The Karen Wetterhahn story

Wetterhahn knew about the high toxicity of dimethylmercury and took very reasonable precautions, donning safety glasses and latex gloves, doing manipulations in a fume cupboard and only working with very small quantities behind the fume cupboard sash. Dimethylmercury, supplied by a chemical manufacturer, came in a sealed glass vial. A colleague of hers cooled the vial in ice-water to reduce the volatility of the Hg(CH3)2 then cut off the glass top to open it. Wetterhahn pipetted a small sample into a NMR tube and transferred the rest into a storage container, sealed and labeled the tubes and cleaned up, disposing of the latex gloves. Less than a year later, she was dead from the effects of mercury poisoning.