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

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I do that all the time. We don't drug them up beforehand, which makes getting them into the guillotine much more difficult. It's easier if you have the guillotine next to a sink with your tube and a funnel. All you have to do is quickly move the torso over the funnel and voila, the blood goes into the tube. Though it still freaks me out when the rat's legs keep moving afterwards, like it's trying to run away. In my lab we immediately take out the prostate and testes, and a lot of the time the intestine will pulse for a few minutes after cutting off the head. It freaked me out the first time I saw it, but you quickly get used to it.

The worst thing I've done in lab is to use the wrong species secondary antibody in immunohistochemistry. It took me a week to figure out why I wasn't seeing anything and needed to use the mouse instead of the rabbit, but I won't ever make that mistake again.

disheveled_dave said:
This has got to be one the most f'ed up lab experiences of all time: I'm working with rats, and the grad student needs to collect blood samples from the area surrounding the spinal cord. Easiest way to do this, she says, is drug 'em up a bit and cut their heads off. "They won't feel any pain," she tells us. "Standard procedure."

Being the faithful little research assistant I was at the time (just following orders, right?), I find myself one week later with a semi-limp rat in my right hand and the handle of this freakish guillotine/paper cutter thing in my left hand. CHOP. At this point, the headless rat torso would begin to kick and squirm, and I'd run it over to the other side of the lab. Blood flying, I'd squeeze the torso above a test tube sitting in ice and try to catch as much of the precious sample as I could, all while the poor animal's glassy eyes stared at me from across the room.

I still have dreams about this. :eek:
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I've had pretty much the standard breaking of glassware in orgo lab with the condenser and graduated cylinders and other stuff my research lab, but I also broke the micropippetor. It was repairable with a little glue and still works. When I first started working I would mess up dilutions and various things. I was homogenizing some tissue to later isolate the RNA. I was using the lovely pink trizol stuff and some splashed on my cheek and immediately put little holes in it. Damned stuff. I had a bunch of small little dots of red on my face for a few days. And I need not mention acrylamide. The stuff is all over our lab because a lot of us run westerns. Nasty stuff. I've also used a lot of xylene in the fume hood along with methanol. When I was doing some immunohistochemistry stuff I used xylene to dry the sections and often ripped my gloves. Sure enough I usually got xylene on my exposed skin. Not that bad but breathing that junk in for months couldn't have been good.
 
JHU Texan said:
I do that all the time. We don't drug them up beforehand, which makes getting them into the guillotine much more difficult. It's easier if you have the guillotine next to a sink with your tube and a funnel. All you have to do is quickly move the torso over the funnel and voila, the blood goes into the tube. Though it still freaks me out when the rat's legs keep moving afterwards, like it's trying to run away. In my lab we immediately take out the prostate and testes, and a lot of the time the intestine will pulse for a few minutes after cutting off the head. It freaked me out the first time I saw it, but you quickly get used to it.

The worst thing I've done in lab is to use the wrong species secondary antibody in immunohistochemistry. It took me a week to figure out why I wasn't seeing anything and needed to use the mouse instead of the rabbit, but I won't ever make that mistake again.
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Nice. I haven't had to sack the rats in our lab since the PI and one of the grad students do it, but I'd imagine it's an interesting experience.

But yeah, I think I was lucky and haven't messed up the antibodies in the immunohistochemistry or westerns yet. Too many rabbits, goats, horses, and donkeys.
 
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during cell bio lab and workin on gel electrophoresis (i think)... i pipetted 2 mL of ethidium bromide on my TA's arm. She just stared at me and said, "i have a 2 y/o daughter u know."
 
Samosas said:
during cell bio lab and workin on gel electrophoresis (i think)... i pipetted 2 mL of ethidium bromide on my TA's arm. She just stared at me and said, "i have a 2 y/o daughter u know."
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"Good......that way the damage to your DNA won't affect a future generation." :smuggrin:
 
DropkickMurphy said:
"Good......that way the damage to your DNA won't affect a future generation." :smuggrin:
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It's only a somatic mutation, it shouldn't hurt you too badly...oh dear. :laugh:

I once had to profuse a mouse in my lab...talk about a nightmarish experience. I'm not terribly squeamish but cutting off a mouse head with scissors really bothered me. :scared:

I also remember another one: one time in my lab one of the post-docs was trying to dispose of a whole bottle of xylene, so he tried to follow directions by pouring it into the waste bucket. The waste bucket was plastic though...and the xylene melted it immediately. That was quite a mess to clean up. Ranks right up there with the people who spill radioactive isotopes on themselves and then walk around with it on the bottom of their shoes.
 
first time at my reserach lab... my PI cut off the head of a prairie vole and handed it to me... the beady eyes just looked at me.. then she promptly showed me how to cut off the skin, crack open the skull, and remove the hemispheres.

good times.
 
ssquared said:
It's only a somatic mutation, it shouldn't hurt you too badly...oh dear. :laugh:

I once had to profuse a mouse in my lab...talk about a nightmarish experience. I'm not terribly squeamish but cutting off a mouse head with scissors really bothered me. :scared:
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:eek: I did perfusions on mice too; quite a horrific experience! :scared:
 
in high school bio i almost drank 20mL of petroleum ether. this was like 6 months ago LOL. good thing i asked the teacher if it was dangerous
 
Not lab related, but crap happens no matter what your job is.
Working as a biomedical engineer at a hospital:

I had to stay late at night to help a service rep with an upgrade of the cath lab monitoring systems. Defect in a cable from the manufacturer shorted out the systems in both cath labs about 11PM at night. Glad it wasn't my fault, but the result was no cath lab facilities in the hospital for about 12 hrs. It was a long night and God only knows how much revenue the hospital lost having to cancel procedures. Thankfully no patients were injured.

Same cath lab: One night during an emergency angioplasty the hospital lost power and only one of two emergency generators turned on. It was complete blackness with the exception of a couple of flashlights, a portable EKG monitor and the catheter in the patient's vessel with no imaging. Scary. Fortunately lasted only about 10 mins and the patient was ok.

Unrelated: My husband worked as the general manager for a company which supplied airplane parts. A quality defect delayed shipment until at last it looked as though they would make the deadline with a rush overnight courier. A blizzard cancelled all flights, they finally found a private flight out of an airport about 4 hours away. The guy driving the truck with the parts is on the highway when in front of him a crazy man goes on a rampage shooting at cars. The truck is hit, fortunately the driver is unharmed, but the truck is held on highway and towed as evidence. No way to get the parts to Boeing that night. Not everyone can say they were responsible for shutting down production of a 777 airliner.
 
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my gf works in a lab (chemistry) where one GRADUATE STUDENT once turned the oven (to sterilize glassware) to the max (~700 Celsius) and left it on OVERNIGHT. The entire inside was completely melted, obviously. Luckily, the lab and building didn't burn down.
 
I threw away the supernatant (which contained the DNA!). lol. :oops:
 
Kfire326 said:
<-- o-chlorobenzaldehyde on my tongue (don't ask)
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I had physics teacher who once put a 9-V battery on his tongue. That actually turned out to be a bad idea....(not lab related, but it's along the same lines of "things that shouldn't be put in your mouth")
 
I don't even want to put a figure on the cost of all the glassware I've broken. My favorite was when I killed a massive 5 liter sep. funnel. I'm guessing it was valued in the high hundreds up to a thousand or so bucks...:eek:
 
I just remembered HS Physics, my teacher had one of those lovely (I forget the name) things that basically generates a high voltage current. You could line a group of people up holding hands and run the current through them with the last person holding a light bulb and as long as the chain was connected... it would work and no one would get shocked b/c the whole system was grounded (I think, I forgot pretty much all physics after the MCAT). Anyway, something that requires everyone to remain calm and not break contact is good experiment to try with jittery HS girls. We all got a good jolt.
 
Six HPLC machines were supposed to be used for an analytical chemistry lab that I took awhile back...portions of the class split up and took rotations using the different pieces of equipment on alternating weeks...by the time the first rotation was done we had all but 2 of those machines broken (the faculty even said that they were way too expensive to even try to have fixed for the purposes of our lab). Most of us had to take the initiative to come into lab after hours to use the 2 remaining machines to get our work done...it sucked!
 
Not in the lab, but I have wrecked an ambulance. It wasn't totalled or anything that crazy, but I did get to pee in a cup and do lots and lots of paper work. I can't imagine how much I would have hated life if there had been a patient in the back. :eek:
 
Captain Fantastic said:
Not in the lab, but I have wrecked an ambulance. It wasn't totalled or anything that crazy, but I did get to pee in a cup and do lots and lots of paper work. I can't imagine how much I would have hated life if there had been a patient in the back. :eek:
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Looking for a job? My old employer seems to look for people with bad driving records. :smuggrin:
 
I forgot to dilute the lab's stock of a radioactive tritiated compound. Besides getting ridiculous results, I wasted about $600 worth of materials. Whoops.
 
Some doc contaminated the Petri dishes with a fungus. It led to the discovery of penicillin.

Some screw up! :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:
 
Some doc contaminated the Petri dishes with a fungus. It led to the discovery of penicillin.

Some screw up! :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:
 
As a lab tech just after I graduated, I purified protein from mammalian cells in acid. I picked up a bottle of NaPhos buffer that I thought was neutral. It turned out to have pH of 3! oops.
 
i caused a fire to get out of control in the fume hood, causing the hood to catch on fire.
 
healthnut said:
i caused a fire to get out of control in the fume hood, causing the hood to catch on fire.
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A number of years ago, a post-doc of mine put teflon in the 500 degree Centigrade furnace

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teflon

As this is well above the melting point of teflon, it gave the local fire department a chance to come out and visit us as well as cost us about $10,000 in supplies that were destoyed.

Many years later, this post-doc is a tenured faculty in the sciences at an Ivy League institution. Every time this person sees me, they mention that incident!!

Of course, my mom still reminds me (30 years later) of the time I fell asleep at home over spring break from college having left something in the oven, also giving the local fire department the opportunity to visit us and some folks the opportunity to repaint our kitchen.
 
oldbearprofessor said:
A number of years ago, a post-doc of mine put teflon in the 500 degree Centigrade furnace

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teflon

As this is well above the melting point of teflon, it gave the local fire department a chance to come out and visit us as well as cost us about $10,000 in supplies that were destoyed.

Many years later, this post-doc is a tenured faculty in the sciences at an Ivy League institution. Every time this person sees me, they mention that incident!!

Of course, my mom still reminds me (30 years later) of the time I fell asleep at home over spring break from college having left something in the oven, also giving the local fire department the opportunity to visit us and some folks the opportunity to repaint our kitchen.
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Imagine having your own garage burn down (due to an electrical short) when you're a lieutenant on the fire department.....I still hear about that one. :laugh:
 
Well this is just plain stupidness on my part. I work mainly in proteomics - the lysis buffers that I use don't work well with the common protein quantitation assays out there.

I didn't know this at the time, and used the BCA assay to quantitate my samples. I literally had to dilute my sample to 1:100,000 in order to get a concentration within the standard range. Of course, I thought this was "just fine," and would then wonder why I would never see any protein on my gels. And, i kid you not, I troubleshooted for WEEKS before I finally realized that the assay was telling me that I had over a KILOGRAM of protein in my little protein sample. Which is total bull****!!

I got a better assay. And everything started to work...finally.
 
after lab... i had some dry ice left over. ohh yeah. put that giant chunk (about 4 to 5 pounds) in a sink and turned on the water. :D :D
 
dropped a couple mice in the lab this summer while trying to set up an animal model. they werent hurt, but my advisors/fellow lab mates could have killed me for all the time we spent trying to catch them. Balb/c's are springy, take note.

also once blew up a distillation apparatus in organic chem lab. actually, twice.

edit: remembering more of them. i went through about $1000 in tool compounds in a day because i couldnt get my calculations set up right, and nearly ran the chem dept out of the experimental molecule we were using for the same reason. (worked for a pharma company, they only have a few grams total of the experimental stuff and i used like 3/4 of the dept's allocation of it in one assay)
 
Crazy4F1 said:
dropped a couple mice in the lab this summer while trying to set up an animal model. they werent hurt, but my advisors/fellow lab mates could have killed me for all the time we spent trying to catch them. Balb/c's are springy, take note.

also once blew up a distillation apparatus in organic chem lab. actually, twice.
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Oooh, expensive apparatus...
 
HumbleMD said:
Oooh, expensive apparatus...
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i'm a little short on sleep...was that sarcasm? :laugh: it did result in an almighty shower of glass and water over my entire lab group, and they were not very pleased. :laugh:
 
Crazy4F1 said:
i'm a little short on sleep...was that sarcasm? :laugh: it did result in an almighty shower of glass and water over my entire lab group, and they were not very pleased. :laugh:
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No, not at all. Whenever I was doing a distillation, I was constantly reminded how that tiny bit of glassware cost thousands of dollars. Thus, i was always terrified of breaking one. I had referenced earlier the time I killed a 3 litre sep. funnel...
 
HumbleMD said:
No, not at all. Whenever I was doing a distillation, I was constantly reminded how that tiny bit of glassware cost thousands of dollars. Thus, i was always terrified of breaking one. I had referenced earlier the time I killed a 3 litre sep. funnel...
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true. sorry, just a little sleep deprived this morning (in the middle of an 8 hour work shift on 3 hours of sleep :()
 
i'm pretty sure a distillation doesn't take $1,000's of dollars equipment. many of the set ups now have tiny little cooling thingies that's literally the size of your palm. now if you broke the vaccum during a vaccum distillation.... :D
 
crimsonkid85 said:
i'm pretty sure a distillation doesn't take $1,000's of dollars equipment. many of the set ups now have tiny little cooling thingies that's literally the size of your palm. now if you broke the vaccum during a vaccum distillation.... :D
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Sorry, 1 thousand dollars. I do organometalic chemistry, and we have these teeny tiny ones which are custom made and cost at least a grand...
 
:eek:

man, i do synthesis/methodology--and wow, i dont know how much they cost for us, but i bettered be more careful! (haven't broken one, but just in case!)
 
I once fried a $600 sonicator. It was smoking and everyone kept saying what's that smell. It took a minute to realize that - no - the other people working in my lab didn't set something on fire...I did.
 
Crazy4F1 said:
dropped a couple mice in the lab this summer while trying to set up an animal model. they werent hurt, but my advisors/fellow lab mates could have killed me for all the time we spent trying to catch them. Balb/c's are springy, take note.
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Nothing's worse than trying to catch loose mice. We had to wear jumpsuits, hairnets, face masks, gloves, and booties when working with the mice, so running after them was more like an exercise in waddling around, swearing at the little thing. "Gah! You !@$^$%@# mouse! Come back here!"

Always a good time. And if you're lucky, they'll bite you, too.
 
Breaking big things in lab is somewhat a rite of passage into research. It ALWAYS happens, it's generally caused by something really stupid, and hopefully you learn from it. One of my best advisors sat everyone down when they first started and told them "When you start, I expect you to be completely inept...if you knew how to do everything you wouldn't need to be here. Our goals is that when you leave, you will be proficient on your research and on the tools in the lab. Things break, mistakes happen, most important is to learn from them and NOT to repeat them, particularly the more expensive and time comsuming ones."

Thus far, the best "accident" in lab has been when the waste bottle exploded. One of the summer students accidently filled the bottle to the very top and sealed the cap, leaving the sealed bottle next to a window on a sunny day. About halfway though lunch we hear this big boom and the entire floor of the lab was coated with this nasty, slick brown organic goo that seriously took us a week to get off. Too bad we weren't working on a long lasting synthetic lubricant...
 
Breaking gels on the way to geldocs and piecing them back together like a puzzle is also bitching fun. who's with me?
 
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