The deaths of two people following a laboratory explosion at a Chinese university in October have raised alarm among researchers. The full circumstances that led to the deaths at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA), in Jiangsu province, are not yet known — but they come amid wider concerns about safety in university teaching labs in China. The deaths are the latest in a series of fatalities caused by explosions in academic laboratories in China, often involving students in chemistry departments, that have been reported in recent years. Some researchers are optimistic that the situation is improving. But others say China’s government needs to do more to improve safety. In the recent incident, nine people were injured and two died as a result of an explosion just before 4 p.m. in the NUAA’s College of Materials Science and Technology, according to a 24 October post by the university on the social-media network Weibo. The NUAA said this week that an investigation was ongoing, but declined to answer Nature’s questions regarding the safety of its laboratories. Earlier this year, on 31 March, a graduate student was killed following an explosion at the Institute of Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Previous lab blasts led to deaths of three students conducting a sewage-treatment experiment at Beijing Jiaotong University in December 2018; one death in the chemistry department at Tsinghua University in Beijing in December 2015; and one death in a chemistry lab at the China University of Mining and Technology in Xuzhou in April 2015. It’s not possible to say what the cause was of any individual explosion and death without a full investigation report — none of which have been made public except for the incident at Beijing Jiaotong University — and some may not have been caused by negligence or lack of safety procedures.
Renewed safety concerns
Nature asked the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing Jiaotong University, Tsinghua University, and the China University of Mining and Technology if problems with safety may have been linked to the incidents at their institutions and whether there is a wider problem with safety in university labs in China, but all either declined to answer or did not respond. Very few countries keep detailed records on the number of university lab accidents. But in many countries deaths seem to be rare. In the United States, for example, the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board listed only one fatality related to a chemical incident at a university between 2001 and mid-2018. According to the Laboratory Safety Institute, which maintains an informal online memorial wall for researchers killed in labs, Germany and France each had one fatality from a lab incident over the same period, while the UK had none.
Safety is an issue globally
However, China has far more students than many other countries, so it's difficult to say if it has a larger number of lab-related deaths per capita and researchers note that lab safety is an issue in many countries. Some also question the idea that incidents are becoming more frequent in China and argue that serious accidents were probably happening 15–20 years ago as well, but they just weren’t reported publicly before the rise of the Internet and social media. Still, other researchers in China who spoke to Nature say that some universities don’t place enough emphasis on lab experience and training for students, and some senior staff may even not have had enough safety training. Some institutions “don’t produce students with basic practical skills required to work in any research lab with hazards”, says one experimental physicist in China, who didn’t want to be named. Yang Guang-Fu, a chemist who studies pesticides at Central China Normal University in Wuhan, agrees that there is a severe shortage of staff with safety experts, that rules are poorly enforced and that the administrations of some Chinese universities don’t attach enough importance to safety.
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