A familiar rule-set gap: the tech races ahead, but worker safety does not

NYT story, coming to a court near you.  Pic is David Michaels, director OSHA, which everybody despises until it's your ass on the production line.

Naturally, the leading edge is a risky place to work, starts the piece.

You work with dangerous stuff, and maybe it costs you--literally--an arm and both legs when the meningococcal bacteria infects you, as happened to a New Zealand lab worker.  

The small quiet suits by workers have already arrived, like a $1.4M win for a former Pfizer worker.  The bigger class-action types will inevitably follow.

Michaels says, in effect, that "his agency's 20-century rules have not yet caught up with the 21st-cnetury biotech industry."

No kidding.  Same is true for US foreign policy on biowarfare, as our leaders instead prefer to obsess over the oh-so-20th-century "N" in the NBC (nuke, bio, chem) trilogy, which, in historical terms is really CNB (chemistry in the 19th C, nuclear in the 20th C--both producing weapons that debut in two world wars, and then biology in the 21st).  

Have no fear, the tragedies are coming.  Every good law on the American books had some nasty real-world tragedy as precursor. This will be no different.

Rule-set gaps, it's "what's for dinner?" in political terms.