Has anyone ever messed up in research lab?

[XRanger]

So I've been in this research labs for about 2 years, trying to develop good relationship with my supervisor and PI so I could ask them for letters since med school expect letter from research.

But recently I made a mistake that delay the project and cost them money, and my supervisor got all pissed off, so I thought to myself that maybe I just ruin my chances of getting a good letter of rec from them

so I wanna know, has any of you ever make a big mistake in research lab or anything like it? Did they still write a good letter for you?

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[HumidBeing]

Oh, you SOOOOO need to read this thread. You'll love it!
http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?t=277242

You are not the first, and definitely won't be the last.

I think the PI's who blow up get rid of their excess steam and then just get on with it. One mess up shouldn't send 2 years of good work out the window.

 

[0Complications]

I just made one today... It happens.

I felt like an idiot and learned from it, so I won't do it again (although, I know what you're talking about though with the whole LOR). My mistake might have cost my lab about $1000 and my PI just smiled and said it was cool and that he would write a protocol for what to do and how to do "X-thing" next time. Really, mine was more of a, "Hmm, I don't know what the hell I'm doing, but apparently everyone else thinks I do." So, I told them I was unsure, but that _____ was my best guess, then we went with it and ran it by my PI later.

The way I look at is my PI has moral integrity and won't say he'll write me a LOR if he can't make it a good one. So, use your PI's morals and relationship with you as a barometer for your status in reference to your LOR.

What did you do anyway?

 

[HumidBeing]

Oh, our PI told us about the time that one of his students autoclaved the plasticware on high, took off to do something, and forgot to come back. The next time he saw the lab, it was locked, with the firemen standing outside waiting for it to burn itself out.😱

Was your mistake THAT bad?

 

[kami333]

No, never, we are perfect, just like our GPAs and MCAT scores😀

You have to keep in mind too that a lot of important discoveries have been made by accident from people making mistakes, not that any of the mistakes we make are likely to but you never know...

Anyways, it sort of depends on the level of screw up and the manner. Unless it was some repeated screw up coming from your laziness or something, I think it won't be that big of an issue. Just keep your head down and work extra hard for a while.

Agree with the PI blowing up thing. My father is an MD/PhD so I've kind of grown up with excessive yelling on bad days, I just let him (both my PI and father, lol) yell and vent for a while and don't take it too personally. The way I figure, if I was truly useless and incompetant, he would have fired me instead of just yelling that I am😎

Really, mine was more of a, "Hmm, I don't know what the hell I'm doing, but apparently everyone else thinks I do." So, I told them I was unsure, but that _____ was my best guess, then we went with it and ran it by my PI later.

Good to know I'm not the only one who gets that. Granted I should have some knowledge too but when the post doc shrugs and says, "I don't know", it's like what am I supposed to do, I have even less education than you!

oh, and lol at the autoclave thing. I think I've broken the one in our building in the past but I maintain it wasn't my fault, how was I supposed to know that the drain was clogged?

 

[Bacchus]

My roommate just told me two days ago that in the past two weeks the same PhD student threw out 2 or 3 cell lines, 3 times must be a charm.

 

[neuroprotector]

The thing about science is that it's actually impossible to learn a procedure without messing up at some point. That's how people learn. I'm sure your PI knows that, and has messed up himself time and again. They know the risks of taking on young people like us.

 

[XRanger]

haha...I don't think mine was as bad as some of those, but anyway...here's what I did.

I work with rats and do surgeries and stuff. So basically after we did surgeries, we put the rats in a heating cage until they're awake. Well...I think I set the temperature in the heating cage too high so 4 of the rats died.

Usually my supervisor is the one who set up the surgery room, but this time he was late so I had to set it up, and the heating cage had 5 settings, and I put it on 3, which was medium. But apparently, it should be on 1. 3 was too high and some of the rats died, and he got really pissed.

Well...I won't be asking for letter until march-ish so hopefully everything will be alright by then. I'm also applying for a research program, and if I get in, the lab will get $2000, so hopefully that will help.

 

[seraph524]

Usually PIs will budget in mistakes into their grants...nobody is perfect and mistakes are bound to happen. I broke 2 large 2000 mL round bottom flasks that were stirring some exotic plant for extraction and everything was fine...

 

[whittle]

I heard of a rotating grad student in an o-chem lab dump ~15k of some exotic metal catalyst down the drain because his rxn didn't work and he thought it was just some bum catalyst.

I think diarrhea ensued.

 

[nonesuchgirl]

define exotic plant, were y'all making brownies?

 

[Aynsl156]

I heard of a rotating grad student in an o-chem lab dump ~15k of some exotic metal catalyst down the drain because his rxn didn't work and he thought it was just some bum catalyst.

I think diarrhea ensued.

OMG is that Christian Bale? I love your avatar!

 

[Maxwell Edison]

The lab I am in is currently facing a bit of a mystery. We've been working on trying to prove a theory for a rather long time with a good bit of capital investment (cell sorting/profiling, antibodies, you know the drill) that just might be explained away by the fact that the person who froze down the original culture of cells *might have* mislabelled the cryotube.

Punch Line: there are several grants and a student's PhD placed as wager.

Moral of the story: double check every label you apply.

 

[MWK]

Our freezer doesnt shut all the way (like the seal is kinda old) and you have to push it by hand to close the door. Normally this doesnt sound like a lot of extra work, but one Friday afternoon, I kinda just pushed it shut from about 18" away (not slam or anything but you get the jist).

Monday morning there is a nasty note for me about how the freezer door was 6" open and the motor was making terrible sounds and it was 50+ degrees in there. Not good when you have ALL the antibody and specimins that dont need to be at -80* that the lab has done in the past 15 years. Including 2 sets of antibody that were on loan very graciously from a bigwig.

Nothing was seriously ruined but I nearly got kicked out of the Lab. The PI said I was 1 kimwipe on the ground from getting the MD called and throwing me out.

 

[ghostfoot]

Our freezer doesnt shut all the way (like the seal is kinda old) and you have to push it by hand to close the door. Normally this doesnt sound like a lot of extra work, but one Friday afternoon, I kinda just pushed it shut from about 18" away (not slam or anything but you get the jist).

Monday morning there is a nasty note for me about how the freezer door was 6" open and the motor was making terrible sounds and it was 50+ degrees in there. Not good when you have ALL the antibody and specimins that dont need to be at -80* that the lab has done in the past 15 years. Including 2 sets of antibody that were on loan very graciously from a bigwig.

Nothing was seriously ruined but I nearly got kicked out of the Lab. The PI said I was 1 kimwipe on the ground from getting the MD called and throwing me out.

So they learned their lesson and put the valuable stuff in a freezer that closes?

 

[MonkeyNuts!]

So I've been in this research labs for about 2 years, trying to develop good relationship with my supervisor and PI so I could ask them for letters since med school expect letter from research.

But recently I made a mistake that delay the project and cost them money, and my supervisor got all pissed off, so I thought to myself that maybe I just ruin my chances of getting a good letter of rec from them

so I wanna know, has any of you ever make a big mistake in research lab or anything like it? Did they still write a good letter for you?

You generally get in more trouble if you try and hide mistakes.

If you make one, that just means you're human. Hopefully you're in a lab with a big budget.

 

[Piyush]

four degree C heated up to RT..that was bad cause it was one of those walk in rooms with a lot of stuff. minus twenty C thawed overnight, that was worse cause it was a bigger room with more stuff in it. liquid Nitrogen was left un covered and one hundred twenty liters of nitrogen disappeared in thin air, literally. A bottle with agarose gell was heated in the microwave before pouring but the lid was tight - blew up the microwave. All this happened in vairous labs on my floor. In another case, my brother decided to sleep in the lab cause it was late and someone accidentally left a open methanol bottle on the bench next to his. Next morning we had to treat him for methanol poisoning and temporary blindness.

This is just scratching the surface of stuff that goes wrong in the lab. Wait till I get the HPLC or EM stories out. Oh and did I say someone spilt a lot of radio labled something and we had to evacuate the floor?

Dont worry about messing up in the lab. Follow the right procedures and report ASAP to your boss, safety committees, or someone above you. Be truthfull and upfront about what you were doing, how your were doing it, and what happened. Maybe, and this is often the case, its not a human error, but just a system error. We somehow had a few liters of contaminated culture media, and I made that media. I told my supervisor how I made it and we found out that I did not make a mistake, the supplier shipped us a bad batch...

Things happen in the lab, both big and small. but the important point is that always report the incident and follow proper protocol to react to the situation.

Cheers
Piyush.

 

[ARoseIsARose]

that you're applying next year. If you are...don't sweat it. Just do an awesome job and he'll forgive you. 🙂But if you want that letter of rec soon, I would suggest that you ask another prof. that you know.

 

[BoilerWolverine]

Has anyone ever NOT messed up in a reasearch lab? I think thats a better question.

If you didn't screw things up it wouldn't be called, "research," it'd simply be called "doing."

 

[FSAP]

I don't think I ever messed up on anything more than $500. They are gonna let me work on rats this summer, so that'll probably change. Animal model FTL

 

[Ebuff]

I think most simple answer to this is that if you haven't made a mistake at the bench, then you really haven't been involved in research. I can't remember how many stupid mistakes I've made in the lab.

I think the issue becomes what kind of mistake you make. Everyone gets mixed up on labeling tubes, pipetting incorrectly, leaving something out overnight, not adding the proper control, and an infinite amount of other stupid mistakes. A problem arrises if you continually do these things frequently and don't learn from mistakes (you probably should think of a different path if this is the case), but any PI who expects perfection is out of touch. I doubt the PI would write a bad letter if you made one mistake like this.

Comprehension mistakes are a completely different issue. If, for example, you spend weeks cloning a gene only to find that you cloned the cDNA for the mouse gene when you needed the human and you don't understand the difference, then the PI may think you are lacking in understanding and may state so in a letter. If I were you I would make sure your PI understands why and how you made the mistake, apologize and learn from the mistake moving on.

 

[BoilerWolverine]

They were waxing the floors in our labs this weekend and they unplugged a fridge and forgot to plug it back in... Oops, someones whole stash of samples and reagents are now donzo. Thats serious $$$... Oops.

 

[0Complications]

The lab I am in is currently facing a bit of a mystery. We've been working on trying to prove a theory for a rather long time with a good bit of capital investment (cell sorting/profiling, antibodies, you know the drill) that just might be explained away by the fact that the person who froze down the original culture of cells *might have* mislabelled the cryotube.

Punch Line: there are several grants and a student's PhD placed as wager.

Moral of the story: double check every label you apply.

I think that's more of a PI mistake than a student mistake. If he didn't bother to try another sample to see if the results were similar to the "unexplained" first set then that seems like it's his fault. Don't get me wrong, the student definitely made a mistake, but who gets results that are completely unexpected/predicted and doesn't double check the sample?

To the OP: had you been operating on these rats for a while or was this their first surgery? Were they already trained? Either way, I don't think it's going to ruin your relationship with the PI, unless you are constantly making mistakes.

Although, the family of those rats will never forgive you!!!

 

[ChubbyChaser]

ehhh, i spent hours lysing cells, collecting the proteins, and then running a protein assay, and when the time comes to prepare the western, I stumble and lose it all.

I swear im not usuallyclumsy though.

 

[whittle]

ehhh, i spent hours lysing cells, collecting the proteins, and then running a protein assay, and when the time comes to prepare the western, I stumble and lose it all.

I swear im not usuallyclumsy though.

Your avatar made me laugh.

 

[Concordia]

You will be fine--science is inherently messy. Your best learning experiences come from your mistakes.
As for your PI's wrath, unfortunatelly that happens too. I used to work for a PI who was very laid back, and now I am working for somebody with a completely different personality. Sarcasm, raised voices, sniping... You just have to roll with the punches sometimes. Take comfort though, people who have a quick temper usually calm down pretty fast and don't hold grudges.
Try not to spill anything too dangerous and you will be more than fine. And if you are REALLY worried, consider lining up more LORs than you would think you'd need--problem solved (in case you do something that requires the fire department to how up with lights flashing🙂)