Prosecutors in Los Angeles reached a plea agreement on Friday in their criminal case against a University of California chemistry professor over the accidental death of a student researcher, putting an opaque ending on a landmark legal pursuit credited with pushing lab-safety improvements on university campuses nationwide.
The UCLA professor, Patrick G. Harran, accepted penalties that include 800 hours of community service and the threat of resumed legal proceedings in the event of new lab-safety violations over the next five years, but no jail time.
The settlement and the likely avoidance of a trial, five years after the accident that killed Sheharbano (Sheri) Sangji and two years after criminal charges were filed, left the victim’s family deeply disappointed.
“A trial would have brought about serious change, overnight, that a settlement really cannot achieve,” said Ms. Sangji’s sister, Naveen F. Sangji, a general-surgery resident at Massachusetts General Hospital who has served as a family spokeswoman.
Independent safety advocates, however, were considerably less pessimistic about the ultimate effect of the case. Several agreed that universities’ research laboratories still remain more dangerous than their corporate counterparts. Yet they also expressed confidence that the impetus for improvement brought by the first filing ever of criminal charges over a fatal university lab accident has not been diluted by the plea bargain.
“It’s not an insignificant penalty that he’s paying,” said James A. Kaufman, a retired chemistry professor who heads a lab-safety training institute.
The case was felt deeply across academe, said Nathan P. Watson, whose company provides lab-research-management services, and “I don’t think the effect has all been lost.”
Inexperienced and Unprotected
Mr. Harran, who is now 44, heads a UCLA laboratory that explores disease-fighting properties in naturally occurring molecules.
Sheharbano Sangji was 23 when she was badly burned in the lab on December 29, 2008. The accident occurred as she handled a syringe containing tert-Butyllithium, a compound that ignites spontaneously in air. Ms. Sangji was relatively inexperienced and was wearing a synthetic-fiber sweatshirt that burned quickly. Prosecutors offered evidence that she was given little training and no protective lab coat. She died of her injuries 18 days later in a specialized burn center.
Naveen Sangji repeatedly flew to Los Angeles in the years after the accident to help press the legal case against both Mr. Harran and the University of California. Judge Shelly B. Torrealba of the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles approved a deal in July 2012 that ended charges against the university in return for its adopting new lab-safety measures and establishing a $500,000 scholarship in the name of Sheharbano Sangji.
Another judge in the same court, George G. Lomeli, on Friday accepted the legal settlement with Mr. Harran, who faced up to four and a half years in prison if tried and convicted on the charges brought against him. Mr. Harran has avoided any public comment in the case. After Naveen Sangji made a 50-minute presentation on the impact of her sister’s death on her family, the judge doubled the prosecution’s suggestion of 400 hours of community service.
The most serious penalty facing Mr. Harran, however, appears to be the need to avoid any lab-safety violations for five years, with quarterly reports to the court by state safety inspectors. Under that pressure, “he has an extremely tough row to hoe over the next five years,” said Neal R. Langerman, a former associate professor of chemistry at Utah State University who now heads Advanced Chemical Safety, a consulting firm.
The family disagrees, seeing it as “a fairly easy agreement to comply with,” Naveen Sangji said. But Mr. Kaufman, Mr. Watson, Mr. Langerman, and other safety experts said criminal pursuit of Mr. Harran had already achieved about as much as could be reasonably expected from the legal system in terms of forcing change on university campuses.
Holding Universities Responsible
The key now, said Janet D. Stemwedel of San Jose State University, is for universities and their financial backers to shift the expectation of safety from individuals to departments and entire organizations. Universities could do that through rules that include barring departments with poor safety records from accepting new graduate students, said Ms. Stemwedel, an associate professor of philosophy with a doctorate in physical chemistry who studies research practices.
Mr. Kaufman suggested going a step further by holding the organizational head, such as a university president, legally liable for fatal lab accidents. Employees who don’t get on board should be fired, said Mr. Kaufman, a retired professor of chemistry at Curry College who now serves as president and chief executive officer of the Laboratory Safety Institute.
“That’s harsh talk, and academic institutions don’t like it,” he said, “but the places that have the best safety programs make working safely a condition of employment.”
Mr. Watson, president and chief executive officer at BioRAFT, which provides laboratory-management services, said he sees the process of improving university lab safety as a series of stages, beginning with formal acts of compliance and liability mitigation. The Harran case helped get most universities to that first stage, but it has left most of them short of fully embracing the necessary deep changes in cultural attitudes, he said.
The progression of universities into more meaningful stages is likely to continue, Mr. Watson said. And a jail sentence for Mr. Harran might have even slowed the process, he said, by creating a reaction on campuses that focused more on questions of justice than on the need to deal with their own institutional behaviors.
Continued incidents such as the death last month of a technician in an explosion in a petroleum-engineering lab on the Texas A&M University campus in Qatar, and a science-lab explosion just last week that injured a University of Minnesota graduate student in Minneapolis, show the need for improvement remains deep, Mr. Langerman said.
At the same time, the action by California prosecutors “has gotten the attention of virtually every research chemist out there,” even in states that may seem more reluctant to pursue such cases, he said. “This is precedent-setting, and now that the precedent is set, you really do not want to test the water, because the water is already boiling.”
Naveen Sangji isn’t so sure. “We just hope that other young people—researchers, students, scientists—are safer in the future than Sheri was,” she said.
