The clinical laboratory in the Laconia, N.H., hospital had a foot square pass through to the next room at bench-top level.

As I looked through into the cleaning room, I was startled to see Marie cleaning pipets used for blood cell dilutions.

The pipets are essentially calibrated tubes. It was one of her regular duties to clean those pipets.

What I saw sent shivers down my spine. In an urgent voice I said, “Marie, go into the hall immediately! I will meet you there!”

It was our routine to stick several pipets into the holes of a large rubber stopper. The rubber stopper was connected to a suction tube. When the vacuum was activated we would successively aspirate soapy water, clear water, acetone and then ether through the several pipets. The soapy water cleaned. The clear water rinsed. The acetone is miscible with the water and thus removes the water. The ether is very volatile and soon the pipets dry as air is sucked through them.

When I was in organic chemistry laboratory as a student, the professor would become excited and very irate if any gas flame was not extinguished before the ether was opened for use in a procedure.

The open flame was not permitted, even if it was distant at the other end of a large laboratory. Ether is said to be much more explosive than gasoline.

When I looked through the pass-through at Marie, I saw her with a lighted cigarette in her mouth and open dishes of ether and acetone on the bench within arm’s reach, being used as she cleaned pipets.

As tactfully as possible, I told her she had narrowly escaped an explosion that would probably have resulted in her funeral being scheduled within the next few days.

An explosion and fire were not needed at this time to test the learning we had undertaken at regular drills.  Marie returned to her pipet cleaning without the cigarette and those of us who also worked in the laboratory breathed easier.

There is a debate ongoing now about whether to staff clinical laboratories with people having less technical education.

The debate is actuated by two realities. As with nursing, there is also a shortage of baccalaureate qualified personnel to fill the vacancies in clinical laboratories as those vacancies occur.

The course work in the sciences is more demanding to qualify as a clinical laboratory scientist than to qualify as a registered nurse. The second reality is that employees with less required science education will cost the employing hospital less money. There is a continued search by the government and by hospitals for ways to shave costs and still meet the needs of an increasing number of patients being added to the health care system. These concerns are legitimate. But do we really want to go back to times when a high school diploma and some on-the-job training were acceptable qualifications for becoming primary care givers, laboratory employees and operators of today’s sophisticated analytical and imaging equipment? We believe that as the sciences in health care have moved to higher levels of sophistication, so also must the qualifications and educated judgment of the personnel who administer that care be advanced. Marie might not have put us at hazard if she was aware of the hazards of ether.