, a podcast brought to you by the American Chemical Society and produced by Multitude. This week’s script was written by Sam, who is also our executive producer, and edited by me and by Michael David. It was fact-checked by Michelle Boucher. Our audio editor was Mischa Stanton.
Sam: Thanks so much to Candace Mathiason, David Nierenberg, and Christie Stayes for joining us. Go rate and review us wherever you listen, we really appreciate it. We’ll see you next time.
References:
- A Tribute to Karen Wetterhahn
- 25 years after Karen Wetterhahn died of dimethylmercury poisoning, her influence persists
- Minamata Bay mercury poisoning
- Minamata Convention on Mercury
- An outbreak of organomercury poisoning among Iraqi farmers
- Dimercaptosuccinic acid (DMSA), a non-toxic, water-soluble treatment for heavy metal toxicity
- Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease
- France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes two lab workers
- Variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease Diagnosed 7.5 Years after Occupational Exposure
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