<p>There seems to be a few common themes that have occurred, at least with the most high profile cases:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Accidents occur late at night or in otherwise unsupervised conditions where the student is working alone</p></li>
<li><p>The root cause of the accident is related to the fact that the student was acting in serious violation of established safety rules and procedures (intentionally or not is not always known, but what they were doing was clearly wrong)</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Both of these issures require better review by schools. </p>
<p>However another point that needs to be thrown out there, even though it’s not one some people like to talk about is the element of personal responsibly here. </p>
<p>When working in a lab environment where every day is full of different procedures, some perhaps never done by anyone before, safety training always focuses on pointing out that the person doing the experiment is ultimately responsible for taking the necessary measures to make sure it is safe and done in accordance with published practices. </p>
<p>Schools can make all the rules they want and give all the training 10x over, but at the end of the day if someone still makes a decision to cut corners or not follow safety rules and then gets hurt/killed as a result…</p>