In August 1996, Dartmouth chemistry professor Karen Wetterhahn spilled a small amount of dimethylmercury on her latex glove.
She was working in a fume hood, wearing protective equipment, following the safety protocol as it was understood at the time. She cleaned up and went on with her day.
The dimethylmercury went straight through the latex.
That’s the part nobody knew. The gloves in standard use offered essentially no protection against that compound — it permeated the material in seconds and absorbed through her skin.
For roughly three months, nothing specific — some abdominal discomfort and weight loss that November. Then in January 1997 she began stumbling, slurring, losing her balance. By the time doctors identified mercury poisoning, the level in her blood was many times the toxic threshold and the damage to her brain was already done. Chelation therapy couldn’t reverse it.
She lapsed into a coma and died in June 1997, about ten months after the spill.
Two things came out of it, and both matter.
Her case rewrote laboratory safety standards for handling organomercury compounds. The guidance now is a laminate barrier under heavy-duty outer gloves, and dimethylmercury has largely been abandoned as a reference standard because nothing about handling it is worth the risk.
And it demonstrated something about toxicity that people find hard to internalize: the dose was tiny, the exposure was brief, the protective equipment was in place, and the outcome was still fatal. There was no moment where she could have made a different choice, because at the moment of the spill nobody knew there was a choice to make.
She was 48, a respected researcher, and the thing that killed her was a substance she was using to study how toxic metals damage cells.
My son teaches college chemistry. Stories like this one are why the rules in a lab read the way they do.
This is one of the entries in The Elements Little Black Book: Facts, Trivia and Secrets of the Building Blocks of Everything.
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One Response
In 8th grade science class the teacher played with mercery with his bare hands. We also made seismographs and set off dynamite in a field to show how easy it was to triangulate the location of the explosion. Yes, we poked a hole in the dynamite and properly tied the wires around it before dropping it into the 10′ deep hole we drilled in the ground.