Perhaps the worst laboratory accident in recent memory occurred in 1996, when Karen Wetterhahn, a chemistry professor at Dartmouth, spilled a couple of drops of dimethylmercury on her glove. Thinking ...

Karen Wetterhahn was pipetting a small amount of dimethylmercury under a fume hood in her lab at Dartmouth College when she accidentally spilled a drop or two of the colorless liquid on her latex ...

In another universe, you could be reading an article celebrating Karen Wetterhahn’s retirement from Dartmouth College. She would be 73. A chemist, Wetterhahn started her career at Dartmouth in 1976, ...

What happens when a scientist makes a minor mistake? This story of one such scientist spilling two drops of mercury on her hand is well known by toxicologists, but perhaps you've never heard the ...

Karen Wetterhahn was a rising star and chemistry researcher at Dartmouth studying how the heavy metal chromium damages DNA and causes cancer, but she died in 1997 after an accidental exposure to ...

In early May, the neurotoxic effects of the heavy metal mercury made news when outlets reported that 2024 U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in 2012 that he experienced cognitive ...

One educator and researcher suffered a terrifying demise from just a tiny droplet, no bigger than a raindrop, of one substance that made contact with her skin. Serving as a research chemist at ...

One teacher and scientist experienced a horrifying death all from a tiny drop, comparable to the size of a raindrop, of one chemical that touched her skin. Working as a research chemist at Dartmouth ...

A warning sign at a chemical weapons disposal facility at GEKA in Munster, Germany, in 2013 (used here as stock photo). Photo: Philipp Guelland/AFP (Getty Images) A federal court has sentenced a ...

The following is excerpted and adapted from Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America (Haymarket Books, 2022). If you thought breathing in microscopic drops of COVID-19 was bad ...