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

[disorder]

In another instance...I was pipetting fish nucleotides into wells, and my professor, who was the hottest PhD I've ever seen, comes over and wants to "help" me. I had a death grip on the pipette, she goes to help guide it and it smashed through the gel, and then splashed us both with whatever solution the gel block was bathed in. Embarassing. I seriously considered proposing to her though.

Freakin hilarious!

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[Depakote]

We did throat swabs on each other and cultured out whatever grew.

Despite my best efforts to avoid contamination, I'm not 100% convinced my current sore throat/sinus infection is unrelated to the above experiment.

 

[student1799]

Bump

 

[Espadaleader]

I ruined a 300 dollar special order stock solution from Great Britain, put my dissecting tools in the fridge, left a several thousand dollar microscope on over night and carried antibodies in my pockets.

 

[VikingLegacy]

I didn't break anything, but I will confess that I did botch my research project royally. I wrote a really nice research proposal and then spent one year spitting out crappy blots, contaminating cultures and spilling things. In the end I only finished one of the three goals I laid down, and I'm still pretty embarrassed about it.

Research is tough stuff. Much respect to anybody who is actually skilled at it.

 

[wolverinepwns]

I didn't, but another undergrad broke a sensor on the Electron microscope that cost something over 80K to fix, that was the last time any undergrad was allowed in that room!

 

[andrewnwi]

Set the lab on fire.

 

[squiddy]

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.

This reminds me of a story I heard while installing some equipment at ORNL. I discovered a kind of "crypt" under the raised floor, with an engraved tablet (itself worthy of the Voyager spacecraft), warning of radiation contamination if you opened the crypt.

Curious, I asked about it; I was told that, in early days, they did PU 239 milling in that building, and to collect up the dangerous bits of PU 239 dust, they used to rinse the floors with mercury, and just kind of squeegee the whole mess into floor drains that just simply went into the ground ..

Biggest lab screwup? Once I was working on a project with an enormous database, and we realized our db design was inefficient, so we re-organized it - it took 8 days. We had people working in shifts, 24 hours a day, doing nothing but watching the jobs run, to make sure each finished and to restart any that failed.

The last step was to export, then import the re-organized database tables, using the new tablespace definitions. So, in a hurry, I wrote a quick and dirty script, to create a bunch of scripts to run, in the directory where the backup files were, on the order of:

for i in `ls`
do
echo "imp uname/password file=$i" >$i
done

This script should've taken a second or so, when it ran and ran, I looked more closely at what I'd typed, and then I spotted it ...

In case you don't know "sh", this was supposed to create a bunch of files, name "tablename.sh" - instead, what it did was create a bunch of *new* files, named "tablename" - by overwriting all of the backup files ...

With one typo, I managed to obliterate a full week's work - and then, I had to explain what I just did to a room full of happy people who were finally getting to go home ...

 

[roseglass6370]

I know it was you, Freido. You broke my heart.

I haven't had any major lab incidents yet. Working with the mice a couple weeks ago was interesting though. I went to put one into an ether chamber to knock 'im out. However, instead of going into the chamber, he flew out of my hands and raced across the floor. I may or may not have screamed like a 4yr old. So much for looking professional and mature for my lab prof.

 

[Avicenna]

Thank god for this thread. Makes me feel better about my own screwups

 

[gannicus89]

After a week of doing protein purification...I tossed out the vial containing the supernatant. I think the worst thing that happened in my lab was when one of the other undergrads contaminated all of the plates in the incubator and somehow mold started growing all over the place. He was fired.

 

[Goro]

I once blew away a colleague's experiment because I thought his samples were finished counting in a scintillation counter; they weren't.

The Dep't Chair merely said "don't use the counter without my permission." If he had said, "jump out that window", I would have!

 

[Gandyy]

Set the lab on fire.

lollllllllllll

 

[md-2020]

In a completely different vein but one of my friends in undergrad starting hooking up with his supervising grad student.

Nor LORs were acquired from that lab.

 

[Gandyy]

In a completely different vein but one of my friends in undergrad starting hooking up with his supervising grad student.

Nor LORs were acquired from that lab.

lmao

 

[GiveMeThatMD]

Not my mistake... but one student in our Chem lab decided to shake an ester solution... in a closed container...

 

[NotASerialKiller]

Needed blood for an immune assay, and I accidentally used an earlier version of the protocol with the wrong product code and bought $2000 rabbit blood instead of $40 rabbit blood. It was the same volume and anticoagulant, just classy rabbits I guess. Whoops!

 

[iluvbeingpremed]

This is so relevant right now. **** running gels and making gels and loading gels!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[ls2412]

Sitting in my lab cracking up at this thread. Makes me feel a lot better about my screw ups.

Not really my fault, but a giant rat (like 2-3 times the size of a normal lab rat) was escaping while me and my mentor were trying to get him in a box for anaesthesia... We had to catch him and he bit my finger ridiculously hard and I had to go to the ER so that was fun. My finger was so swollen I couldn't bend it for like a week.

 

[lets_operate]

This thread is great! I definitely have a story to add.

So I was doing some histology in lab and was trying to tag neurons with a particular type of glutamate receptor to verify some of my experiments. I was copying the procedure from another paper, but for the life of me could not get the staining to work- I literally was troubleshooting for WEEKS

Finally, in exasperation, I contacted the people who wrote the paper to ask if there was anything they suggested.

Welp, they kindly pointed out I was using anti-glut2 instead of anti-vglut2 and I was tagging glucose transporters the whole time. It makes me embarrassed just thinking about it blerggggggg

 

[ChrisMack390]

Spend 7 hours doing a couple of ELISA assays -> drop all of the plates on the way to the analysis machine

 

[Gandyy]

Spend 7 hours doing a couple of ELISA assays -> drop all of the plates on the way to the analysis machine

oh god....

 

[deleted393595]

Despite my TA's warnings, I stuck my entire hand in a cage of extremely violent animals to get them to react.

They reacted.

 

[Romz]

Spend 7 hours doing a couple of ELISA assays -> drop all of the plates on the way to the analysis machine

lmfao

 

[theriomorphos]

,

 

[Shirafune]

A friend of mine spilled a 1L bottle of Coomassie blue on the floor during his first week.

Personal failures of mine include letting semi-trained friends change media on my cell cultures while I was slightly tipsy (ended up contaminated the next day), somehow aerosolized radioactive DNA probe (thankfully only the radioactivity bench was hot), and spilled a good 50ml of Trypan Blue on the counter.

Nothing too bad, all things in this thread considered.

 

[The Cheat]

My lab ordered a 2,000 dollar electron microscope standard and I spilled Mountain Dew over it. The standard looked facked up and I was thinking that it was the end of my research career, but luckily the image generator was buggy that day. The IT guy fixed it and turned out the standard was only slightly facked up.

Win.

 

[altblue]

My lab ordered a 2,000 dollar electron microscope standard and I spilled Mountain Dew over it. The standard looked facked up and I was thinking that it was the end of my research career, but luckily the image generator was buggy that day. The IT guy fixed it and turned out the standard was only slightly facked up.

Win.

Lol, what were you doing with Mountain Dew near an EM anyway?

 

[The Cheat]

I had the standard and my Dew in a waiting area when the accident happened

 

[deleted407021]

Not in research lab, but once in ochem II we were performing a vacuum filtration of some precipitate through a Büchner funnel. We had already placed our precipitate into the funnel when I wanted to check and see if a vacuum were introduced and for some reason I decided that the best way to do this was to place palm over the opening of the funnel. Predictably, my hand became firmly attached to it via the vacuum and in my panic, I snatched my hand away, taking with it the majority of our product, which ended up scattered across 1/4 of the room. Our % yield was a bit low on our report.

 

[pineapplecake]

Lol once I didn't look at the bottles carefully and added EDTA instead of sodium pyruvate into my media and single-handedly destroyed all of my and my supervisor's cells in our incubator he was pretty mad...didn't talk to me for a week

 

[bee17]

Not in research lab, but once in ochem II we were performing a vacuum filtration of some precipitate through a Büchner funnel. We had already placed our precipitate into the funnel when I wanted to check and see if a vacuum were introduced and for some reason I decided that the best way to do this was to place palm over the opening of the funnel. Predictably, my hand became firmly attached to it via the vacuum and in my panic, I snatched my hand away, taking with it the majority of our product, which ended up scattered across 1/4 of the room. Our % yield was a bit low on our report.

Our orgo lab instructor always had us check vacuums that way. Fortunately, product was never thrown across the room

 

[vantheman]

An undergrad in my lab dropped an analytical balance... I was fortunate this happened since I accidentally let the pH meter electrode dry out (which ruined it) and my PI wasnt that upset since it wasnt as bad as dropping a analytical balance haha

 

[Caffein3]

I just constantly feel as though I'm way too clumsy in the lab..

I drop open eppendorf tubes full of product at least once a day. Also I'm infamous for the old "accidentally break something and then hide it and wait for the grad student to use it and feel as if they broke it themselves" trick