In the early hours of 13 April, undergraduate students working at Yale University's Sterling Chemistry Laboratory made a shocking discovery. There in the lab's machine shop was the dead body of 22-year-old undergraduate student Michele Dufault, her hair tangled in a lathe. She had apparently died of asphyxiation in an accident described by Richard Levin, president of Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, as a "true tragedy".
Within days, federal health and safety officials had started to investigate. Details are scarce, but it is already clear that Dufault was not inexperienced with the equipment; she had taken a training course and had used the lathe safely many times before, according to fellow physics student Joe O'Rourke. She was, however, working late at night and probably alone (a speculation that Yale would not confirm) — circumstances that were not unusual at the machine shop, says O'Rourke.