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

[Surg Path]

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That was the final straw in realizing a phd in organic was not really for me.

Yeah, I think I'll stick with cell bio and pathology 🙂

 

[akestler]

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.

yeah, like I said, stupid. should have had the common sense to realize Lewis acid + water = boom.

 

[75969]

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!

I did this in inorganic lab...looked like a polymer....then added more EtOH, thinking it would cause the inorganic stuff to ppt out, it turned into this silly putty stuff...oh, I am sooooooo not a good chemist!

 

[yanky5]

When doing research in college, I accidentally splashed mercury all over the table (I was working with a 2 lb jar of it). Oops!!! It took me 30 minutes to clean it up with the rest of the lab helping out and they were very pissed.

It's very hard to clean up mercury since it's like that liquid metal dude in terminator 2. When you touch a droplet, it rolls away.

 

[Tangent]

When doing research in college, I accidentally splashed mercury all over the table (I was working with a 2 lb jar of it). Oops!!! It took me 30 minutes to clean it up with the rest of the lab helping out and they were very pissed.

It's very hard to clean up mercury since it's like that liquid metal dude in terminator 2. When you touch a droplet, it rolls away.

we had a post doc break a mercury thermometer in the heating block and didn't clean it or tell anyone, so everytime we turned on the block we were heating the mecury spilled in the bottom this went on for a few weeks before he realized he should have cleaned it out- after that we had to switch all thermometers to the non-mercury kind

 

[chowchilla]

- nearly killed the entire aphid colony that my supervisor maintained while he was away for a week at a conference (i got an earful for that)
- broke several expensive pieces of glassware (i just shuffled away the broken pieces as quickly as i could and hoped nobody would notice)
- accidentally released a few specimens of the beet army worm from the lab. i'm hoping the canadian winter killed them.

 

[yanky5]

Here's another one. A lab attending told our class that once a class was doing an experiment where they incubate chicken's eggs and look at them under the microscope to see the embryo. When they were done looking at the embryo, they threw it into this heating tub. Someone forgot to clean out the tub for a few weeks (I guess it was vacation or something) and the embryos matured into chickens and there were 25 chickens roaming around the lab building!!!

We were doing the same experiment that day, so it was funny.

 

[neilious9]

Dropped a 4L jug of diethyl ether. No one believes that the handle had cracked. anyways, the liquid vaporized immediately and quickly permeated the whole building and everyone had to evacuate but not before the small taiwanese girl in the lab nearly passed out feeling drunk. the stuff was meant to be used for preparing slides but I found out that it actually served as a general anesthetic back in day. whoops.

 

[mshheaddoc]

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.

So how do you dispose then?

 

[OctoDoc]

So how do you dispose then?

Ha! You mop it up and pour it down the sink drain!

Although OSHA would probably say to put the mopped up water into containers, label them as chemical waste, and have them shipped off for incineration. Incinerate water.

But, as we all know Dilution is the Solution to Pollution, down the drain it goes.

 

[Squad51]

So how do you dispose then?

If you follow the rules - call an environmental hazard disposal company (your local HazMat team will have a selection of numbers for you). Just a note, some safety showers do have "drains" of a sort, but they are limited length drains that end in a holding tank. Just easier to dispose of the waste.

 

[Bluntman]

But, as we all know Dilution is the Solution to Pollution

lol...I like that one, Octo!

 

[weirdkloud]

In Orgo lab I accidentally burned the sulfuric acid that we were working with. I was supposed to add ice-cubes throughout the experiment, but started flirting with the guy across the bench. All the sudden it felt like I was breathing fire and everyone started coughing and grabbing their necks . We had to evacuate the lab and air it out for awhile before continuing. Very embarrassing. 😳

 

[Compass]

Well, I didn't do anything that resulted in loss of equipment, but I did pour a small amount (about 50-some pellets) of dry ice into the sink and rinse it with water. It's quite fun bailing carbon dioxide out of a sink with an ice bucket. Completely overflowed a 2 foot x 2 foot x 1.5 foot sink.

 

[Surg Path]

Well, I didn't do anything that resulted in loss of equipment, but I did pour a small amount (about 50-some pellets) of dry ice into the sink and rinse it with water. It's quite fun bailing carbon dioxide out of a sink with an ice bucket. Completely overflowed a 2 foot x 2 foot x 1.5 foot sink.

haha I do that for fun on the weekends... 🙂

 

[LJDHC05]

Yet another one from the annals:
I had a science fair project where I was trying to make breathalizer crystals, which involved mixing potassium dichormate crystals and sulfuric acid. Call it foreshadowing for my future drinking habits and chemistry degree.

So not doing all of the proper research, I brought the crystals that I made with my chemistry teacher, who was incidentally a nun, home and tried to dry them out with my dad's help in the toaster oven. Needless to say, we vaporized a good ammount of sulfuric acid through out the entire house and had to leave because it felt like burning to breath and open your eyes.

Both my mother and Sr. Adrienne have since banned my father from helping with science fair projects involving chemistry.

 

[red dot]

thank god for this thread! i think i'll just settle in here and get cozy. i thought i was the only idiot in o-chem! 🙂 i've spilled ether and gotten high off it, knocked over the iodine jar and watched it sublime, and broken a quarter of my glassware.

 

[arsenewenger]

Bumper!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[munnabhai]

good stuff indeed

 

[DropkickMurphy]

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.

 

[DropkickMurphy]

As for something that I did was when I was in high school and our earth science and chemistry teachers decided to do a combined project for the "advanced" students (read as: those of us who were taking both classes and had a decent grasp on things). We were to make our own model rocket motors and build a rocket to launch with them.

Well, suffice to say we sort of modified the recipe If you mix perchloric acid and ammonia, you get ammonium perchlorate; if you mix aluminum powder into this, you get the rough formula for the fuel in the solid rocket boosters of the space shuttle. Needless to say this is NOT what is typically used to launch model rockets (and requires a different compound as an ignition charge which I will not disclose).

Come launch day, we go out to the football field to shoot our creations into the sky (or low earth orbit as the case may be). Our turn came around and we put our 42 inch, ~2.5 lb beast on the launch tower. After a quick look around to make sure there were no aircraft anywhere nearby (and a prayer that this thing had a low radar cross section), we pushed the ignition button.

There was a bang as the ignition charge ignited the ammonium perchlorate and then there was a huge cloud of smoke and a roar as the rocket disappeared skyward. When I say it disappeared I mean that in the most literal sense possible.....there was a smoke trail and then a deafening BOOOM. We never did find any trace of the rocket and the fact that is was packed with about 1.5 lbs of propellant may have had something to do with that.

 

[whatintheworld?]

Besides breaking some glassware...

I shot my lab partner with the glass cork from a sep funnel that I didn't vent quickly enough.

 

[DocBR]

I once left the lab for the weekend without ensuring the freezer door had vacuum sealed, when we all returned on monday the -4 degree freezer had thawed out with everyone's purified DNA, stock DNA and the taq enzyme.

Nothing (luckily) was ruined, the taq remained usable because it had its own cooling unit and all the DNA was usable, but for about 4 days I had my PI and the other 3 people in that lab seriously pissed at me.

 

[washington101]

Listen up people, this is the worst of them all!
I used to work in a government radiochemistry lab. This stuff was nasty, pure reactor waste and old WWII radioactive isotopes from nuclear research plants. Add me too the mix.....oops. I forgot to use the hand and foot detector one day and tracked alpha radiation all over the lab....it is a very big lab! It took 45 people and 3 days to clean up my mess, probably over $100K and cost me my job...all for not using a simple little detector that I used every day. Oh well, sometimes the lunch time excitment of the hotdog truck is just too damn much. It really wasnt my fault, it was all that radiation.

P.S. Being the government, I was not really fired, just demoted to a technician in the chemical lab where I burned chemicals in fire to see when they blew up....how cool is our government?!!

 

[Samosas]

in orgo lab: mixed cholestorol with acid in a round bottom flask and placed it over boiling water. only, i hadnt secured the round bottom flask and it fell into the boiling water and turned over spilling all the acid/cholestrol into the boiling water and 3 seconds later a big boom and purple **** all over the lab desk. my lab TA just looked at me and walked away.

 

[j-weezy]

Here's another one. A lab attending told our class that once a class was doing an experiment where they incubate chicken's eggs and look at them under the microscope to see the embryo. When they were done looking at the embryo, they threw it into this heating tub. Someone forgot to clean out the tub for a few weeks (I guess it was vacation or something) and the embryos matured into chickens and there were 25 chickens roaming around the lab building!!!

We were doing the same experiment that day, so it was funny.

how can no one else find this funny??? Can you imagine walking into lab and seeing all these chickens runnning around - WTF??? I just hope it's true.

 

[Fiddlergirl]

This is hilarious. I'm going add a couple of my better lab stories, or as I like to call them "Reasons I am not going into surgery"

Orgo Lab-
I was trying to get a needle out of a plastic cover and stabbed myself with a needle full of benzene. Plus I somehow hit an vein and bled all over the place. The best part was the TA had left the room when I did this, so he left a lab full of undergrads being reasonably productive and came back to the entire lab clustered around me as I tried not to cry (it HURT) giving advice like "run your hand under water."
A few weeks later I spilled chlorosulfonic acid on myself and didn't notice until it ate through my clothes and hit skin, at which point I said an extremely bad work and dropped the beaker I was holding (which had what would have been my results). The TA said, and I quote, "Why are you doing this to me?"
One of the labs required taking home two large test tubes for a week, to sit them in our windows. This was over Spring Break, so I carted these tubes to North Carolina and back home, and then back to school on my lab day. I was in a history class with about a hundred other undergrads when I knocked one of the test tubes on the floor. The test tube shattered and isopropyl alcohol and crystals went everywhere. The professor stopped lecturing and stared at me. I turned bright red and muttered something about it "not being dangerous, just isopropyl alcohol" which didn't really help because apparently "isopropyl alcohol" sounds dangerous. After five minutes of me swearing no one was going to die, he ended up stopping lecture until I got it cleaned up.
Other random stories-
Held a closed glass beaker full of gas over a bunsen burner, with predictable results. Glass went halfway across the lab.
Made a cloud of hydrochloric gas by mixing reagents too quickly. That one evacuated the end of the lab I was working in.

Biochem Lab-
This is more of a "why lab is awful" story. A few weeks ago my biochem lab was an experiment on research kinetics. The TA messed up making the reagents, and the entire section got no results. Did we get some sort of help from the TA? Of course not. That would be showing weakness.

Research lab-
Heated a solution of PVA up to 150 degree Celcius, then promptly spilled it all over myself.
My lab uses a lot of really accurate 25mL volumetric flasks, which are fairly expensive. My first week in the lab I dropped two, the first because it was a little hotter than I expected when I took it out of the over, the second because apparently using tongs is beyond my hand-eye coordination.

 

[Hurricane95]

I haven't done anything too dangerous...just costly and annoying.

I've ruined two elisa kits, at $450 each. One of them I mixed the wrong diluent in with the sample and performed like two wrong dilutions. And on the second one I accidentally discarded the stop solution because I was in a rush to go to the beach during spring break last year. How smart of me. I went to the beach alright...but set myself back a week and cost myself some money.

I've also killed many a cell line in the incubator. I'll give myself credit in that these cells are so damn picky to grow and miantain (HEKA), but still...each vial of new cells is $300...and not to mention the time cost of ruining the cells and watching them grow all over again....so agonizingly slow. Near the end I apparently contaminated 3 flasks that the grad student was using for one of his final expts...didn't make him too happy. I was supposed to go check them for growth under the scope and didn't do my usual rinse down with EtOH all over my gloves and the lids like I usually do before transporting the stuff down the hallway, and bam. The next day those suckers had fungus growing all over them. It totally sucks when you look under the microscope and see what appears to be cotton balls floating around in the medium...evil cotton balls that eat your cells.

 

[Surg Path]

I mislabeled five RNA samples and then ran gene expression profiling (microarrays) on all of them. They were all the wrong samples. No burns, broken glass, or explosions, but it did cost $2,500😱 and generated useless data. WOOPS

 

[Schaden Freud]

A long long time ago when I was young and stupid I neglected to add running buffer when using an automated DNA sequencer and ruined the entire column array (which costs ~$5000). That was pretty bad...

I think I might have broken the autoclave. Numerous people have attempted to turn it off, but there is steam spewing from it and the entire floor is a cool 85 degrees. Oops. Good thing I'm going to med school.

 

[kerplunk112]

hmm where do I begin...i almost broke the imager fyi never cut kodak film sheets into halfs and then feed them through. we had a surgical blade fall into the centerfuge then come flying out..no one got hurt thank god.

i turned my air on too high on my bunsen burner...left and it blew out the flame my boss nearly flipped his **** when he came back in and the whole lab smelled like gas. again no one got hurt..

ive spilled phenol onmyself once...it is truely as they say it is...doesnt hurt at all burns ya dark purple wherever it touches skin.

 

[45408]

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!!).

Wow, that reminds me - my gen chem professor told us about a guy who figured HF would be great for cleaning his floor, and after he got a little on him, he realized it doesn't burn your skin, so he didn't worry about it. And he sloshed it around. And got it all over himself. And at some point down the road, his bones started breaking repeatedly in many different places. That sucks!

 

[45408]

Ha! You mop it up and pour it down the sink drain!

Although OSHA would probably say to put the mopped up water into containers, label them as chemical waste, and have them shipped off for incineration. Incinerate water.

But, as we all know Dilution is the Solution to Pollution, down the drain it goes.

I'm so remembering that one.

 

[ssquared]

I think I might have broken the autoclave. Numerous people have attempted to turn it off, but there is steam spewing from it and the entire floor is a cool 85 degrees. Oops. Good thing I'm going to med school.

I hate autoclaves. Every time I use the one at school I somehow set off the alarm. I then try to turn it off (which I can manage) but I have no idea how to turn it on again (pressing "ON" does not work, apparently). The worst is when I can't get the alarm to stop beeping and I have to sheepishly slink away into the hall and hope that nobody saw me. 😳

Fortunately I haven't done any major damage. I've screwed up PCRs and things, broken pasteur pipets (try cleaning that up, it's a blast, really), and similar little mishaps. I did once get bit by a mouse and by reflex flung it across the room into a bucket of water. Fortunately the mouse didn't seem to mind, but my mentor was not pleased given that the poor little thing had just recovered from surgery.

I've got lots of stories of idiotic things that people have done, though. One of my favs is the girl at NIH two summers ago who got corneal burns because she didn't know that when visualizing your gels with UV light using eye protection is probably a good idea. 🙄

 

[ssquared]

I broke the big centrifuge - the one that is bigger than a washing machine. Yeah that one. Did you know that when you screw that bugger up it locks itself for 48 hours and automatically calls its own service person?

My research director had tears in his eyes (as did I).

A guy in my lab broke the centrifuge last summer-it was $10,000 worth of damage. He is no longer with our lab (one of our grad students says that it's the only time he has ever seen our PI get angry about anything).

A girl punched a hole in the floor of our lab a few weeks ago because she likes to wear stilletos while doing research. Most PIs would understand breaking some glasswear, but seriously, a hole in the floor?

And of course, one of the fridges in our lab short circuited last year and blew out the fuse (this was actually the electrician's fault). Hence, all of the fridges died for the weekend: our -80, -20, & 0. We lost about $11,000 worth of stuff. That was pretty miserable.

 

[disheveled_dave]

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...

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. 😱

 

[kerplunk112]

...another good one...not about me. so i work with tularemia(rabbit fever) and apparently a few months ago some tech in the lab down the hall was asked to ship a strain of LVS(live vaccine strain) to another lab. LVS is completely NON pathogenic. Yet some how he mixed into the culture a pathogenic SCHU-4 strain of francisella tularensis...ie a level 3 biodefense agent. needless to say a few ppl got sick along the way. and his ass got canned.

 

[kerplunk112]

things that people have done, though. One of my favs is the girl at NIH two summers ago who got corneal burns because she didn't know that when visualizing your gels with UV light using eye protection is probably a good idea. 🙄

wow i almost repeated that when i started using a pair of "UV" glasses to cut out gel bands expect they were just simply saftey glass...thank you matt for not letting me go blind

 

[wassupjoehu]

I put a non-autoclaveable plastic container (fairly large container) in the autoclave. Can you imagine what happened? I def left my mark lol 😀

 

[foofish]

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!

Last weekend I caught an episode of MythBusters where they tested exactly that! It was about compressed-air cylinders in general busting through a wall, and it totally busted not only through the cinder block wall they constructed for the experiment, but then went half-way through the wall of their lab building. 👍 👍

Man, I love that show.

 

[kerplunk112]

jesus stuff keeps popping into my head...so one day i thought it would be fun to take a giant ass block of dry ice home..i pack it in foil get it into my backpack and hop on the bus. its bout a 1.4 hour ride...half way through im starting to get a bit dizzy(im sitting in the back) ppl around me are looking a big fidgity reaching to turn their air on). Then it hits me...the c02 level in here must be high as hell. then i start getting scared b/c i do not want to be responsible for half a bus full of ppl ..or have the bus driver pass out. i ran off at the next stop and chuck it in the can ...again getting some odd looks from ppl as i throw a huge square shaped object, wrapped in foil thats slowly subliming into the can.

 

[viciouz]

I broke a spectrometer that was old... I used it soo many times in a month... that it wouldn't shut off.. but if you unplugged it and turned it back on... it would go straight to reading and measuring and never stop.

It made me feel good cuz everyone in the lab knew I was busting my a$$.

Cost about $3000 bucks to replace.

 

[crimsonkid85]

i love the ochem lab mistakes! 😀

first time i did a LAH reduction on a 20g scale...during the work up, i had my reaction on ice bath, and i was slowly adding one pipette of water...nothing happened...added another pipette of water...nothing...got impatient, and dumped 100mLs in...small bubbles..big bub--boom! yield: 25% 🙁 🙁 this was step NINE out of a 13 step scale up! AHHHHHHHHH!

lesson learned: never rush during an ochem experiment.

later that summer, i was running a very large column using nitrogen to push through solvent (EtOAc:Hex). a little solvent got onto the joint, and when i tried to take off the nitrogen line to add more solvent, it wouldn't come off. i got frustrated, so i yanked. the (still partially-full) solvent bulb separated from the top of the column, which was at eye level. over 200mLs of EtOAc:Hex sprayed all over my face. no i was not wearing safety glasses. yes, i had normal glasses on at the time. nevertheless, i spent the next 30 minutes in front of the eye wash, and praying that hexanes is not TOO bad of a neurotoxin....

 

[crimsonkid85]

also: not me, but one guy in my lab dropped a flask of neat TiCl4. (good ole aldols...) needless to say, the whole building evacuated immediately.

 

[futuredoc14]

-Accidentially burned my finger with the burner twice
-Spilled acid on my hand
-Broke the flask and the beaker

All these things happened in my general chemistry lab, but I was much more careful in other labs.

 

[CTtarheel]

I'm a total lab screw up.

Most notably, when moving an HPLC machine, i dropped the pump and it smashed onto the floor.

Additionally, when refilling an excimer laser, I made a proceedural mistake and wasted an entire tank of fluroine, and also broke a flask spilling a $150 a gram compound all over the bench top.

 

[paranoid_eyes]

my lab partner once poured stock (very concentrated) sulfuric acid straight into an erlynmeyer (sp?) beaker that had been sitting on a hot plate for about 15 min. the acid quickly vaporized nearly suffocating both of us. that's not even the worst part. he panicked and accidentally dropped the stock bottle on the bench. Thank god for lab goggles.

 

[LolaGene]

ive actually done a lot of stupid things:
-put drying rocks intead of yeast when making fly food (the bottle was labeled incorrectly!)
-i autoclaved and threw away solutions that we not supposed to be thrown away (hundreds of dollars)
-i asked someone if bacteria are bigger than a water molecule..no joke! hey it was freshman year

 

[Papillon11]

hahaha... This thread is so funny... It makes me feel less stupid about my lab mistakes.

 

[def jeff]

I once lost a tube in a $400K NMR machine in organic chemistry and thought my ass was grass!