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UT Lab Safety Expert Says He Was Fired For Finding Problems
An expert who was fired from overseeing safety at UT research labs says he lost his job because the university didn’t want to address problems he found.
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(May 31, 2008)--A veteran national security expert says he was fired from overseeing safety at University of Texas research labs because the school didn't want to address problems he found.
Harold "Woody" Davis says university officials and scientists resented what he found while in charge of compliance for UT's research program.
Among the problems, he said, were badly monitored experiments, disregard for federal reporting rules and under-trained students involved in dangerous experiments.
Campus officials said Davis was terminated for "performance, communication and personnel issues,” not for being a safety watchdog.
UT officials strongly denied claims of security problems and say campus labs have easily passed surprise federal inspections.
As recently as September, though reports revealed the university failed to report 10 lab accidents in seven years.
Those mishaps included a flu virus spill and the exposure of several workers to the bacteria Shigella.
Davis is a physician, attorney and civil servant whose career spans several federal security agencies.
He said he is going to back to Washington to work for another government agency.
Davis said the problems weren't across the board in UT labs, but he said he repeatedly clashed with researchers unwilling to abide by new safety measures.
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