The tragic story of a young lab assistant, whose death exposed lax safety at UCLA and other universities and has led to an unprecedented criminal trial.
Sangji was working on a reaction involving tert-Butyllithium. She was 23 and had earned her bachelor’sdegree that spring. Two older postdoctoral fellows were engrossed in their own work nearby.Patrick Harran, the chemistry professor who had hired Sangji as a research associate two months earlier, was in his office one floor up.
Tert-Butyllithium, or t-BuLi for short, is what’s known as pyrophoric: it ignites spontaneously in air. Sangji picked up a plastic syringe
and began drawing up 54 millilitre quantities.
Nobody involved in Sangji’s story claims her death was anything other than tragic. But lawyers for Harran, the professor, say that tragedy was rooted in Sangji’s own actions: she was an experienced chemist who had botched a basic experiment she had completed successfully before. Her death was an accident, not a crime.