[paulirwin]

These are the first few sentences of the article:

> Cadmium is bad news. Lead and mercury get all the press, but cadmium is just as foul, even if far fewer people encounter it. Never in my career have I had any occasion to use any, and I like it that way.

It seems clear that he doesn’t want to work with cadmium, regardless of the compound.

[timr]

I mean, sure. But then you read past that sentence, and you see that the rest of the article is about this particular compound, and it's unique tendency to explode, form toxic gases when burned, and so on.

I can't speak for the guy, but lots of things are "bad news", colloquially, and yet we work with them in the laboratory as an accepted everyday risk. I am not an inorganic chemist, but I'm pretty certain that they work with far riskier things than inorganic Cadmium on a regular basis.