What’s in a label?

Time to stick it to The Man and play both fast and loose with H&S in the lab? Bad idea says Dr Matthew Partridge as he ponders what's in a label…

I have a confession. During a recent internal health and safety (H&S) inspection I was given a minor warning over my lab. I pride myself on keeping our H&S up to date and running a bureaucratically-correct lab. But I failed, I let my lab down, I let myself down and worst of all, I let the large health and safety filing cabinet down.

Like any good health and safety system we have a labelling policy. And amazingly for us, it goes beyond “must have a label” – which is the policy in most labs and explains why they are full of tubes labelled “Sample 1”, “46Xb-2” and “Jeff’s DON’T TOUCH”. The last is particularly worth paying attention to because Jeff rides a motorbike and you don’t mess with a biker’s lab samples. In my lab, I try to insist that a label has several key things on it to help work out, first and foremost, if the mysterious substance is going to explode and who I should shout at if/when it does. So the first thing that absolutely must be included is initials. If two people in the lab have the same initials then they draw straws and one of them legally changes their name.

[caption id="attachment_56557" align="alignnone" width="450"] Expectation versus reality[/caption]

Next is the date it was created/decanted. Dates are important because some tubes – ordinarily at the back of the fridge – contain life that is sentient enough to want to celebrate anniversaries of its existence. It is also incredibly helpful in tying in the prep to experiments and lab book notes (assuming you bother to put a date in the lab book). In some cases we put best before dates, but in most cases we either don’t know or it’s a lot longer than our project.

Hazards are trickier to do. There are quite a few of them – and, as it turns out, we have almost all of them in the lab. I did try drawing symbols, but people liked the cartoons so much it counterproductively encouraged people to pick up the tubes. Instead we now use colour coded pens and put up a legend on the lab wall…apparently it’s not obvious to everyone that Blue means solvent, and Red means acid.

Lastly, the actualy contents of the tube. This can be tricky – some names are longer than the word limit of this article. Sometimes we use codes but I now try to make sure the translation for these codes exists in more than just a single lab book (an almost always indecipherable document). I also insist that people put concentration on the bottle; it’s amazing how optional people seem to think that is. In fact, as we regularly use both 20% and 0.5% H?O?, this is most certainly mandatory. I know some people that add on lab book numbers and pages but I use an electronic lab book which gives me links – I think scrawling a URL on an eppendorf tube is beyond my calligraphy skills. Although as I write this the thought occurs that I could get a label printer and start covering stuff in QR codes.

So what exactly was wrong with my labels? Well you may have your own opinions on whether or not the above is a sensible policy and may well, in fact, be frowning in disappointment at the terrible labels mistakes I’m making.  One mistake I have definitely made is that I hadn’t used printed labels to write all this information on. Like some dangerous maverick I’d been writing it all on white labels (and even directly on the bottle *gasps*).

It’s a miracle I’m not dead.

Dr Matthew Partridge