Not in our line of work. It needs to be really rigorous because if something goes wrong you have to be sure you did everything to prevent it. If you’re talking about having to wear full body armour when you play conkers in the playground then yes!

Hi geoff,

I don’t know – people who have been hurt at work or the families of people who have been hurt or killed would say it doesn’t go far enough! But it is annoying when some officious health and safety person tells you you can’t do something interesting “because it’s not safe”

I think there needs to be a good balance here, and scientists also need to learn to be responsible so they don’t hurt themselves or others.

It’s something we hear people say a lot, isn’t it!

I’d answer yes and no, personally.

We have a lot of measures being implemented in the lab that are really inconvenient for us and don’t seem to do a lot of good.

On the other hand there are a lot of things we have to do now that are really sensible!
My mum sometimes talks about how they used to play with mercury at school, on their hands – we’d never do this now because it’s very, very toxic! A really great chemistry teacher at school used to tell us about the mouth-pipetting they did, again really dangerous, you don’t want to suck chemicals into your mouth!

So in many ways we’re just sensible now, but being overbearing can also have its dangers, I think.

One thing I really notice is that I don’t pay much attention at all to signs -there are so many everywhere, people stop reading them. This means that really important things often get ignored as well.

It also seems to stop people thinking for themselves sometimes; people might be throwing away food that’s fine to eat just because it’s past the ‘best before’ date – if it’s clearly gone off, sure, but as a society we’re so wasteful and that really isn’t helping – all because companies are scared of people blaming them if they get sick or hurt themselves and maybe that will then cost them money.

This is a problem that is partly down to American culture, I think – people are very quick to find someone to blame for anything that goes wrong and bring a lawsuit. I don’t like this attitude and believe people should take more responsibility for themselves.

On the other hand, companies should always have a duty of care to their employees and health and safety measures at work are a necessary part of that – unfortunately!