The University of California at Los Angeles announced it will open a Center for Laboratory Safety, the first of its kind in the country, to study and publicize best practices in lab safety, inspections and safety regulations, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported.
The institution will endow the new center with $400,000 in start-up funding over the next three years, although it will ultimately be self-sustaining.
The push to start the center follows the death of a UCLA research staffer in an organic chemistry lab, who died in 2008 from severe burns after being splashed with a volatile chemical compound that ignited, the Chronicle reported.
