Trying to understand why your workers are sick may lead to you being shown the door.

While my degree opened up doors for me, it ultimately gave me occupational diseases.

While handling mercury systems in the employment of Columbia University and Dartmouth College, I have no recollection of receiving industry recognized health and safety training for the workplace hazards present.

Professors are typically in their own little worlds, doing their own thing and thinking that the laws do not apply to them.

In the space of less than a year, mercury poisoning took me from being sponsored for an exceptional ability green card by Dartmouth College to being shown the door.

When I reflect on my time working for the W. M. Keck Observatory, Columbia University and Dartmouth College, my memories are not of brilliant minds advancing science, but rather of shady people damaging their workers health in order to obtain tainted astronomical data.

When I worked in astronomy, I routinely observed young college and university students working with liquid nitrogen and breathing nitrogen gas as they discharged it into the indoor environment at high altitude.

This was my Mauna Kea experience: 1. Hire worker and do not disclose the full range of the biological toxicity of the very high altitude facility to them. 2. Let the worker get sick and start using their earned sick time. 3. Harass the sickened worker out of the company. 4. Hire an unsuspecting healthy worker to replace them.

During almost a decade in high altitude astronomy, I developed a strong dislike for the upper management teams through experience.