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Pregnant women in the laboratory
14 April 2012
By Blanka Sengerová
Recently, I had to significantly reassess the type of work I was willing to do in the laboratory, and this may resonate with others who were in a similar situation. Many of us moan about the health & safety regulations that govern any work that is done in the laboratory (curiously, I was told that H&S rules are a lot more lax in the US where I would expect institutes to be a lot more paranoid given the - at least perceived - suing culture of the country), but they are all there to protect us.
Before I was pregnant I was doing a lot of work with radioactive 32P, routinely used to label DNA substrates (or proteins in some cases) to visualise these after enzyme reactions on gels. I never did any of this in my PhD project but my current project involves a lot of radioactive work. The plus of radiation (and likely the reason why it is still used quite extensively) is the sensitivity of the technique, which is not achieved by alternative methods such as fluorescence. RA work is relatively safe, especially working with 32P which has a half life of 14 days, because you work behind a screen and are pretty well shielded from the beta radiation it emits.
However, when it comes to being pregnant the advice is obviously to try and avoid doing RA work if at all possible. Curiously, though, my department does not expressly forbid you from doing the work. When you write the risk assessment for use of radiation when pregnant, the radiation supervisor advises you to avoid the work if at all possible and to certainly not to certain tasks (pipetting from a stock pot, emptying RA bins, etc.), but there is no categorical rule of 'thou shall do no RA work'. I think such a rule was in place in my PhD department (someone there was even disallowed from being in the lab totally). I am told that the reason why the work is not categorically forbidden is because by forbidding pregnant women from doing RA work they have to admit that any users (not just pregnant women) are exposed to some radiation and therefore no one should be allowed to do such work.
This leads to the scientists themselves making the decision as to whether continue with the work (with precautions) or not. Personally, I would prefer if a categorical rule was in place, because it means that pushy bosses might bully you into continuing with the RA work (I hasten to add that that wasn't the case with me, as soon as I told my PI what the situation was, he assumed I wouldn't be working with RA). If such work was expressly forbidden, they couldn't do that. What do you think?
If there are some departments that effectively ban pregnant women from doing work in the laboratory (because of the chemicals you could be exposed to), is that the other extreme which isn't helpful either, because you effectively cannot work on your project for the nine months prior to maternity leave.
Sandrine Berges16 April 2012 at 08:37 AM
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This sounds like a real quandary - if you look too closely at what a pregnant woman might be exposed to in the lab, then you find out what everyone is exposed to and no one is able to do any work? But would it be possible for pregnant women to have temporary assistants who can do the bits of the job they can't do themselves?
Incidentally, I thought of you yesterday as I was watching an episode of the latest season of Bones. Not to give any spoilers, in that season there are pregnant women, and new born babies and some fairly dangerous looking lab action.
Blanka Sengerová16 April 2012 at 02:52 PM
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>> But would it be possible for pregnant women to have temporary assistants who can do the bits of the job they can't do themselves?
That's how it works in practice. Though of course these people aren't your temporary assistants, they're your colleagues who are doing you a massive favour and who have their own work to do so you have to reassess what is essential to do and what isn't and get them to do those things. In my case, I spent a lot of time before even trying to get pregnant thinking about how I can change my methods to reduce the RA use and ended up doing some work with fluorescence for some bits (for obvious reasons, you can't consult with your PI at that stage!!). The bits that couldn't be done without RA were done by one of my postdoc colleagues with me designing experiments and her doing them. But I had to be mindful that I had to fit round her work rather than she round mine ans she rightfully ended up as a co-author on my paper.
Sandrine Berges18 April 2012 at 08:07 AM
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It sounds like you handled it really well. But what a lot of extra work for both you and her! As ever, the burdens surrounding pregnancy seem to be hidden from policy, and dealt with, under the table, by women.
Simon Smith21 April 2012 at 09:17 PM
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Hi Blanka,
I agree you handled the situation with admirable forethought and professionalism! But why do you say "for obvious reasons, you can't consult with your PI at that stage!" (when you were trying out the alternative method of DNA labelling)? I would have hoped that your PI would approve of someone trialling a less risky method and basically preparing for every eventuality. Surely it's an advantage to be skilled in an alternative procedure, if only as a back-up?
Blanka Sengerová22 April 2012 at 06:36 PM
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>> But why do you say "for obvious reasons, you can't consult with your PI at that stage!" (when you were trying out the alternative method of DNA labelling)?
Probably because trying to get pregnant is a really personal issue and there is never a guarantee it will work out, so beyond your partner I wouldn't have thought you'd want people to know.
>> I would have hoped that your PI would approve of someone trialling a less risky method and basically preparing for every eventuality. Surely it's an advantage to be skilled in an alternative procedure, if only as a back-up?
Actually one of the reasons I was testing out fluorescence based methods was because I could make measurements in real-time, which might make a much quicker way of measuring enzyme kinetics in the long term (and these efforts have actually since formed the starting point of a PhD student's project, which is great). As for the gel-based assays, where the experimental set-up is effectively the same except that the DNA is visualised with either fluorescence or radiolabelling, part of the reason for trialling the alternative method was also to enable a project student to work on the project without having to do radiation (because of the large amount of paperwork that this involves, although in our case the undergraduate student did end up managing to do some radioactive work, but only during the second half of his project).