Anyone ever screw up big time while working in the lab...

[PhillyMD2006]

Haha. Alot of the blame has to rest on the postdoc and PI. Sounds like didn't make enough of an effort to give you a managable project for an undergrad.

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[americanpierg]

worst ive done was mix cabbage juisce (pH indacator) with bleach...which turned into a hard white solid and the .25 cent vial broke while i was trying to chip the rock hard bleach out

 

[Vox Animo]

Used gloves that handle a gel that had etbr (carcinogen). they typed up something on a computer with the gloves still on. a professor saw me and freaked out. I dont know why i didn't think of taking the damn things off.

 

[91946]

At my lab, we used these 96 wells column to elute drugs. They cost around 200 bucks per plate along with roughly the time it takes to prep the samples and the run time on the mass spec instrument. Roughly around 2 grand per experiment. I usually screw this up once every other month.

 

[OctoDoc]

Used gloves that handle a gel that had etbr (carcinogen). they typed up something on a computer with the gloves still on. a professor saw me and freaked out. I dont know why i didn't think of taking the damn things off.

Don't worry. ETB is not that bad. Just because it is labeled a carcinogen doesn't guarantee it'll give you cancer from a brief exposure.

Old fart chemists used to wash their hands in benzene, HMPA, and HMPT, and a whole bunch of supposedly nasty stuff. They are still around today, no worse for wear.

That ER episode with the benzene contamination makes me want to kick Michael Crichton's a$$. What a douche.

 

[Surg Path]

Don't worry. ETB is not that bad. Just because it is labeled a carcinogen doesn't guarantee it'll give you cancer from a brief exposure.

Old fart chemists used to wash their hands in benzene, HMPA, and HMPT, and a whole bunch of supposedly nasty stuff. They are still around today, no worse for wear.

That ER episode with the benzene contamination makes me want to kick Michael Crichton's a$$. What a douche.

Yeah Crichton is a bit of a quak.

Doesn't sound like you got ETB on you, but it's seriously carcinogenic- above and beyond benzene- or so people say. I haven't tried.

Ahh, the good old days, when kids played with mercury for fun.

 

[OctoDoc]

Yeah Crichton is a bit of a quak.

Doesn't sound like you got ETB on you, but it's seriously carcinogenic- above and beyond benzene- or so people say. I haven't tried.

Ahh, the good old days, when kids played with mercury for fun.

I was an organic chemist for 15 or so years. I specialized in fluorescent and phosphorescent stilbenoid and azo dyes, some of the worst carcinogens known.

No boobs (stilbenoids) or cancer (both) that I can detect.

Trust me, ETB is nuthin', unless you eat it or bathe in it, I guess.

 

[Surg Path]

I was an organic chemist for 15 or so years. I specialized in fluorescent and phosphorescent stilbenoid and azo dyes, some of the worst carcinogens known.

No boobs (stilbenoids) or cancer (both) that I can detect.

Trust me, ETB is nuthin'.

Wow. My orgo knowledge stops at pi bonds...

Well, next time I run out of tabasco sauce for my burito, I'll throw on a few ul's of EB. HAHA

 

[Sansfrontier]

Used gloves that handle a gel that had etbr (carcinogen). they typed up something on a computer with the gloves still on. a professor saw me and freaked out. I dont know why i didn't think of taking the damn things off.

One of the guys in our lab has done this on several occasions. It freaks me out everytime I see somebody waiting on a gel sln to cool down get anywhere near a computer.

 

[deuist]

I've broken lots of glassware, made a few bombs, and splashed myself in the face with a dilute HF/HNO3 solution. My undergraduate once forgot to close the lid to a glove box and let in lots of oxygen, thereby ruining several people's experiments and causing several thousand dollars worth of damage.

 

[frany584]

HAHA I like this thread, I thought I was the only one who did this stuff. I've had quite a few mishaps...in Immunology lab we had to administer an immunizaiton to rats by holding them on their back and inserting the needle near their belly. Well the the girl held the rat, but he went crazy and I accidently stuck him too hard and he started bleeding! I thought I might have seriously hurt him!! Then, in Biochem lab I broke a thermometer and mercury went everywhere and I felt so bad because it was a hassle for my professor to clean it up...and I've broken other sorts of glassware. My personal favorite was in organic, which every lab basically consisted of purifying and making crystals. I never had such luck with making those stupid crystals; I would always get brown when they were supposed to be white, or yellow when they should be brown, but the weirdest one was when I actually didn't get crystals at all...I got this thing that looked like a piece of chewed gum lol My professor never could explain what went wrong, but he was pretty puzzled at how I made that!

 

[OctoDoc]

I've...splashed myself in the face with a dilute HF/HNO3 solution. ...

Wow! HF is a bone seeker, meaning that it doesn't readily damage flesh. Instead, it is absorbed into the bone near where contact was made, and can cause problems years after exposure. I hope it was very dilute. If not, don't be surprised if your face hurts years down the road. And not because you're ugly (J/K!!).

 

[deuist]

Wow! HF is a bone seeker, meaning that it doesn't readily damage flesh. Instead, it is absorbed into the bone near where contact was made, and can cause problems years after exposure. I hope it was very dilute. If not, don't be surprised if your face hurts years down the road. And not because you're ugly (J/K!!).

That was a year ago. I immediately washed my face off in the sink when it happened. Another student made a concentrated HF bomb that went off in his hand. He was wearing his PPE, but still had to take a safety showers (sans clothing) and spent a night in the ED.

 

[faluri]

hahaha love this thread.

mine is less costly to the lab and more costly to me. as a dumb frosh in first semester gen chem lab, i was working with some crazy chemicals under the 'special' fume hood [where all the much more harmful chemicals were used instead of at the bench]. I was using one of those cheap plastic 3cent droppers and mine fell in the back of the fume hood by the sink drain thing and being the dumb freshman that I was, I didn't want to ask the Nazi non-english speaking graduate students for another one so I literally ducked under the fumehood to fish it out. I wasn't successful needless to say and literally almost blacked out 10 minutes later

 

[OctoDoc]

That was a year ago. I immediately washed my face off in the sink when it happened. Another student made a concentrated HF bomb that went off in his hand. He was wearing his PPE, but still had to take a safety showers (sans clothing) and spent a night in the ED.

When you say "bomb," do you mean the testosterone-induced "wouldn't it be cool to blow something up so lets make a HF bomb" bomb, or a high pressure reaction vessel in the chemistry laboratory bomb?

If it was the former, my god ...its HF!

 

[neom3x11]

-

 

[OctoDoc]

Here's another goodie. I was working with hydrazine hydrate (if you have access, read the MSDS, or even the warning label on the bottle), and the residual drop from the pipette dripped onto my wrist at the exposed space between the end of the glove and the cuff of my lab coat. It took all of three seconds to get to the sink and wash it off.

About ten minutes later I had the worst migraine of my life, and at fifteen minutes about 60% of my field of vision was blurry, like looking through a greased up window. I put my head down for about 30 minutes, and things began to clear up, pun intended.

This from one drop, 3-second exposure.

 

[nrddct]

Anyone ever have to use the emergency shower?

 

[OctoDoc]

Anyone ever have to use the emergency shower?

Yep. Read my post way earlier in this thread. Have you noticed that there are no drains under those showers? OSHA won't let them be installed, for fear of washing chemicals into the groundwater system.

 

[deuist]

When you say "bomb," do you mean the testosterone-induced "wouldn't it be cool to blow something up so lets make a HF bomb" bomb, or a high pressure reaction vessel in the chemistry laboratory bomb?

He was trying to dissolve glass particles in a closed container. Heats was released and the enclosed gas expanded until the pressure inside the vessel was greater than the pressure outside. The container blew up in his hand and sent HF splattering around the lab.

 

[anon-y-mouse]

hydrazine hydrate

whoa! it's been forever since orgo, but that sounds like it has a lot of h's and n's and could be a decent reducing agent. how exactly did it affect you? vapors? through your skin?

 

[CardiacIntensivist]

I am pretty klutzy in lab. In orgo lab, I forgot to vent during extraction and the top blew off, spilling base all over my hand. Then during my research project I forgot to turn on the cooler for IEF. The professor was not happy. Guess I'm better off not getting a Ph.D. in Biology eh?

 

[OctoDoc]

whoa! it's been forever since orgo, but that sounds like it has a lot of h's and n's and could be a decent reducing agent. how exactly did it affect you? vapors? through your skin?

Yes, it is a strong reducing agent, but it is also a strong nucleophile. I'm guessing it reacts with all those aldehydes, ketones, esters, etc. in the body. And it is a good hydrogen-bond donor. It probably messes up the secondary, tertiary, quaternary structures of proteins.

Hydrazine hydrate is very water soluble. Some of it probably went right through my skin. Nasty, nasty stuff.

 

[diosa428]

My personal favorite was in organic, which every lab basically consisted of purifying and making crystals. I never had such luck with making those stupid crystals; I would always get brown when they were supposed to be white, or yellow when they should be brown, but the weirdest one was when I actually didn't get crystals at all...I got this thing that looked like a piece of chewed gum lol My professor never could explain what went wrong, but he was pretty puzzled at how I made that!

Yeah I was the one that always had to put my solution in the cold room overnight to get the crystals to form b/c they wouldn't form in the ice bath.

 

[LT2]

Yeah Crichton is a bit of a quak.

Doesn't sound like you got ETB on you, but it's seriously carcinogenic- above and beyond benzene- or so people say. I haven't tried.

Ahh, the good old days, when kids played with mercury for fun.

sorry to be a total geek, but isnt' EtBr a mutagen?

anyway, i have a funny story...

this girl in my lab was trying to make some 1 M arabinose. She came to one of the other grad students (this woman is also a grad student) because she said she couldn't get the arabinose into solution (even after heating it). He asked to see the flask so he could help her out, so she brought it over. He immediately recognized her "arabinose" as the packing material in the box her bottle of arabinose came in. the bottle was still buried in the box... we laughed at this for weeks.

 

[OctoDoc]

this girl in my lab was trying to make some 1 M arabinose. She came to one of the other grad students (this woman is also a grad student) because she said she couldn't get the arabinose into solution (even after heating it). He asked to see the flask so he could help her out, so she brought it over. He immediately recognized her "arabinose" as the packing material in the box her bottle of arabinose came in. the bottle was still buried in the box... we laughed at this for weeks.

Same thing happened in my lab. A new grad student came to me and said that he was having trouble dissolving bromine into his solution, and that he even tried grinding it in a mortar and pestle. WTF? I went over to his lab bench, and he was grinding the vermiculite packing material!

 

[ClarinetGeek]

Same thing happened in my lab. A new grad student came to me and said that he was having trouble dissolving bromine into his solution, and that he even tried grinding it in a mortar and pestle. WTF? I went over to his lab bench, and he was grinding the vermiculite packing material!

Come on! You can't be serious!

 

[OctoDoc]

Come on! You can't be serious!

No joke. After making fun of my friend, I asked him how he could make that mistake. He said he'd never seen elemental bromine before, and that was the first box of chemicals he'd ever opened himself. I guess I can see how he made the mistake. One of my undergrad inorganic chemistry classes had two chapters on qualitative inorganic chemistry, and my professor told us similar stories and commented on how no one nowadays knows what elements look like.

 

[LJDHC05]

AHHH - animals are the worst!!!!! I worked in a lab using mice and rats where we had to hold the mice flipped over on their back with their head immobilized to deliver their doses. Sometimes they would COMPLETELY freak out and DIE!!! In your hands! Like have a heart attack or panic attack or something - can you imagine killing an animal with your hands??!?! Holy "Of Mice and Men" gone bad...

Um, when I sacrifice my chickens, I hold them in my left hand and inject the fatal plus with my right...the blood of close to a thousand little baby chickens is on my hands.

As just a plain cool story, I had to make oxygen plasma for my undergrad research. An easy enough task with an Oxygen plasma generator, BUT we were in a small institution with only an argon plasma generator for SEM/TEM sputter coating, so part of my job was to figure out how to generate plasma in the lab. My advisor's only instructions is to do it without killing myself or anyone else. The chemistry faculty were all pulling for me to do it in their wing of the building, so that if there was an explosion it would allow them to get a new department built for them. I think I spent about a month microwaving different pieces of metal to generate a consistent spark. Now couple that with a low pressure, oxygen rich chamber and you've got some cool sparks and oxidized metal. Yes, it did occur to me that oxygen+spark=fireball. It took another few weeks to get a proper vacuum pump for the high vacuum that we needed to sustain plasma, which was probably the coolest thing I've ever seen.

 

[Slide]

When I was taking an NMR sample, I broke the NMR standard in the adjustment tube. It was funny seeing the TAs run around like chickens with their heads cut off until I realized I broke at least $200 in equipment for one small NMR tube.

 

[BozoSparky]

My old graduate school advisor told me a scary story once. He was a graduate student at Caltech and studied NMR. They ramped up the current in a new superconduting magnet for the first time. They had followed all the recommendations as far as placement of the magnet in the room. However, they didn't know that the wall contained a significant chunk of iron pipe. The magnet and the entire dewar system suddenly jumped and destroyed itself against the wall!

 

[DirtyIndian]

I've gased the wrong transgenic mice and didn't find out until 3 days later when the wrong cell counts came up on the FACS.

Point being: God will smite you for killing animals (or at least the wrong ones).

 

[Surg Path]

sorry to be a total geek, but isnt' EtBr a mutagen?

anyway, i have a funny story...

this girl in my lab was trying to make some 1 M arabinose. She came to one of the other grad students (this woman is also a grad student) because she said she couldn't get the arabinose into solution (even after heating it). He asked to see the flask so he could help her out, so she brought it over. He immediately recognized her "arabinose" as the packing material in the box her bottle of arabinose came in. the bottle was still buried in the box... we laughed at this for weeks.

Yup EB denatures your DNA- fcks it all up. But I still put it on my tuna sandwhich for that extra kick!

 

[PhillyMD2006]

wow that is seriously ******ed.

 

[LT2]

Yup EB denatures your DNA- fcks it all up. But I still put it on my tuna sandwhich for that extra kick!

it intercalates, it doesn't denature...

and i can't believe someone else tried to dissolve vermiculite, that's pretty funny. especially the mortar and pestle part...

 

[Gimlet]

Had a buddy in undergrad who was carrying an open 5 gallon carbine of phenol and dropped it, causing it to erupt out of the top and splash all over his face, neck, and arms. His skin was a nice bright pink from the burns for at least a couple of months.

I had a lot of crazy times in lab with the monkeys I used to work with, especially when they got loose. Nothing ever really managed to break, though.

 

[Surg Path]

it intercalates, it doesn't denature...

and i can't believe someone else tried to dissolve vermiculite, that's pretty funny. especially the mortar and pestle part...

Yeah you're right about that (to intercalate not denature)

 

[Squad51]

Ohh I see. The protocol I was taught (and that is ingrained in my mind since we were working with compressed liquid Cl2 cylinders around our government clients) is that it's supposed to be chained to the wall, or you're supposed to have the protective cap in place over the regulator before any sort of transport/movement.

I've always wanted to see one fly tho...heard they can go through walls!

When I was a young lad (thankfully the statute of limitations has passed) some friends and I took some tanks from a bankbrupt machine shop owned by my friend's dad. We set them up, nozzle down, with a cinder block raising the "bottom" and took turns smashing the nozzles off with a 16# sledgehammer, thus launching them into a lake. They do fly impressively!

 

[45408]

wow! this makes me feel a lot better about *almost* breaking a pH probe

 

[NCF145]

This wasn't a big deal, I just thought it was hilarious. I was working with a girl in the lab one afternoon plating collagen and we were using sterile cotton balls for one of the procedures. She accidentally dropped one of them and decided to sterilize it by flaming it. Needless to say it caught on fire. The rest of the day I made fun of her for trying to sterilize a piece of cotton by passing it through a flame.

 

[Surg Path]

When I was a young lad (thankfully the statute of limitations has passed) some friends and I took some tanks from a bankbrupt machine shop owned by my friend's dad. We set them up, nozzle down, with a cinder block raising the "bottom" and took turns smashing the nozzles off with a 16# sledgehammer, thus launching them into a lake. They do fly impressively!

Sweet. That should be the story basis of an mcat passage on pressure, force, ect.

 

[dilated]

Don't worry. ETB is not that bad. Just because it is labeled a carcinogen doesn't guarantee it'll give you cancer from a brief exposure.

Old fart chemists used to wash their hands in benzene, HMPA, and HMPT, and a whole bunch of supposedly nasty stuff. They are still around today, no worse for wear.

That ER episode with the benzene contamination makes me want to kick Michael Crichton's a$$. What a douche.

HMPA and HgCl2 were the only two chemicals I refused to use in the lab. If the reaction needed them then I needed a new project.

Super reactive is OK, long term mutagen = not cool.

My lab mishaps were beyond counting, but a favorite was doing a simple conversion of an alcohol to an iodine via PPh3 on like a 30 gram scale. I slowly added my iodine at 0C and everything seemed fine. Then I realized it hadn't been stirring vigorously enough as it was added, the iodine was at the bottom and the PPh3 was floating on top, and just as I realized that the stirrer splashed them into contact.. it bubbled up ominously, slowly enough for me to go "Oh, shi--" before the 24/40 glass stopper on the 3neck shot across the lab and shattered, followed by a giant orange geyser of 250mL methylene chloride and a few dozen grams of iodine/imidazole. The impact was rather impressive. My yield was 27%.

 

[novawildcat]

delete this post

 

[novawildcat]

I once accidently spilled all over my face and ingested some of this-

 

[OctoDoc]

My lab mishaps were beyond counting, but a favorite was doing a simple conversion of an alcohol to an iodine via PPh3 on like a 30 gram scale. I slowly added my iodine at 0C and everything seemed fine. Then I realized it hadn't been stirring vigorously enough as it was added, the iodine was at the bottom and the PPh3 was floating on top, and just as I realized that the stirrer splashed them into contact.. it bubbled up ominously, slowly enough for me to go "Oh, shi--" before the 24/40 glass stopper on the 3neck shot across the lab and shattered, followed by a giant orange geyser of 250mL methylene chloride and a few dozen grams of iodine/imidazole. The impact was rather impressive. My yield was 27%.

I had my share of geysers. 10 second mistake, 2-3 hour cleanup.

Just be glad you got a 27% yield after that mishap. Usually it is 0%. And both PPh3 and imidazole do very bad things to your body; I hope you didn't get splashed during eruption or cleanup.

 

[OctoDoc]

I once accidently spilled all over my face and ingested some of this-

THAT's why I said atropine is my anti-drug in another thread!

(for those puzzled, novawildcat's molecule is VX, a nerve gas. It was the nerve gas in the movie The Rock, and also earlier this season on the TV show "24.")

 

[akestler]

I was in the process of acidifying a polyaromatic hydrocarbon with a very strong lewis acid (PBr3) agent while refluxing in benzene. Upon completion, the instructions said pour over water and shake. Be it lack of sleep or hangover from the night before, I didnt think to use ice water and immediately poured entire mixture into sep funnel for separation. Since this was my first compound of a grand synthesis I was working on a very large scale (~20g). Upon shaking up of refluxed benzene+compound+lewis acid + water in 2L sepfunnel, i didn't vetn it quickly enough and the entire thing blew up in the hood and all over me. I was wearing protective glasses but had contacts in and wasn't wearing an apron. It blew up all over my face, arms, neck, shirt/jeans. I felt like I was on fire and went running to the grad student who turned on the sink and started rinsing my face, arms, took off my shirt and took out my contacts, put them into disposable glass vials, and took me to the hospital to treat burns. Other labs on the same floor came over to say they smelled something funny coming from our lab, and you could see splatter patterns of acid that ate away the color of the metal cabinet across from me. Oh yeah, the next day when I took a look at my clothes they had holes in them. That was the final straw in realizing a phd in organic was not really for me.

I was lucky.

 

[OctoDoc]

I was lucky.

No kidding. You should have used the safety shower. My o-chem professor told us of one student that got an acid (I'm guessing sulfuric) splashed all over her. She was forced under the safety shower against her will, and was encouraged to take off her sweater. Even when the prof tried to pull it off of her, she grabbed it and fought to keep it on. She was embarassed that the other students in the class would see her unclothed. Because she kept her acid-soaked sweater on, she sufferred massive scarring to her torso. He then looked at our entire lab class and said, "If you are under the safety shower, STRIP! That is no time for modesty!"

 

[dilated]

I was in the process of acidifying a polyaromatic hydrocarbon with a very strong lewis acid (PBr3) agent while refluxing in benzene. Upon completion, the instructions said pour over water and shake. Be it lack of sleep or hangover from the night before, I didnt think to use ice water and immediately poured entire mixture into sep funnel for separation. Since this was my first compound of a grand synthesis I was working on a very large scale (~20g).

Geez man, wasn't the massive fuming as soon as you syringed the PBr3 out a hint about how nasty it is?

I actually did something similar once. I took an overly liberal interpretation of "dropwise" PBr3 addition and it blew up into my manifold line. Apparently among its many powers is the ability to digest tygon tubing.

 

[akestler]

No kidding. You should have used the safety shower. My o-chem professor told us of one student that got an acid (I'm guessing sulfuric) splashed all over her. She was forced under the safety shower against her will, and was encouraged to take off her sweater. Even when the prof tried to pull it off of her, she grabbed it and fought to keep it on. She was embarassed that the other students in the class would see her unclothed. Because she kept her acid-soaked sweater on, she sufferred massive scarring to her torso. He then looked at our entire lab class and said, "If you are under the safety shower, STRIP! That is no time for modesty!"

At the time, we thought about the shower, but then realized we couldn't remember the last time it was used, good thing to as when we turned it on jut to see all the water that came out was brown