Your screwups in the research lab..Sharee to make us feel better

[uclaussr]

Haha so i know im not the only one that made stupid mistakes in lab, so wat has been your dumbest one?

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[loveoforganic]

I have broken soooo much glassware.

 

[texas72]

I contaminated a line of stem cells while plating during my first week, instantaneously costing the lab more money than I was worth as a research assistant.

:'(

 

[rnkhalika]

It was my first week of lab and I was cleaning my glassware after making buffer when one of the Phd students emptied a cooler full of dry ice into the sink. I decided to play with the dry ice 🙄 . I placed a chunk of dry ice into a beaker of warm water and made fog, quite a bit of fog. I then decided to call the Phd student over to show her my master piece, she laughed and when on with her work . The the my PI came over , i was so proud of my work i showed her too.

That night i got an email from my PI saying that i need to take a lab safety class the next coming thursday.

 

[unhappytnt]

We were dissecting a pig in bio lab. I have zero hand dexterity and we were supposed to open its cranium. The TA showed us the method but being the clumsy person I am, I couldn't get it open with the scalpel. So I had to break it with my hand. Let's just say that my lab partners were not impressed...

 

[Poliscidoc]

I have screwed up several spins in the centrifuge by not having the caps on tight enough. So I have spun blood and urine around and got it everywhere. What an epic clean up it was because nobody knew until they took there's out and then I noticed my full tube was now not full. Haha everyone touched my pee

 

[b2sun]

making gel media but forgetting to put in the agar.....

 

[curlytop]

Definitely broke glassware, it's practically a rite of passage.

I stained heart cells with food coloring instead of a secondary antibody (immunofluorescence) by accident. I had to redo 3 days' worth of work. Plus the part where I looked like an idiot.

 

[Kaustikos]

making gel media but forgetting to put in the agar.....

Not myself, but one of the grad students used 100% ethanol to dissolve the agar. She heated the gel up and it was "boiling too fast" in the microwave. I open the door and I swear I've received irreparable lung damage from the ethanol fumes. So, don't worry, because even grad students who are about to receive their PhD's screw up.

 

[NickNaylor]

When I was doing a SURF program last summer, I accidentally brought the key to the -80C freezer home one night and didn't bring it back the next day. When one of the students wanted the key, I realized that I left it at home. He was not pleased. At all. It took me about an hour and a half to ride the bus home, get the key, and drive back. In the mean time, he couldn't do his assay because he needed reagents from the freezer, so I basically wasted his entire morning.

My face: x 1000.

 

[runrunrudolph1]

we worked an entire week getting a cDNA sample ready and I accidentally ran ALL of it through a gel (I was supposed to have run the EF PCR of the cDNA!) failtastic.

 

[phattestlewt]

at the end of our lab course, we have a lab practical which is basically an exam on our previous lab...

i was running short on time and i ended up dumping a solution of HCl that i had down the drain...i didn't have time to neutralize it and i dumped it down the drain....

🙁

lol

 

[Compass]

I disposed of dry ice in the industrial lab sink and tried to melt it with water.

I had to bail out the carbon dioxide with an ice bucket.

 

[Amrazzz]

Leaving an expensive RT kit on the lab bench overnight and also accidentally adding DNA loading dye to protein samples. HAHA 😛

 

[RichardParker]

During my second week in an immunology lab, I harvested T cells from the spleen of a mouse. The mice were part of a vaccination study and were vaccinated twice in the preceding 2 weeks. I was too slow in doing the harvest, so the grad student who I was working with told me to keep the cells in the fridge and resume the experiment the next morning.

Instead of the 4 deg C fridge I placed the cells in the -20 deg freezer (they looked the same lol). All the cells froze to death. Two weeks of vaccination study down the drain. I wanted to cry :cry:. Thankfully my PI and the grad student were cool about it. They told me repeat the experiment and to be more careful next time.

 

[Bethany555]

I was supposed to carry out an experiment within the confines of a glovebox...I forgot. When the material was analyzed, they got some 'interesting' (unwanted) results.

 

[bullsfan1986]

Making media in a non autoclaved flask. Twice. My PI hates me.

 

[brandnew1]

One of my first weeks on the job. The pHD student gave me the protocol for making a protein gel and since it was getting late, he told me that after the gel polymerized, I could store it in the freezer overnight and load the samples and run the gel the next day.

So I make the gel, wait the half hour for the second phase to polymerize and then wrapped the gel in wrap and aluminum foil and stored it overnight. The next day we went to open the gel and he asked me "What the hell is this?"

I had thought that he meant to literally store the "gel" itself; so I separated the two glass plates that encased the gel and just stored the gel, obviously not stopping to think that it would now be impossible to load anything onto the gel. He gave me a confused look and just died laughing, and then proceeded to make the entire lab aware of my screw-up. I'm really good at taking jokes, but man, it sucks having eight graduate students/post-docs just staring at you laughing like crazy lol.

There have been others; I ran an agarose gel the wrong way yesterday and literally ran my samples right off the gel in about 10 minutes because I didn't bother to remember that DNA is negatively charged and would migrate towards the positive end. But the above incident definitely stands out the most to me.

 

[jl9999]

A post-doc in a lab I worked in years ago asked me to inspect an orbital shaker device. It wasn't moving incredible smoothly and figured that I could clean it or something. Not only did I not fix it, but I completely tore it apart, totally obliterating it, and absolutely could not get it back together again. I quietly left for the day and left it on the lab bench lying in a heap.

 

[echolalia16]

It was my first week of lab and I was cleaning my glassware after making buffer when one of the Phd students emptied a cooler full of dry ice into the sink. I decided to play with the dry ice 🙄 . I placed a chunk of dry ice into a beaker of warm water and made fog, quite a bit of fog. I then decided to call the Phd student over to show her my master piece, she laughed and when on with her work . The the my PI came over , i was so proud of my work i showed her too.

That night i got an email from my PI saying that i need to take a lab safety class the next coming thursday.

Funny you should say that because my PI introduced me to the world of dry-ice office pranks.

 

[darnfreakinheck]

These are from when I was a high school junior/senior:

One of the students spilled ethidium bromide. I walk in and see him and the grad student wearing plastic bags for shoes while trying to clean up :'D

Not a catastrophic mistake, but on one of my first days, I mixed in unsterilized tubes with sterilized ones in a shelf. The shelf's entire contents had to be re-autoclaved.

I would frequently be on "breaking frenzies". I was known as the girl who breaks a sh*tload of glassware. 😳

I don't think they miss me at all LOL.

A post-doc in a lab I worked in years ago asked me to inspect an orbital shaker device. It wasn't moving incredible smoothly and figured that I could clean it or something. Not only did I not fix it, but I completely tore it apart, totally obliterating it, and absolutely could not get it back together again. I quietly left for the day and left it on the lab bench lying in a heap.

That's also my approach. When you make a mistake, leave it alone and exit the premises as quietly as possible 😀

 

[Kaustikos]

Funny you should say that because my PI introduced me to the world of dry-ice office pranks.

ditto.

You want real fun? stick 'em in 1.5 eppendorfs and cap 'em.

 

[Amrazzz]

ditto.

You want real fun? stick 'em in 1.5 eppendorfs and cap 'em.

LOL, I've done that too. Try adding dry ice to ethanol/isopropanol = poor mans liquid nitrogen

 

[echolalia16]

ditto.

You want real fun? stick 'em in 1.5 eppendorfs and cap 'em.

Actually that is one of the things we do. Once they're nice and stuffed we throw them into someone's trash can (preferably metal).

 

[b2sun]

omg dry ice 1.7 ml eppendorfs..

**** is SO cash

 

[ScarletRMD]

running a gel with water instead of buffer... or once running a gel with no liquid... 😕

 

[b2sun]

running a gel with water instead of buffer... or once running a gel with no liquid... 😕

lololol ivedone that too!

except all i needed to do was check for an insert, and even the water/agarose gel was able to show that >.>

 

[DocBell]

Definitely broke glassware, it's practically a rite of passage.

Definitely. I actually severed my flexor tendon on a broken test tube. Right before they knocked me out my anesthesiologist showed me his scar from where he had to get stitches on his hand from broken glassware and my surgeon and orgo profs had them too! lol. Nothing quite as impressive as mine though.

Most embarrassing thing: I was extracting four reaction mixtures in a row. I had literally been in the lab 12 hours and I was super tired.... I forgot to stop the seperatory funnel and I poured in NaHCO3 which went ALL over the counter. I was embarrassed but also super glad I hadn't poured my reaction in 🙂.

 

[BigRedder]

Once I accidentally renamed an entire huge directory of data then accidentally deleted it instead of renaming it back. We are talking multiple terabytes of raw and analyzed data from multiple years. Luckily I caught it right away and it was backed up, but that was a nerve racking couple days. The IT guy was not too thrilled with me....

Moral of the story: Be careful with Linux, and always have backups...

 

[BigRedder]

Then there were all the flies I mistreated in undergrad....

 

[Stewie32]

Reading these stories is making me kind of nervous to return to lab in the fall.

 

[Total180]

Wow, this thread has made me soo soo happy. It is good to know I am not the only one who is a disaster area in the lab. I run into things and drop things constantly. One day after mixing up A LOT of ECL (I had like 8 membranes I had to develop) I just randomly like threw it up in the air like a spaz. I don't think I even ran into something and that made me drop it....I just had an arm spasm or something and just spilled it everywhere. Bad thing was that was the last box of ECL....so everyone had to wait like 2 days to develop any westerns 🙁. I also did the same thing with an open bottle of xylazine...which has a lot of glycerol in it, so it was really hard to clean up. Oh! And I also accidentally exposed the last box of film (for developing westerns) once. I was so embarrassed and guilty that I snuck it into my backpack and threw it away at home because I was so scard that someone would see it in the trash....geez, I have no idea why my PI has kept me around as long as he has....

Whew! That felt good to get off my chest.

 

[MedicineManACL]

During my first months in the lab I was doing some TLCs on these reactions one of the PhD students did awhile back and I mixed her vial and my cap when I was done. Needless to say I put the vial in my drawer and she had to make more of the TEG Ester(which takes about a week to make) then found the vial in my drawer. Things haven't been the same since...

 

[mitl]

👍 to dry ice...


I worked in a immunology lab and had a really bad habit of never capping the syringes between injections administered to rats this one time I pricked myself I thought it was nothing and kept working later when I took of my gloves I realized I had a pool of blood inside.. I had to report the incident and then take a few blood tests.. lesson learned

But I have never broken glassware I sure hope I do not cause the glassware in the lab is ridiculously expensive !

 

[equios]

I messed up preparing a lipofectamine transfection reagent mixture. Instead of putting 3 uL in about 200 uL of other crud, I transfected with 200 uL of strait-up lipofectamine. **** was either $250 or $400 for 1ml, so something like $70 down the drain to melt my tissue culture into paste. PI was not amused...

After collecting field samples, realize that several of the sample bags had the same ID number on them. Going back out on a flat exposed rock outcropping in the middle of the summer gave me excellent working knowledge of what bacon feels like on a frying pan...for 3 hours...

My best: Helping a friend dispose of reacted sodium metal that resulted in a small fire in the fume hood, followed by a gratuitous explosion, sending him to the floor, and burning sodium metal into my face. PI was waay to chill about it...that scared us more than the actual KaBOOOM!

 

[brandnew1]

I was also autoclaving what I thought was LB Broth; so I mixed the powder with distilled water, autoclaved it, got the bottle and set it on my bench to cool.

After a couple of hours the post-doc that I work with went over to the bench and apparently moved the bottle over. Only he noticed that the "liquid" did not budge at all. I had accidentally used LB Agar powder (for making plates) instead of the Broth powder. He had a riot turning the bottle upside down and letting everyone see my LB apparently defying gravity.

And of course the PI walked in just then and started going on about wasting resources and such... Embarrassing day for sure

 

[298609]

A post-doc in a lab I worked in years ago asked me to inspect an orbital shaker device. It wasn't moving incredible smoothly and figured that I could clean it or something. Not only did I not fix it, but I completely tore it apart, totally obliterating it, and absolutely could not get it back together again. I quietly left for the day and left it on the lab bench lying in a heap.

nice, whenever i make mistakes i also take that as my cue to leave without saying anything hahaha


but you all make some pretty great mistakes. if that's the worst you've done...kudos.


i was sac'ing a cage of mice to collect tissue samples for a paper. i walked away from the CO tank and like 2 min later walked back "ahh they are good and dead" i thought (and said). let's get down to dissecting....................................................



the wrong cage. goodbye mice, goodbye resources, goodbye good karma.

 

[GellaBella]

So, don't worry, because even grad students who are about to receive their PhD's screw up.

Oh god I've made so many mistakes in the lab over the years.

Anywhere from broken glassware, to dropping 1000 tips on the floor, to spilling glass beads everywhere, to exploding things in the microwave.

I think the worst was when I was boiling some protein samples that I was going to run on a gel. The water bath I used was across the lab, behind my lab bench. So I set the samples up to boil....and then completely forgot about it and went home. Of course the water evaporated, the eppendorf tubes melted and my protein samples completely fried in the water bath.

To make it worse this was near the area where I work with radioactivity. Of course when the samples melted there was smoke and it smelled bad, alerting people (thank god people were still there) to the fact that I had done this. Then the neighboring PI was (so I'm told) running around being like "are these samples radioactive?!?!?!?!?!" (thank god they weren't).

ugh. it was bad.
I also did it twice.

After the second time I learned to move the water bath onto my own bench.

I also began to keep a disposable camera at my bench to keep all of my horrible lab mistakes over the years. Someday I should be able to look back without cringing too badly.

I had another PhD candidate come in to talk to me and as she was talking she looped her hand through the safety shower pull (the triangle part) and then leaned into it....completely turning on the safety shower and getting both her and I wet. I saw her put her hand into the pull and I thought it was strange but I was sure she wouldn't pull it. I didn't realize she would try to use it to support her body weight.

So yeah, even people with soon to be awarded doctorates can make idiotic mistakes in the lab. It happens. and most of the time its funny. if not embarrassing.

 

[brandnew1]

Oh god I've made so many mistakes in the lab over the years.

Anywhere from broken glassware, to dropping 1000 tips on the floor, to spilling glass beads everywhere, to exploding things in the microwave.

I think the worst was when I was boiling some protein samples that I was going to run on a gel. The water bath I used was across the lab, behind my lab bench. So I set the samples up to boil....and then completely forgot about it and went home. Of course the water evaporated, the eppendorf tubes melted and my protein samples completely fried in the water bath.

To make it worse this was near the area where I work with radioactivity. Of course when the samples melted there was smoke and it smelled bad, alerting people (thank god people were still there) to the fact that I had done this. Then the neighboring PI was (so I'm told) running around being like "are these samples radioactive?!?!?!?!?!" (thank god they weren't).

ugh. it was bad.
I also did it twice.

After the second time I learned to move the water bath onto my own bench.

I also began to keep a disposable camera at my bench to keep all of my horrible lab mistakes over the years. Someday I should be able to look back without cringing too badly.

I had another PhD candidate come in to talk to me and as she was talking she looped her hand through the safety shower pull (the triangle part) and then leaned into it....completely turning on the safety shower and getting both her and I wet. I saw her put her hand into the pull and I thought it was strange but I was sure she wouldn't pull it. I didn't realize she would try to use it to support her body weight.

So yeah, even people with soon to be awarded doctorates can make idiotic mistakes in the lab. It happens. and most of the time its funny. if not embarrassing.

Funny you should mention the water bath. I was doing a transformation which required a "heat shock" step and thus necessitated the use of a water bath for like 90 seconds or so. Of course I forgot to turn it off and got a stern talking to the next day about how the water in the bath can evaporate and the machine can catch fire and the lab can burn down. Apparently it is the #1 cause of fires in biochemistry labs? Who knew

 

[MisterVeil]

I was refilling a carboy with MilliQ water. I turned the machine on and let it do its thing while I went back to complete the experiment I was working on.

Turns out, the machine that delivers the MilliQ water is really quiet, and I forgot all about it. I left the lab, and apparently nobody else in lab noticed it either. Come back next morning to find out the lab got flooded and my PI spent the morning mopping it up :/ He was cool about it after I apologized, saying it's an easy mistake to make and that I should put the carboy in the sink next time so even if it does overflow, it flows into the sink, not all over the counters and lab floor.

Spent the rest of that morning drying the lab and airing out drawers. Not fun.

 

[DocBell]

Funny you should mention the water bath. I was doing a transformation which required a "heat shock" step and thus necessitated the use of a water bath for like 90 seconds or so. Of course I forgot to turn it off and got a stern talking to the next day about how the water in the bath can evaporate and the machine can catch fire and the lab can burn down. Apparently it is the #1 cause of fires in biochemistry labs? Who knew

haha I did! My school makes the employees watch these horrible safety videos. I can't remember which school puts it out but they compare all of our safety protocol to drinking and gambling....prolly to make it more fun but the only think you really gain from the session is a strong desire to drive to a casino 🙂 Now kids... working with chemicals is like being an alcoholic ummm sure.

 

[Kaustikos]

I messed up preparing a lipofectamine transfection reagent mixture. Instead of putting 3 uL in about 200 uL of other crud, I transfected with 200 uL of strait-up lipofectamine. **** was either $250 or $400 for 1ml, so something like $70 down the drain to melt my tissue culture into paste. PI was not amused...

After collecting field samples, realize that several of the sample bags had the same ID number on them. Going back out on a flat exposed rock outcropping in the middle of the summer gave me excellent working knowledge of what bacon feels like on a frying pan...for 3 hours...

My best: Helping a friend dispose of reacted sodium metal that resulted in a small fire in the fume hood, followed by a gratuitous explosion, sending him to the floor, and burning sodium metal into my face. PI was waay to chill about it...that scared us more than the actual KaBOOOM!

transfections suck, end discussion. I've used about 5k worth of transfection reagants (lipofectamine alone) to get an answer, so don't worry. That **** is too expensive, and I say this because I don't see the high cost associated with such a readily used reagent. If a PI is getting pissed because of that incident, he/she doesn't have a clue. Lipo 200 is the most commonly used reagent in transfection and a single "oops" experiment should be expected when trying this. Mind you, I'm dealing with the most annoying of transfections - miRNA.

 

[jj6vcb]

I contaminated a line of stem cells while plating during my first week, instantaneously costing the lab more money than I was worth as a research assistant.

:'(

The entire line? sounds like you had all your eggs in one basket (or flask). Was it a brand new cell line with no backup?

 

[loveoforganic]

Funny you should mention the water bath. I was doing a transformation which required a "heat shock" step and thus necessitated the use of a water bath for like 90 seconds or so. Of course I forgot to turn it off and got a stern talking to the next day about how the water in the bath can evaporate and the machine can catch fire and the lab can burn down. Apparently it is the #1 cause of fires in biochemistry labs? Who knew

Done this 3x on the rotovap before I finally started remembering every time.

 

[Wolfman89]

I was also autoclaving what I thought was LB Broth; so I mixed the powder with distilled water, autoclaved it, got the bottle and set it on my bench to cool.

After a couple of hours the post-doc that I work with went over to the bench and apparently moved the bottle over. Only he noticed that the "liquid" did not budge at all. I had accidentally used LB Agar powder (for making plates) instead of the Broth powder. He had a riot turning the bottle upside down and letting everyone see my LB apparently defying gravity.

And of course the PI walked in just then and started going on about wasting resources and such... Embarrassing day for sure

Thats awesome! I remember they warned me about the two types of LB Broth when I learned to make it in my lab.


I've always wondered if in a post-apopcalyptic scenario if you could safely eat LB Broth.


My biggest screwup was the time I attempted to catch a 2000mL graduated cylinder as it fell out of my dish strainer. Key word is attempted. I lacerated my middle finger on my right hand and got two sutures.

Also one time I was sterilizing some glass tools, that I use to pick colonies of e. coli for inoculation, in some ethanol using a Bunsen burner. This time I set the beaker of ethanol on fire. Me and my supervisor just kinda laughed about it after I put out the fire.

 

[loveoforganic]

Technically not in lab, but the first time I went to go refill a dewar solo with LN2, I ended up billowing MASSIVE amounts of water condensation from cold gas all through the room and through the hall without managing to fill the dewar up at all. Turned out the tank was running on empty 😳

 

[DaisyBuchanan]

I usually fix more errors than I make, but one time my PI and I had a near fatal accident. We opened a box from Sigma because we had ordered some chemicals, and we saw something we hadn't ordered: tert-butyllithium. The bottle was inside a metal canister, which we figured was to prevent evaporation. Mind you, we work in a physiology lab so most of our chemicals are to keep cells alive, not kill things. Right as my PI was looking for a screwdriver to pry open the canister, I find out online that it's a chemical that instantly combusts upon exposure to air, and it's the chemical a girl at UCLA burned to death from working with last year.

I yell for him to stop... he turns white, gingerly puts the can down and says "Oh... I have a thing to go to..." and jogs out of the lab, leaving me to take care of it

Needless to say, he put in a very angry phone call to Sigma.

 

[loveoforganic]

The metal can is just for extra protection. There's padding/dessicant on the inside, along with your airtight reagent bottle. And your PI didn't know that tBuLi was pyrophoric??? Biology prof or something?

 

[DaisyBuchanan]

The metal can is just for extra protection. There's padding/dessicant on the inside, along with your airtight reagent bottle. And your PI didn't know that tBuLi was pyrophoric??? Biology prof or something?

Yep, like I said, Physiology (more specifically, neuroscience.) We just started doing mol bio stuff recently, but we used to only order things that keep cells alive so we could stick electrodes in them.

 

[loveoforganic]

Ah sorry! Somehow completely skimmed over that sentence.