Before I go on, let me just say: Yikes.
To be perfectly honest, I’d say biologists are closer to chemists than chemical engineers, mainly because I’ve worked with a lot of biologists in the past, and they have an aptitude for laboratory work, written procedures, chemical hygeine, etc. They’re weak on chemistry, but they’re teachable, and the lab setting is something they’re already used to.
By contrast, every chemical engineer I’ve had to deal with tends to put their own assumptions ahead of my data and expertise. I’ve had to argue with engineers who demand testing, then refused to believe the results because they didn’t agree with their preconceived notions.
Chemical engineers love to sat that things are “impossible”, based on the diagrams of the units they deal with. I don’t know jack about diagrams or process design, but when you ask me to test something, you’re already admitting that failure is not only possible but anticipated. Usually what happens is my data is vindicated, and the engineers realize that the result was possible all along. They just didn’t count on such-and-such thing happening to the unit, or another engineer made some change without anyone considering the impact on the unit.
But it’s a lot easier to blame the analyst. I had an e-mail thread of big shots trying to troubleshoot a titration method they had never performed, just to avoid dealing with a low result. The sample was run in duplicate, and multiple samples were tested, each run by seasoned veterans familiar with the procedure. The only possible source of error would have been if the titrant had somehow gotten stronger over the past two weeks (because it had given good results before then).
So naturally they asked if we had some rookie running the test this week, like we routinely hire people off the street and turn them loose on this stuff just to ruin everyone’s day. They asked us about the titrant’s expiration, and it wasn’t for another year. I had it standardized anyway, and it came back right where it should be. So they finally bit the bullet and took steps on their end, and *lo and behold*, the numbers started to improve.
The moral of the story is that I know what I’m doing. I don’t claim to be infallible, but I try to learn from my mistakes and anticipate potential sources of error. Chemical engineers seem to struggle with this. To be fair, I assume that there’s a lot riding on the results I give them, and it’s a daunting task to fix units that aren’t operating properly. But there’s a fine line between skepticism and denial. If your weatherman tells you there’s a tornado heading your way, you’d be better off camping out in your bathroom rather than calling the station and demanding he recheck his Doppler radar to make sure.
I heard of a similar incident at an old job, where the purified water system was being sanitized with bleach and hydrogen peroxide on a regular basis. The idea is that you would alternate from one to the other, thereby killing off any bugs that might have developed a resistance to either chemical.
But somewhere along the way, our maintenance staff started using both at the same time. I eventually looked this up and discovered that bleach and hydrogen peroxide will react with one another, producing salt and water. The only reason their method worked as well as it did was because they used more bleach than peroxide, so there was at least a fraction of the bleach dosage that could still do the work. So it didn’t do any immediate harm, and it seemed to work, so no one had any idea how wrongheaded this approach was.
I would have been about 27 when this happened, and that was about the time I began to realize that the people who’ve worked here longer than me don’t necessarily know best, and I have to be the expert on some of these topics, because there’s no one else who can. And it’s surprisingly difficult to convince people you know what you’re talking about. The news media warned the public about looking directly at the solar eclipse. They quoted experts and everything, but how many people wouldn’t listen? How do you get through to them? I don’t know. Sometimes you just have to pick your battles. I had a guy lose his cool on me one day because I insisted on having samples properly labeled. He said I “freak out over the stupidest shit”, except I didn’t even raise my voice, and it’s *not* stupid shit, it’s basic lab procedure. If I can’t identify a sample, it’s useless. But people think I’m being a dick when I’m just trying to do my job. They don’t respect that they’re in my world when they walk into a lab.
Unfortunately, your workplace seems to suffer from the same problem, to the point where they don’t even have a chemist in the lab at all. They hired you and a gaggle of microbiologists and said “close enough”. And maybe 99 times out of a hundred it *is* close enough. I try not to get too arrogant about this line of work. Lots of people can do laboratory work. I know, because I’ve worked with a lot of laymen. But when things go wrong, and equipment doesn’t work right, or the lab gets a problem they aren’t used to dealing with, *that’s* when you really need an honest-to-God chemist on your team. I might not know the answer either, but I know what questions to ask, and how to investigate.
The main thing you and your coworkers need to keep in mind is that you don’t know what you don’t know. *Why* would you need to make a germicidal agent more powerful? Is the existing disinfectant not effective enough? If HCl could make it stronger, why wouldn’t the manufacturer add it to their formula themselves? This sort of scrutiny doesn’t require a lot of technical or scientific knowledge. It’s just common sense thinking, a way to eliminate courses of action without even getting to the potential hazards.
Also, most manufacturers will take questions about their products. So even if you don’t have a chemist in-house, you can still talk to one who knows about the materials in question. When you have a service rep work on one of your instruments, talk to them and learn as much about it as you can. I’ve yet to meet a service guy who didn’t love to talk shop. Read the SDS. Establish written procedures and follow them. That sort of thing.
Sadly, your scenario is pretty common. I don’t know if employers just don’t value chemistry degrees, or there simply aren’t enough chemists out there in the workforce, but I usually find myself outnumbered by co-workers from other disciplines. But the best co-workers are the ones who make an effort to understand what’s going on and show a genuine curiosity about the work they do. It doesn’t make them chemists, but it puts them on the right wavelength.