Fatal Lab Blasts Spur Fears Of Negligent China Science Policy

Deaths caused by university lab blasts have some scientists in China concerned about a lack of oversight and standardized safety protocols, especially in teaching labs, Adam Silver wrote for Nature.

Photo Insert: The Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA)

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, which 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 October 24 post by the university on the social-media network Weibo.

Earlier this year, on March 31, 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 was the cause 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.

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