Lead Story
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Among those with “The Worst Jobs in Science,” according to the annual listing published in October’s Popular Science: researchers in Borneo who catch falling orangutan urine (in bags mounted on poles or in plastic sheets, firefighter-style) to study hormone levels; volcano monitors, who must run, laden with gear, toward the poisonous gases, molten rock, clouds of ash, glacial avalanches, etc associated with eruptions (dozens have been killed or wounded over the years); U.S. Geological Survey teams harvesting “extremophile” microbes that thrive in vile-smelling arsenic-saturated mud (imagine, one worker suggests, being “tightly surrounded” by 100 “extremely flatulent people”); students participating in a pesticide-industry-funded study at the University of California at San Diego, who get $15 an hour to have chloropicrin (used as a nerve gas in WWI) sprayed into their noses and eyes; manure inspectors at the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety (pig and chicken are the worst, apparently); and high school biology teachers in Kansas.
Last year, chief executive officers at 367 top U.S. corporations were paid, on average, $431 for every dollar paid to their companies’ average production worker, according to information compiled and released in September by the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy. If the federal minimum wage had increased at the same rate as CEOs’ pay since 1990, the study pointed out, it would now be $23.03 an hour.
Least Competent Criminals
In October, a 33-year-old pastor at University Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, mishandled a microphone while standing in a baptismal pool, preparing to immerse a parishioner in front of about 800 congregants, and was electrocuted. On the same day in Johannesburg, South Africa, a pastor and a parishioner of the Jerusalem Apostolic Church drowned during a river baptism ceremony when they lost their footing on rocks in the riverbed.
