"I got there two hours after the explosion," Kaufman remembers. "The light fixtures had been blown off the ceiling, the windows had been blown out of the room. There had been a lab bench with a soapstone top on it, with a laminated plywood cabinet underneath, and it looked as if someone had taken a hot knife through butter--it was sheared right in half. A grad student I knew blew off portions of his hands, and he was lucky he wasn't killed."
Kaufman, now a professor of chemistry and director of the Laboratory Safety Workshop at Curry College in Milton, Mass., says that while he's not sure exactly how the explosion happened, he believes that safety precautions that were routine at Dow Chemical had not been followed at the school. "[The graduate student] was synthesizing a large quantity of a compound that was potentially explosive," he says. "He was doing ...
