Skip to content

Comment on Dimethyl Mercury Exposure Incident at MITparent

Comments

Yes, dimethyl mercury is terrifying stuff - it killed Karen Wetterhahn from a few drops that went _through_ the gloves she had on:

The case proved that the standard precautions at the time, all of which Wetterhahn had carefully followed, were inadequate for "super-toxic" chemicals like dimethylmercury

(from the Wikipedia page [3])

Methyl any sort of metal - especially heavy metals - are probably not something you want to splash on like aftershave.

There aren't really any "good" organometals, but if there were, they wouldn't be this stuff.

Sufficiently pure dichloromethane is also fun stuff. It just eats through most any gloves, plastics, whatever. Even PET, and only polyethylene is somewhat resistant.

LD50 about 2mg/kg oral. By oral it's meant that well.. if you soak your hands in it it will be worse.

Still it's the goto thinner for f/ex gluing ABS. I have a couple liters sitting on the shelf right beside me.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.