Since starting to work in industry, I have noticed how much more seriously safety is taken than in academia. This difference is partly logical. In industry, you work with larger volumes and more hazardous substances, and you have to meet high quality standards. This necessitates a strict safety culture. Of course, academia also has safety rules, committees and training courses. In fact, I was a safety steward during my PhD. It was then that I realised how difficult it was to tackle unsafe behaviour effectively. Simply threatening to deny lab access was ineffective, as this would also result in fewer experiments, less data and in the end fewer papers.

While professors are ultimately responsible for safety in their groups, they also depend on the productivity of those same people. Therefore, enforcing safety can directly conflict with publication output, a classic example of conflict of interest. The solution is not to force universities to adopt the same approach as industry. Academia is all about freedom, exploration, and new ideas. This involves a different dynamic to that in industry.

However, one simple change could have a significant impact: do not put safety in the hands of the same person who is incentivised to conduct as many experiments as possible. You don’t assess your own papers, either; that’s what peer review is for. Nowadays, we also have to declare that there is no conflict of interest in publications. Perhaps we should start doing that in laboratories as well.