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Cleaning up Stephen Hawking after "Chili Tuesday" has had time to work its magic!

I don't know if being a Corpse-Flower Grower is exactly as bad as a Semen Washer or Orangutan-Pee Collector. So the thing stinks and smells like dead flesh, wear a mask. Working in a diaper service washing area would smell just as bad, but those people don't get an article.

I'm not sure volcanologists really fit in this list. Most of their work these days is done through remote sensing (at least for volcanoes prone to explosive eruptions). Still dangerous to set up and service equipment, but I'm sure there are lots of more dangerous jobs around. And there really isn't that much dirt involved (ash, maybe - but it's good clean ash).

I knew a girl in high school who wanted to work as a hot zone researcher; last I heard, she was applying to law schools. I'm not sure which profession involves more noxious material.

Many of these are not science jobs. And the ones that are, well, the dirty grunt work would be assigned to a technician. Or by grad students.

Mut be a slow news day.

In college I did some research at the USEPA in Cincinnati on Cryptosporidium Parvum, a waterborne pathogen that causes tremendous diarrhea. The only way to grow them is in the gut of a neonatal animal (or human). We opted for mice and calves and this poor guy did nothing but scoop up cow poo and separate out the oocysts. For mice they would "homogenize" then separate the entire intestinal tract. What was really weird for me was that I would occasionally go and pick up a small 5ml vial that represented about a month of poo duty.

I ones saw a documentary on a forensic anthropology study how corpses evolve in environments like 'under 10cm leafes', 'in a trunk', etc. The study was for forensic investigations very important. Very sick job, but very important.

http://www.deathsacre.com/ [deathsacre.com]

"I want you to study T'Pol in depth and at at length and have a report on my desk by next Tuesday. Hopefully, there will be some hot eruptions."

...Freshman Dorm Custodian?

rj

According to ...err... documentaries I've seen, some portion of the female population doesn't seem to mind semen in/on/around them.

.. it picked up on the word "dirty" in the headline and told me:

Under the current [company name deleted] Information Technology Risk standards, a request for http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/Careers/10/26/cb.dirty. jobs/index.html [cnn.com] is indicative of malicious activity. For more information regarding coporate [sic] policy, please refer to the following:

Or maybe it was the word "careers" that tipped it off.

...gynaecologist. You have to spend all day looking at the parts of women that they pee out from. What could be more disgusting? I can't imagine what they must pay those people.

In our chemistry department, we had a lot of controls on exposure to chemicals: hoods, materials handling procedures, that kind of stuff. The prof who did tin chemistry, and almost all his grad students, had gray hair: a sign of tin poisoning.

I worked in the microbiology department, in a pathogen lab, doing research on mycobacteria, specifically tuberculosis. Every semester we had to get tested for antibodies to TB (indicating that we'd been exposed) and every semester at least one researcher had.

My best friend works as a clinical technician in a lab doing human tissue sample analysis. Pathology lab, basically. About a week ago they had a patient that was *really* sick with a bunch of nasty things, and they were working through samples, and one of my friend's coworkers started screaming because one of the stool samples *moved*. The patient had serious tapeworms, among other problems.

We're thinking about going back to school and becoming art critics.

The examples they mention are nothing. You have to gown up to work in the pathogen lab, which is inconvenient and annoying, but otherwise there's nothing to it. Dealing with stool samples, likewise. By the time the pathogist gets it, the sample is in buffer and doesn't even smell. (Well, not much.) No, the dirtiest job I've seen in science is extracting fossils from the tar goo at the La Brea tar pits. The fossil work is in digs below ground level. The tar pits are exactly that. It's not just some cute marketing name. Tar fumes are heavier than air. So the idealistic scientists are down there in what amounts to a huge bucket of tar, getting covered in black goo, and breathing chokingly horrible carcinogenic fumes. That's what I call a dirty job.

When I worked for a hydrographic company as a young physics student many years ago, one of my assignments was to run a series of sonar scans of the sewage outfall lagoon of a large city on Lake Ontario. I did the runs in a small inflatable Zodiac with an outboard motor. Fortunately I was given a survival suit, although if I'd fallen into that water, I would've preferred to die right away. Besides the usual turds and toilet paper floating around, there were the occasional rotting animal corpses and some of the maintenance workers said they often cleaned aborted fetuses out of the filtration screens. On the shores of the lagoon were washed up tens of thousands of plastic tampon inserters, all in pastel pinks and blues. the maintenance workers called them "beach whistles". Absolutely nothing grew near the lagoon, and one day we noticed that thousands of sea gulls--those hardy beasts!--had died after they poked around the dirt turned over by a bulldozer. Scary stuff.

Anyway, after a few survey runs the outboard motor stalled right when I was in the middle of a large section of open water. I hoisted the prop out of the water and saw that it was completely wound up in dozens of used condoms that had got past the filtration screens. I had to free the prop using my Swiss Army knife. (I later threw away the knife.)

The scariest thing was what I noticed the next morning. The day before, I'd dripped some of the lagoon water on the jeans that I was wearing under my survival suit. Overnight, the liquid had actually burned holes right through the fabric of my jeans, as if mice had gnawed them. I was totally freaked by that and since then I've always wondered what effect the noxious chemicals I probably absorbed that day will have on my long-term health.