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

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masterMood said:
My lab partner was using tritium (hydrogen with 3 neutrons), and is pretty radioactive and spilled that **** all over the floor and over her arms. You can't detect it with a Geiger counter, has a half-life of 12 years and is probably a carcinogenic.


RADIATION ASSAYS ROCK
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Tritium has 2 neutrons (+ 1 proton). And it's very low energy, so as long as you keep it outside of your body you're alright (the radiation can't get through skin to cause damage).
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johnnydrama said:
Tritium has 2 neutrons (+ 1 proton). And it's very low energy, so as long as you keep it outside of your body you're alright (the radiation can't get through skin to cause damage).
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Exactly. As long as you don't ingest the stuff, you'll be ok. Alpha radiation really can't get through clothing, a piece of paper stops the stuff. But eating it, well....I'm gonna go ahead and say that the fact that it's a carcinogen is the least of your problems. :scared:

(the radiation safety course I had to take every year for my lab actually sunk in after the fourth time....)
 
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Worst thing I've ever done is spill a beaker full of solution (like 2L of it!) all over grad student/ my mentor 's bench.... on his sheet of lab sketches and textbooks.... he was so nice about it, but I'm sure it was terrible for him. :(

And mishaps in lab remind me of the time I messed up a chem lab experiment big time in high school. I forgot to put an indicator in my reaction and I was asking the teacher why the color wasn't changing... um in front of the whole class. It was 7am, I was the only student without a lab partner... and duh I felt stupid. She helped by making me feel more like an idiot. I still cringe whenever I think of it. Can't wait to get all MD in her face. HA.
 
Last week I spilled a bag of intralipid all over the bench...I still cant get it off the machines. Also, last year in orgo lab I walked away from my experiment for like 10 seconds and the whole damn beaker burst into flames somehow. I just stood back while my TA's attempted to put it out for like 10 minutes. Thank GOD I wasn't kicked out :thumbup::thumbup::thumbup:
 
after plate pouring... i was putting the huge flasks... the really big ones in the drying bin... the one of them rolled and knocked 3 others to the ground...it was horibble... but at least i didnt have to pay for it...
 
i broke my hands!! :( too much pipetting!

alas, my doctor says i may never pipette again...
 
Let's just say they don't let me near the gene guns anymore...
 
DropkickMurphy said:
My personal favorite was a "****ing duh!" incident done by our general chem professor (now the head of the department (a very questionable decision, given what I am about to describe)).

He heated a sealed container of methylene blue dye over a Bunsen burner. When my lab partner (who is a HAZMAT technician for one of the county fire departments) pointed out why this might be a good idea, the prof responded with "Which one of us has a PhD in chemistry?". As my partner and I walked out, he retorted with "Which one of us has an ounce of ****ing common sense?"

We walked out of the lab- along with a few other students who apparently overheard what happened- and BANG!WOOMMPFFF! *sound of liquid splattering* "SONOFABITCH!"

Needless to say our prof was easily recognizable for a while until the blue stains on his skin faded. :laugh:
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:lol::lol::lol::lol:
 
1. I broke the mini centrifuge machine(15k) in my research lab. I kinda forced it to open and the opening valve snapped. I fixed it(kind of), so it works just fine now. I think

2. I broke the autoclave machine once. I put the autoclave bag without a tray(i don't know what i was thinking) and then the bag just melted and stuck on the autoclave machine... that's when i was a noob. Fortunately, they fixed it pretty quick. I feel bad for the person who strapped all that crap off.

3. I accidentally poured out my precious purified sample of silicatein into a sink and put DI water instead. I worked on that thing for almost 2weeks, and i was pretty pissed about it(and my boss/professor).

None of my lab people know i did all that. They just know that I am pretty good at research and stuff, 'cause i was the one of few people who knew how to use all the machines in the lab, and they've never seen me messing up(yes, i am slick). But ultimately, I paid for my all wrong-doings--

This one time, this other bio lab had this crappy phase-separator for liquid nitrogen gas tank and i had to go get some liquid nitrogen there. That phase separator went nuts on me and my index finger got some serious frostbite from the liquid nitrogen. It was so severe that I thought i had to cut my finger off because i couldn't feel my index finger an hour. Fortunately, i got some crazy scar instead(now it doesn't look that bad), and my lab covered for my medical expenses. That sucked.

Let's be careful in the lab... and not break anything. I hope none of my lab people read this.
 
When I first started working in my lab, no one had ever told me about autoclave tape so I asked my PI how someone could possibly have all the time to individually color each line with a black sharpie...we all have our moments...AND I broke a CO2 incubator. Don't trip, sh&# happens. :)
 
Wow you guys are crazy... Everyone screws up sometimes, but damn, I never cost my lab more than hm... $300 at any given time?
 
Zendoc said:
When I first started working in my lab, no one had ever told me about autoclave tape so I asked my PI how someone could possibly have all the time to individually color each line with a black sharpie...
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I swear, that's how it's done. In our lab, we trained monkeys to do it. Or at least...that's what the Post-docs told me anyway. Ah...those poor monkeys.
 
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I don't think you've really experiences true lab work until you've broken something. For me thermometers just have a way of cracking on me; as well as the columns for hplc. As far as huge centrifuges, gladly no. I have heard of a situation occurring where someone didn't calibrate the tubes correctly; something on the order of a few mL's. At so many thousand rpm's the machine was actually thrown through a concrete wall. Good thing no one got hurt; happened back in the 90's. It's been the tale of my chem dept. for years.
 
I kill rats every now an then......but I think its only fair since I am implanting canulas into their brains.
 
I broke a 2L bottle of Acetone while I was putting it on the counter. I got the stuff all over me. Luckly I wasn't wearing synthetic fibers or I would have ended up with no pants. I think the fumes also gave me brain damage because my short term memory is now horrible.
 
As for my own lab follies.....
-Using a few hundred grams of (expensive) YNB instead of Yeast Extract to make media
-Trying to vacuum filter a cell culture to retrieve supernatant.... somehow I missed the part about spinning it down first
-Broken thermometer in organic lab
-Rescuing my hplc peak in a beaker when the fraction collector decided to malfunction... only to spill said beaker two minutes later
-The classic "run an agarose gel backwards"
-Dropping (and breaking) two freshly made, filtered, and pH-ed buffers back to back one day
-Running SDS-PAGE gels in the wrong buffer for a week and a half, wondering "Why the hell do my gels look so screwed up??"
-Countless other stupid mistakes, although thank goodness I have not broken a centrifuge. The last person that did that got fired.
-Although not necessarily my screw-up, a 3L flask of yeast culture came loose from its bracket in the shaking incubator and of course shattered, leaving yeast to fry on the walls of the incubator all weekend. I got to clean it out... all day. Gross.

Glad to see I'm not the only one!
 
littlealex said:
Wow you guys are crazy... Everyone screws up sometimes, but damn, I never cost my lab more than hm... $300 at any given time?
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You're lucky. Very lucky.

I was training a girl who spilled an entire reagent tube, and then didn't bother to tell anybody about the accident. When I asked her why she didn't think it was worth mentioning, she said, "Oh, it was just one tube." She was a little surprised when I told her the stuff was $500 per mL.
 
I have a few stories, but here is one that I remember:

Coomassie blue staining requires 45:45:10 MeOH:H2O:Acetic Acid mixture, but in the protocol book it said 90:10 (MeOH:H2O v/v, Acetic Acid) so I made the solution with 90mL methanol and 10mL Acetic Acid. I started staining, came back in the morning, and all I saw was a shrinky dink.

One week wasted. Sad.
 
So I haven't read all these posts, but I had a pretty scary incident with our 500MHz NMR doing research after sophmore year. I'm not sure if this is true, but from my understanding, do undergrads not get to work directly with the NMR? But anyways, at our school, you're allowed to work it by yourself as an undergrad if you past a test (which is required one of the intermediate classes). My PI, however, apparently just doesn't do his own NMR often, or at all, and he told me that I'd have to turn the lock way up on DMSO, which was definitely not the case. Anyways, the NMR computer obviously starts freaking out on me with beeping error msgs and all that. All of I sudden, I hear a loud noise from the magnet itself and I HAULED A$$ outta there, because if the thing quenches, you're done for. After calming myself down and the noise stopped, I went and found one of the professors, and he got it fixed and told me what I had done wrong. Fortunately, nothing was actually broken, but being scared that you're going to die and scared that you've broke a 500k machine is not the kind of excitement you want, let me tell you...
 
this isnt biology/chemistry related but when i was interning at an engineering firm, i put an OC-128 blade($150K) into a chassis while the chassis was on. i thought i fried the card but luckily for me, i didn't press the blade in all the way.
 
Not so much screwup as a set back...plus a little stupidity thrown in.

My lab partner and I spent two weeks working 10 hour days taking the pH of over 200 solutions. Thing is, only 10% of those solutions were actually water based. So 90% of our pH's were of organic solvents that the pH meter wasn't reading correctly to begin with because there was no H+ in the system. I don't think I've ever been this stupid before in my life.
 
I accidentally used some of the second year medical students cultures and put my bacteria on it. The lab tech was pretty upset with me.
 
High school chemistry lab, first time, got confused with turning on the bunsen burners. Left in on for a couple of minutes, came back and lit the striker. Whole table ignited. Should've known better, it smelled strongly f gas-oh well at least no one had taken a deep breath
 
My professor: "Ecology research is great. I burn down forests, kick back in a lawn chair, drink a beer, and watch things grow back. Sometimes we make mistakes. There was this one time down South, when we set fire to a forest and went to lunch. We came back a few hours later to find the fire had spread outside our sectioned area and burned down a lotta acres that weren't ours. :D"
 
I forgot to shut off the FPLC pumps and left them running overnight. My prof freaked out the next day about how I could have killed the machine. That night he makes the same mistake:laugh:
I think I know what it feels like to be "pimped" during med school cause my prof does it to me all the time and makes me feel like a *****. :oops:
 
I haven't done anything too bad... *knock on wood* But of course, I've had my moments.

Once I was counting bacteria using a UV light, and all the face shields were getting used. I waited and waited and waited and finally just said, Oh well, I'll be fine.
Later that night I'm convinced something got stuck in my eyes because I keep rubbing them, and they're turning red... then at 4am or so I wake up and my eyes hurt OH MY GOD SO MUCH... it was like, I seriously could not even open them, they hurt that badly. Even in the dark. So slowly, slowly, with a huge burst of pain, I opened them.. I remember thinking I was going to pass out. Then I was terrified to close them again so I kept blinking rapidly. I actually biked to the ER like that, barely able to see, everything was a white blur. I had no idea what was going on, and when the doctor said I had burned my corneas, I asked him "Are you sure?"
The other two things I remember from that night were that he said that cornea burns happen to metal wielders (who I always think of as big burly men) and then they never ever do it again. I felt kind of hardcore after that, haha.
Also I remember the sweet, sweet relief of the pain-killer eyedrops he dropped into my eyes. He kept saying "Is that enough?" and I kept saying no, a little more, it still hurts. That went on for a good while.

None of the other stuff compares to that, and luckily I haven't messed anyone else's experiments up. *knocks on wood again*
 
Terna said:
I haven't done anything too bad... *knock on wood* But of course, I've had my moments.

Once I was counting bacteria using a UV light, and all the face shields were getting used. I waited and waited and waited and finally just said, Oh well, I'll be fine.
Later that night I'm convinced something got stuck in my eyes because I keep rubbing them, and they're turning red... then at 4am or so I wake up and my eyes hurt OH MY GOD SO MUCH... it was like, I seriously could not even open them, they hurt that badly. Even in the dark. So slowly, slowly, with a huge burst of pain, I opened them.. I remember thinking I was going to pass out. Then I was terrified to close them again so I kept blinking rapidly. I actually biked to the ER like that, barely able to see, everything was a white blur. I had no idea what was going on, and when the doctor said I had burned my corneas, I asked him "Are you sure?"
The other two things I remember from that night were that he said that cornea burns happen to metal wielders (who I always think of as big burly men) and then they never ever do it again. I felt kind of hardcore after that, haha.
Also I remember the sweet, sweet relief of the pain-killer eyedrops he dropped into my eyes. He kept saying "Is that enough?" and I kept saying no, a little more, it still hurts. That went on for a good while.
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J....I think that is the worst one I've read on this thread so far...I mean you could of went blind.
 
Yeah, you heard me right.. I froze a mouse or two with liquid nitrogen. Pretty incredible. The tail is completely stock frozen stiff. Wow, my post-doc wasn't happy with me for a week or so. :rolleyes:

Then, when I joined my current lab, they were showing me how to do the procedure. They said, be careful to close the lid to the centrifuge all the way. I said, of course. Watched carefully... and then proceeded to do it myself, and make a frisbee out of the lid as the centrifuge slowly tore apart all the plastic around the edge. It was out of commission while we ordered a new lid. This was my FIRST DAY!!!!!! Talk about wonderful first impressions...
 
Out of curiosity, why would a mouse and liquid nitrogen ever come that close to each other in a lab?
 
i had a bunch of nematode worm strains in one of those plastic containers, and i had been creating these strains for weeks and weeks. one day, im looking under the microscope and out of the corner of my eye, i see a huge flame. i look up and my entire experiment is on fire as well at the shelf right above with with bottles of ethanol. i grabbed the ethanol right before the fire hit it. i guess i put my stuff waaay too close to the bunson burner.

one of my lab collegues jumped over 5 lab benches to get to me and a fire extinigusher while i stood there paralyzed with tears pouring out of my eyes.

i guess that means no emergency room medicine for me ;)
 
The worst thing I've seen happen in the lab was an accident when I was undergrad that one of our postdocs had with mice, 100% oxygen, and a spark. It was truly horrendous. Things burn FAST in 100% oxygen.
 
I had my moments but thank god nothing bad happened to me,
last week I had a methanol flood in my chem research lab, all over my pants and shoes, blamed it on my partner who out of the kidness of his heart cleaned the spill while I continued the experiement. We had to leave the lab because the smell was way tooooo strong, talk abt getting high lol,
ANother thing, I accedently mixed 2 cell lines together and was wondering why my cells looked so weird, and the grad student said they are mutated when he was WRONG!!! as usual!!!.
I also had several water bath floods in my physics lab, but the worse was the burn in my face because of NaOH solution we were using, a splash of it kept a burn scare, but good thing it wasnt in my eyes, i had no saftey glasses and I wasnt working in the hood!!!!!??? :laugh:
In a proecess called transfer in western blot, i forgot to add tris to the transfer buffer, so nothing transfer, which made 2 weeks of work and experiemnent go to waste!!!.
Also, the worst was when I used liquied nitrogen to freeze down yeast cells, I put my hand all in the liq N2, made my glove hard as a wall and my hand took forever to get back to normal, extreemly freezing !!!!!
 
Sometimes it's not so much an issue of damaging the lab equipment itself, but more of the way in which it was done...

A lab I was working for was throwing a small reception, on the premises, to celebrate some accomplishment or another. Nothing fancy, but the usual free food and drinks. Some people from my department show up a bit late and were lamenting the fact that by the time they got there, all they had left were non-alcoholic drinks. These events, they tell me, used to be much larger, and this was never a problem before. One of the supervisors points out that they cut the budget for these sorts of events, specifically related to alcohol.

Why?

Well, apparently, at some previous reception, one of lab techs or whomever had a little more to drink then they could handle. And in their inebriated state, decided to go down to the lab and start indiscriminately urinating on the industrial scale (think Human Genome Project) automated DNA sequencers. Why couldn't they just piss off the balcony or on a potted plant like a normal drunk?
 
GujuMD said:
I haven't broken any thing but when I was doing immunological stain-I accidentally forgot to dilute the antibody and ended up using two vials of concentrated antibody.
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holy crap, antibodies are hundreds of dollars per vial!
 
aynrand said:
yeah i'm a walking disaster. and here i am trying to get into med-school.
last summer i was working in lab and i was using the UV-light visualizer: stuck the gel in, closed the box, turned the lights on, got my image on the computer, saved it, and i left lab. the next morning, i saw water coming out of every crack of the equipement. i realized that i had forgotten to turn the uv-light off. when i finally pressed off and opened the gel compartment, there literally was no gel left. what was left was this crinkled piece of plastic.
i didn't get in trouble or anything, thank god.
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I almost want to be disappointed. I thought I had a totally unique story. Yep. ,I did the same thing, except along with the crinkled piece of gel that needed a spatula to scrape it off the visualizing plate I also burned the plate itself. No water though...
 
I've made gels with water instead of TAE.

I've accidentally taken a mouse's head off while trying to do a cervical dislocation. Blood everywhere, not fun.

In my lab, we euthanize with dry ice. Just spray some water, Co2 is released, mouse dies. Sounds easy, unless you're not spraying enough water and the mouse continues to twitch for awhile. I had a mouse like that, and I tried a cervical dislocation on top of the gassing, and I thought it worked. Except then I started to open her up (I needed to harvest embryos), and she starts twitching. Like, it looked like she was doing rhythmic crunches, while making this horrible gagging sound. And I kept cutting, and eventually she stopped when I was like, **** this, and opened her ribcage and cut her aorta.

I've gotten 4%PFA in my eyes. It burns real bad, even after you wash it out in the eyewash station.
 
Tenacity said:
I have a few stories, but here is one that I remember:

Coomassie blue staining requires 45:45:10 MeOH:H2O:Acetic Acid mixture, but in the protocol book it said 90:10 (MeOH:H2O v/v, Acetic Acid) so I made the solution with 90mL methanol and 10mL Acetic Acid. I started staining, came back in the morning, and all I saw was a shrinky dink.

One week wasted. Sad.
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I think Ive said this before...but I'm almost disappointed that both my biggest mistakes are already in this thread.

Only dif was that I put in the right amounts of everything but I put in the acetic acid last and DIDN"T MIX IT... and ended up with a shrinky dink.
 
Didn't balance stuff properly in the microcentrifuge and lost a batch of protein.

Exposed one of the FPLC pumps to air during a run and almost ruined the streptactin column, that was bad.

Other small things, like ripping gels, etc.
 
I was in biochem lab last year and conveniently was working at a bench across from people from a different lab group. Evidently, they had gone to the rainforest over spring break to collect samples of leaves and twigs and things (this by far must be the coolest lab offered at my school), and were doing something to their samples that involved flames. And ethanol.

The entire lab bench had to be scrubbed with ethanol, and covered in a paper towel soaked with ethanol. Then, the leaves/twigs/whatever were run through a flame on that bench, and sometimes little pieces would fall off. There were definitely a couple of times when the entire bench burst into flames in front of me. Scary, but funny at the same time. And more and more funny each time it happened.
 
I have only had a couple lab classes so far, but I can't even imagine making some of the mistakes that have been mentioned on this thread, sheesh.

Worst I did so far was breaking a glass pipette last lab which was disposable anyway and some glass shards of it getting jammed up in my thumb. I think wiping the blood on a paper towel and continuing the experiment (before you ask, yes I washed my hands) isn't nearly as bad as breaking a 300K machine or any of the other stuff I've read here. :rolleyes:
 
no big mistakes but I finally realized that the black spots on my toes were from when I removed canes from the liquid NO2 while wearing sandals and they would spill on my feet everyday
 
I spilled xylene all over the lab floor...shut down for a week...lets just say the PI was not very happy, but i got a week off :laugh:
 
My personal worst is pretty benign compared to most of the posts here. I once broke a really expensive piece of glassware ($300) used for Argon/Nitrogen/vacuum lines (forgot what it's called). The most expensive piece of equipment I've seen broken is my school's 300MHz NMR. Apparently ice got into the NMR, and one night the entire machine quenched. It was unfixable and it cost about several hundred k's to half a million dollars.

I love this thread.
 
Two things have happened to me, although compared to what I've read on this thread they aren't too amazing.

First I got a job at the chemistry lab for my school when I was a freshman and I was supposed to refill all the acetone containers. Unfortunately the large container slipped out of my hands and acetone went everywhere. Unfortunately there was about four or five tiles on the floor that were pretty much eaten away after their little bath.

During my organic chemistry lab my prof had never taught lab before and was prone to doing experiments with my class. Unfortunately one of them involved heating up what turned out to be a rather large amount of bromine, and me and my lab partner was assigned to do it. Since the lab was supposed to be done with another substance that did not produce a gas me and my lab partner foolishly did not have it under a fume hood. I learned that day that bromine gas really stinks. The gas just went everywhere and after we got it under a fume hood everyone in the room evacuated for around 15 minutes or so to let the room clear up. It seemed like my throat was sore for a week after that.
 
I think at some point or other, everyone does a small stupid thing.. waste antibody.. run gels incorrectly (I once ran a gel without staining... and didn't know why nothing showed up, not even on my ladder).. leaving things on and so on.

My personal list
  • that gel incident
  • forgetting to put the inner lid on a centrifuge and leaving it (chug chug chug chug chug)
  • when using a filter cup, i forgot to put it in a collection tube.. only realized AFTER i had spun down and thought "hey wait a second.. where does the liquid go anyways?" had to clean up that centrifuge good
  • some primer mis-usage
  • leaving the microscope on all night (burnt out the bulb)
  • stepping on a mouse and killing it... i swear it was accidental, but it was a horrible mouse to work with. i was doing a behavioral experiment and that mouse JUMPED out of the apparatus (its got walls and everything so nothing is supposed to jump out, plus its a meter high) onto the floor so i chased after it for like 15 minutes and then gave up.. which, ironically, was when *squish*
  • getting bleach in my face... i've done that twice while cleaning up... guess it doesn't really hurt the lab as much as me lol
 
I'm a little clumsy, so I've knocked over beakers, pipette racks, volumetric flasks, etc., and borken them. I also broke a hot plate and melted part of a lab bench, as well as a beaker. And I got another girl in the lab electrocuted. All in all, chem lab is my friend.
 
estairella said:
I think at some point or other, everyone does a small stupid thing.. waste antibody.. run gels incorrectly (I once ran a gel without staining... and didn't know why nothing showed up, not even on my ladder).. leaving things on and so on.

My personal list
  • that gel incident
  • forgetting to put the inner lid on a centrifuge and leaving it (chug chug chug chug chug)
  • when using a filter cup, i forgot to put it in a collection tube.. only realized AFTER i had spun down and thought "hey wait a second.. where does the liquid go anyways?" had to clean up that centrifuge good
  • some primer mis-usage
  • leaving the microscope on all night (burnt out the bulb)
  • stepping on a mouse and killing it... i swear it was accidental, but it was a horrible mouse to work with. i was doing a behavioral experiment and that mouse JUMPED out of the apparatus (its got walls and everything so nothing is supposed to jump out, plus its a meter high) onto the floor so i chased after it for like 15 minutes and then gave up.. which, ironically, was when *squish*
  • getting bleach in my face... i've done that twice while cleaning up... guess it doesn't really hurt the lab as much as me lol
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Hargreaves apparatus or Von Frey for your behavioral testing?
 
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