Dr Shane Bergin

speaker

581 appearances 6 recordings 2 series first heard May 2026 last heard 10 Sep

Dr Shane Bergin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Today with David McCullagh · A Beginner’s Guide to Chemicals · 10 Sep 2026 podcast

You can also have things that might be salts or metals, plastics, organic uh chemicals.

And by our when when a chemist or physicist says organic, they don't mean organic in the food terminology.

They mean that it contains carbon as its as its basic element.

So we're able to put them all into various

Classifications and take that two hundred and ninety million and start to make some sort of sense.

So you can predict and crucially you can make new ones.

Yeah, and I I I now think back to when I was a PhD student and the array of chemicals that was in the lab that I worked in and I went in willy nilly and didn't think too much about it.

The forty something year old me now would be far more cautious about going in and playing with with these things, right?

My dad tells the story about using mercury on the lab and uh bench in school.

They used to roll it up and down.

Um you wouldn't be allowed to do it now.

Danger is a combination of things.

Hazard, which is the potential for it to do something, right?

You know, it's hazardous.

In the wrong situation, this could really cause harm.

But with that hazard, you have to classify risk, which is basically the likelihood of it going wrong.

Mercury is a good example.

If a mercury thermometer is kept in the thermometer, even though it's hazardous, it's very unlikely that you're going to ingest that mercury and cause harm.

However,

If you were to drop the mercury thermometer and then try and scoop it up with your hands, or God forbid you were to to take some in through your mouth, uh you it there'd be a lot of risk and mercury will will accumulate in the body, it'll sit in the brain and um I believe it it has been known to cause all sorts of psych uh psychological and psychedelic effects.

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