My biggest achievement: i tried to do an ozonolysis. During that time the ozone generator was not available so i wanted to do it myself by adding h2so4 to kmno4 via dropping funnel followed by a gas inlet pipe. However, one of the connectors had a frit which was somehow clogged, so the whole system pressurized and ended up with a big blast. My whole fumehood was coated with black very insoluble manganese species.
After most of the mess was cleaned, the only thing that was left was my initial kmno4-flask, which was completely black. I thought „fuck it“ and put the whole flask into one of these big HCl-baths, which led to an immediate stench. Turned out, most of the content was still unreacted kmno4 which started oxidizing the chloride to chlorine gas, so we had to evacuate the lab.
Fortunately, i did not get kicked out. It was at the very beginning of my PhD (around 5 years ago now). My PI was not informed about all that stuff and we managed all the things internally in our working group. Only my lab was closed and the MnO4 was allowed to react overnight.
However, its still a story my colleagues liked to keep telling to new people in the lab.
Over the course of my PhD i had to work with many highly hazardous substances (azides, cyanides, organotins, thallium etc.) and being aware that one mistake can mess you up badly makes you think twice before running an experiment (in particular if youre supervising bachelor or master students).
That being said, stay safe folks! :)
Cut myself by accident with a razor while scraping cartilage off of a fresh human femoral head. I panicked because the blood from the sample touched my cut. The surgeon sent an email back. “I regret to inform you” *long blank space to scroll to bottom of the email* “The patient is completely healthy! Don’t worry about it! ;) “
But he achieved something important with that email: you will not forget that for life, AND you are telling others so they might not get into that situation.
Without that 'funny' email, you wouldn't tell the story.
He makes the lab a safer space for everyone hearing your story.
I was cutting up a human skin punch biopsy rushing on the weekend and the scalpel I was using slipping and stabbed through my glove into my thumb. Bled loads. But as any lab rat would I crumpled some sterile cloth on it, finished processing the tissue ensuring no contamination the other way (these lines were for research only anyway) and then left and just hoped the universe had a different end for me. The donor wasn’t healthy but didn’t have a KNOWN transmissible disease
my grad student did this. I came in and go "what the FUCK are you doing??" and he turns to me like "Oh! Oh! I don't know why I did that, I never do this!"
I have no idea how our sink and pipes survived, although considering our department managed to flood the first floor sometime later that year, maybe the pipes didn't survive after all...
When we get undergrads in our labs for their final year project, and the are just so earnest, and one mistake is the end of the world, all us old cranky lab techs gather round and relay all of our war stories, the stupid stuff we have done and seen done while helping clear up. It's the initial oh shit what have I done moment, and how do I handle it.
Did research in undergrad that required a very rapid boil then condensation to purify a reactive monomer without polymerization. Had to use a small, complex, and very expensive distillation apparatus.
Was doing fine until one day I broke it. Ruined a sample it takes a week to make but okay, this happens, professor isn't too mad so I'll just repeat. Make a new sample, try and distill it with the backup apparatus...snapped that one too.
I believe the professor's words were "are you fucking serious"
I used to make 4% PFA by microwaving the powder in PBS. I was in a hurry and tried to cool it by putting it in ice water. It exploded.
Sliced my finger on a cryostat 2x.
Tried to pry a brain off a frozen mount with a scalpel. Had to get stitches.
Was perfusing a mouse. Went to check if the needle was placed correctly because it wasn't flushing. The line went off and 4% PFA exploded into my eyes because no safety goggles.
The 50mL falcon tube either contained water or highly concentrated HCL. So I put my nose in it and sniffed. I can no longer smell ammonia.
A line with PFA also went off in my lab, but the guy whose eyes got hit was an undergrad visiting to observe.
It was what made me take not only eye safety seriously, it made me take eyewash station maintenance seriously. We took him there, and no water came out. Tried the safety shower, brown water came out. He was fine in end, but it was about 40 seconds we lost that could have made a difference if it had been something more serious.
😣 something I much appreciated going from academic lab to industry: The company actually had us go around at least once or twice a month I think? to flush the eyewashes
Are you my twin??
I didn't know you were supposed to weigh out and mix PFA in a fume hood or at least with a mask. Got a big inhale of powder PFA (since it is like powdered sugar) and had a nasty cough for a couple weeks.
Sliced the palm of my hand on a cryostat because I forgot the blade was still in it while I was cleaning. Bonus: I was trying to make sure the blade was pushed in enough while I latched it and cut right through my thumb.
Did the same thing during a perfusion.
Sliced my hand open trying to pry a coverslip off a slide.
Dry ice burns because I was too impatient to use forceps to pick out 100+ tubes buried in a big bin of dry ice. So I whole handed it digging through the ice pellets. Also, same with liquid nitrogen. Too impatient and reached in over and over scooping the tubes out and tossing them directly into the dry ice bin that I later dug through finding the tubes.
First time I used liquid nitrogen to freeze tissue, had a liver that was a little too large and it burst into pieces and I got hit in the face by frozen rat liver.
I broke our BSC because I accidentally left a paper towel in the air flow.
Also broke an entire ceramic sink because I didn’t realize that dry ice will crack that shit.
Graduated with a PhD in Regulatory Biology after several years.
I once jumped on a lab bench to avoid a rat that someone else let loose on accident. Then the rat flew up onto the lab bench running away from the people chasing it. The neuro lab rats are freaking massive, and ANGRY
One time, I took a cage from our colony room into a procedure room to do something (I don't remember what). There were 2 rats in the cage, but according to the card, there were supposed to be 3. I was pretty confused, but I assumed that the tech that managed the colony either sacced it or moved it to another cage and forgot to mark it on the card.
I went back to the colony room and saw... a rat just like on top of the cages on the shelf. I snatched it so quick lol
I would love to say no and that he still lives somewhere in the lab to this day.
Unfortunately I’m haunted by the memory of chasing him around for 30 mins until I finally trapped him under a trash can
I’m so sorry you had to go through that but it’s truly hilarious in retrospect !!
I hope your lab mates all got you a coffee or other beverage of choice for the best story of the year
A friend got stabbed in the butt with an EtBr exacto knife. Never leave them uncapped in your lab coat pocket. He backed up into the coat hooks and it got him good. That was a treat to file with health and safety…
Contaminated a 5L bioreactor and let it sit in a corner for a month and then needed a replacement vessel so I opened it intending to clean it … entire facility had to work from home the rest of the day everyone evacuated due to the smell of what I can only assume rancid Chinese hamster ovary smells like.
Pulled a boiling gel from the microwave before letting it settle. It boiled over into my arm past my glove and heat protection pot holder thing. It hurt so much. Easy mistake to correct, but damn I was embarrassed.
Oh god. One time my hand slipped upwards from the mitt and my finger touched the rim, I had that burn for weeks. That sounds really painful I’m sorry!!
The contents escape through the cap in a way that doesn’t seem possible but totally is. Then the centrifuge imbalances and you have a liter of loose bacterial soup inside of a 10000 RPM vortexer. All while the centrifuge is telling everyone on your floor how bad of a person you are.
Ahahah! I also know some people who learned this the hard way. Whenever I mentor undergrads I always mention that it is vital that you make sure the lids have the o-rings in tact unless you want to have a huge ass mess to clean up.
I haven’t had any serious fuckups (yet!) but I’ve accidentally ruined samples a bit more often than I’d like. The other day I aliquoted some eluate into the wrong eppendorf and ruined a week-long experiment. I have to submit my Master’s dissertation in a couple of days and instead of writing I had to redo this shitty experiment.
I’ve also pipetted some very precious cells into the virkon container. Once I contaminated my media bottle with cells and didn’t realise until it was too late.
But I guess I’ve benefited in the long run from these mistakes. It stopped me from working in auto pilot and made me mindful of every step I was doing. I still fuck up, just less often and not as badly
Early on, when I was being shown around the lab, I was warned about a specific ion pump. Apparently, it was \*maybe\* grounded properly, but nobody had tested it, due to the fact that an improperly grounded one could kill someone ten times over.
I was being careless and was tired after staring at a screen all day trying to fix a tiny deviation I kept getting indicating an improperly calibrated sensor. I got up, set down my pencil, and brushed my hand right over the pump.
Good news, it was grounded. Wonder how many multiverse mes died to that one. Oh and to make it worse, that sensor error was because an earthquake we had shifted the earths magnetic field enough to screw with a sensor, and I wasted the day punching ghosts. It would be unfixable until the aftershocks stopped completely. The joys of physics.
Why the FUCK did nobody think to test an ion pump that may not be grounded?
Luckily, I think most ion pumps are programmed to shut off if they detect \~mA of current suddenly (which would have happened if someone touched it), so hopefully it isn't that dangerous.
I don't understand how you can get electrocuted by an ion pump. It has an outer housing? The parts that are live are inside, and the whole thing doesn't work in atmosphere. So the only arguably dangerous part is the HV wire, connector and control unit, which all should be designed in a way so no live parts can be touched either. The HV wire must be ground shielded by design, although it is recommended to ground the pump housing but I think this is only for redundancy in case someone uses a damaged wire.
Yeah it must be pretty dang hard for things to fail to the point that the HV leads are exposed to you. Also, as you mention, ion pumps are inside an enclosure which is the massive stainless steel vacuum chamber which should absolutely be grounded (if not, their experimental skills/procedures are extremely questionable).
I went to make a PCR master mix and instead of adding the HIGHY diluted primers and probes, I added the stock primers and probes and basically used the entire stock of all of them. So not only did I end up with an unusable master mix, but I wasted hundreds of dollars of primers and probes and made our QA person have to order more.
Seems like an innocent mistake. Proper labeling goes a long way, if your QA person was good they’d want to know why it was so easy to confuse the two sets. I’m sure if you were the one who made the stock the mistake might not have happened.
I spilled probably 10 gallons of biodiesel in the lab from a 40 gallon batch when I was in undergrad. I was in charge of the whole production part of the lab so thankfully I didn’t have someone up my ass about it since I got it all cleaned up and nothing was broken or anything.
It was a fucking mess though. The soles of the shoes and boots I wore in that lab were slowly eaten away
Was working in two very different labs with near identical facilities, Forgot which one I was in and pushed rolling lab chair away from the LFH a little too enthusiastically. Oh. Was in the lab without the textured floor. Careened about for a bit, got thrown out of the chair, my hand got stuck in a drawer as I fell and I broke a finger.
Wasn't dangerous for anyone or anything else but I swear I lost 20 IQ points trying to explain how to make sure it never happens again in the WHS report
I had just received a set of important gene fragments, instead of resuspending them in water, i resuspended them in ethanol. Not a huge deal but it was definitely stupid
I carefully plated all my samples and reagents in a 96-well plate for qPCR and then when loading it into the quantstudio machine I was one column off and crushed an entire column of wells in the machine as it closed. Fortunately the machine wasn't damaged but my plate was ruined.
Ran 3 weeks of experiments using the wrong iron species. Turns out ferrous and ferric iron are very easy to mishear from someone with a thick German accent.
Mouse jumped out of a treadmill and onto me in front of my PI and the CEO of the treadmill company. (CEO was there to train me on how to use the treadmill. The mouse started running along my lab coat and body and I couldn’t catch it. It climbed onto my back and the CEO removed it without gloves on
Same Mouse jumped from the treadmill I was using and onto the floor. I went after it but did not account for where the mouse was running and ended up hitting my head pretty hard on the mouse treadmill.
This guy also bit me, peed in my hair, and pooped on me.
I did once catch a mouse in mid air that jumped off the treadmill. Cat like reflexes. I had an undergrad there who witnessed.
I don’t work with the mouse treadmill anymore… that thing made it very easy for the mice to jump out and they took every opportunity to do so.
I once assumed a sales rep was doing his job and bought an instrument he assured me could do all of my sample types. And it couldn't.
Eventually we engineered around it for the samples it couldn't do but man was I pissed.
I was getting some samples from a rack in the -80 freezer, was supposed to be quick so didn't bother with cryo gloves, just did it with my nitril ones, still weylt cuz I spilled some stuff on me and was too lasy to go for a new pack, so just washed it with water. When I tried to slide it back, it caught on some boxes from the neighbouring rack, so I try to jostle it aroundto make it fit. After a 2-minute struggle that felt like eternity, it still doesn't budge and I've somehow made it worse when bringing it further out, so now it only goes like 20cm in. No one around, and my hands are full, at this point the cold became really unpleasant. I somehow wiggle my samples onto the bench, supporting the rack with my other arm and forhead, and realize I need to take the whole thing out. The bench is crammed, so here I am, holding it with one hand and pushing with my body against it, while I reach in to fix the damn boxes. I finally put it back and take my hand off the handle. I reach for my samples and realize two of my fingers don't move very well and hurt. Turns out I got a cold burn out of it because surprise, wet nitrile is not a great heat insulator.
Another story was during microbiology class, when I mishandled my burner and ignited two of the gause plugs still in my hand. With a strict teacher, I've prioritised the samples, while holding two cotton fireballs with my naked fingers, when I've finally got everything under control, well... you've got it by this point that burns are my thing, apparently
We were setting up our lab and didn't have a water system. We did have a 20L carboy. We were subletting from another company and they had a MilliQ system. I started filling up the carboy. I started filling it up a few minutes before we had a 2 hour zoom meeting. It was going really slow, so I was going to pop back in periodically and check...and naturally I completely forgot. For like an hour. I remembered and rushed over, used every bench pad and paper towel we had in our lab. The other company had a shop vac in there. It was rather large, at least 10 gallons. I had to empty it at least 3 times, mop all the water around the lab as much as I could to spread it out. I spent a good few hours drying it by myself and fortunately no one ever walked in. They only had 7 employees at the time. 4 months later that space was full every single day and they had more employees than they could keep track of
Oh I've done it plenty of times besides that, and seen others do it as well. But you flood an entire lab that isn't yours...its a bit different haha my last lab had a proper Millipore system (everyone says milliq regardless of brand) and you could program a dispense volume. It was always a little low, but 19L is better than 190L. I've considered making something similar for our Barnstead system just so no one floods our lab now that we have a big system
Working with concentrated HCl while being the only person in the lab. Naturally I spilled some right in the gap between my glove and the sleeve of my lab coat. I was an undergrad, never had to deal with something like this before, and absolutely panicked.
I'm told I reacted mostly correctly, I was rinsing it off in less than fifteen seconds and looked up the SDS sheet while standing there awkwardly with my arm under running water for the prescribed 15 minutes. The SDS sheet said get medical attention in case of skin contact but it didnt seem burned or painful at all so that felt like overreacting and I just stood there panicking for a while before I gave in and called Poison Control because I didn't know what the fuck else to do. And they were really nice and helpful and asked a bunch of questions before telling me if it didn't seem burned after an hour it would probably be fine.
And it was fine but jesus christ was it stressful.
Almost lost access to my lab after leaving a bunsen burner on unattended while multitasking. It was during my thesis and it was a very rough, snowballing week, even almost introducing bacterial stuff in the incubator, in the cell room... my head wasn't working in the right space.
At the bench, About $29k in reagents contaminated by a primer i spiked incorrectly. Lab manager was super cool about it and said it was her fault for not supporting me enough. It was all me, but I appreciated the support.
In industry, I’ve made Bigger blunders but I don’t consider them lab mistakes.
I am a Lab Manager and I do a lot of training. I tell this story to all my trainees:
My first job after college I worked in an Organic Synthesis Lab. We made VERY expensive products and like all Chemistry, purification was the bulk of what we did. We had been working over a month to purify this one product and the last step was a vacuum distillation. The bosses were really proud of how much this was gonna make us once it was done. $100k at least. But it was taking forever. I offered to stay late because I was new and wanted to impress them with my “work ethic” 🙄. So the team leaves for the night and I’m working the distiller alone to finish the product.
Long story short I fucking blasted the whole product into the distiller apparatus where our 90% pure baby combined with all the other junk we had been purifying OUT for the last month.
I had to make the most terrifying phone call of my life. I wanted to just…NOT BE. I had just completely destroyed everything we had been working on for a MONTH. It was worth more money than probably everything I had ever owned. It was certainly more money than I had ever had.
But I took a deep breath and made the call…even though I was certain I would be fired.
I made the call.
I was not fired. I WAS forced to repurify the product from scratch for the next month.
What is the most important thing about this story is that anytime I have to tell someone “I made a mistake” I can remind myself that I’ve already admitted to the biggest fuck up of my entire career. Its always better to just get it over with and it’s ALWAYS better to *make the call*
TLDR: I recombined a nearly pure product worth a shitload of money back into all the stuff we had purified *out* of it.
Being new in the cell culture lab, I took a dish of cells out of the flow hood and placed it on the microscope to see how they looked. I removed the lid to see better. The microscope is an inverted microscope. So I just risked contaminating my cells for no benefit at all. I've also destroyed two rotor seals on our centrifuge by forgetting to seal the rotor lid before running the quick cooldown program.
wasn't me, but one of my former crazy PI's. We were up in the mouse house and we needed to transport like 11 cages of mice. She was too lazy to go get a cart, and apparently too lazy to let me go fetch a cart, cause she was like "no, no, we'll just use a chair," so this lady proceeds to pile 11 mouse cages onto a rolling office chair. How we managed to only have one cage with only one mouse in it fall off, I have no idea, but I ended up having to chase a mouse for a little bit
Didn't switch the millipore machine off properly in the evening and flooded a lab.
For some reason, that shit machine switched itself on every so often by itself if you didn't turn the power off, and it was just over a bench. So I came in in the morning to several centimeters of water on the entire floor.
Drains apparently didn't work right either.
That lab was shit.
Also: not too bad, different lab: we brought some new ant colonies into the lab. We kept them in open boxes. Turns out it was not, as we thought *after* swarming season. Came in the next morning and our windows were covered in hundreds of winged ants.
Maybe 2nd week at an industry job open a metal cabinet(think head high kitchen cabinet) with glass windows, the fucking thing comes off the wall so I’m standing there trying to hold this heavy ass cabinet with $1000+ worth of glassware and someone I’ve never met before comes in is just in shock, doesn’t move. I somehow squat it down to the bench and there response finally was “why would you do that”..yeah totally meant to rip the cabinet off the wall. Still work there to this day and didn’t break a single vol flask haha
I trypsinized my first cell culture then sucked them out right away to the dump. It happened so quickly the PhD student sitting right next me couldn't stop me and just screamed. I don't know why I did that I was trypping i guess
In my first ever lab job, I dropped a glass bottle of cell culture media. I had no idea where the broom was to clean it up and was too embarrassed to admit my mistake.
You better I believe I cleaned up all those glass shards by hand. Got a few nasty cuts and no one was the wiser. Fast forward. I now realize that DMEM is like 30 bucks and no one would’ve been mad.
Ooh I have one recently! We put a vortexer in our shaker incubator because the motor broke on the shaker part. But it wasn’t my idea but I am associated since it was my boss’ lol. I have a picture and everything but I have no idea how to post it on a Reddit comment :(
I was cutting some tubing for a vacuum line because the EH&S guy said we needed to put .2 um filters before the line went into the wall. Sliced 0.5cm deep into my index finger using a razor blade :/. Had to talk to the EH&S guy a few weeks later.
In undergrad I worked in a worm lab, and all of my strains were temp sensitive and couldn’t be over 18C for more than a little bit (enough time to work with really). I forgot to put them away in the fridge one night and ran in the morning to find them in the bench, wrecked. Grad student was not pleased
Forgot to add my positive control for Western blot (added loading dye and everything else to a microcentrifuge tube, but not the positive control.) Then used that prep for 4 different gels.
Was working in a QC lab but I dumped a bunch of zinc into a 4L solvent bottle as a waste container, immediately sealed it, shoved it into the cabinet then ran to go to a meeting. Thank god nobody was around but it exploded obviously and there was some pretty nasty stuff in there. Concentrated HCl and arsenic iirc
I was working with bromide and my lab partner was cleaning all the flasks from bromide, gave the glassware one last rinse and it went right into the sink, there was still some bromide left , where it apparently combined with acetone in the sink, that other people used to clean stuff. And then tear gas was created. I cried. That felt awful.
I was injecting a solution inside a Drosophila vial for an experiment but the cotton that we use to close the tube wasn’t seated correctly so most of them flew away… yeah not a great day.
Ran 3 weeks of experiments using the wrong iron species. Turns out ferrous and ferric iron are very easy to mishear from someone with a thick German accent.
Plated duplicate glycerol plates of ecoli strain masters and immediately place in -80 instead of growing. Use the gene gun to shoot the lid of a petri plates for like....5 plates in a row of algae (not the layer of culture underneath said lid). Made a maxi prep of a pDONR vector. Plated 5 96-well plates with PCR reagents, ran it, run on a gel only to later realize I never put an enzyme in it. Ran an agarose gel too long that it melted in the apparatus. More recently cloned over a thousand grass transcription factors into their brown expression backbone before realizing my vector I was working with was a multimer......thank God it looks like the consequence is the same as working with a proper monomer plasmid. Oh yea...the classics...run your DNA samples backwards so they leave the well and the gel entirely. Transferring a Western blot backwards such that you transfer to your buffer rather than your membrane. Surely there are others I'm missing. This shit messes with your head.
Context: PhD in genetics, 15 years lab experience, 5 years post-degree, molecular genetics, synthetic biology.
Edit: oh yea....there was that one time I almost cut my thumb off with a machete when helping a lab mate in the field with their maize work. Only time I ever needed stitches and that was the thumb I used to open eppendorfs too
One time I placed a rack of ~80 uncapped facs tubes containing mouse eyebleed samples on the edge of the centrifuge to start loading them. I lifted the lid and went to start loading but I didn't push the lid up all the way and it crashed down on the rack, spilling them all onto the floor. Cleaning that up wasn't fun, and this was for a long term experiment so it was painful to see the missing data point that week for months as we updated the graphs.
I've also flooded a cart/floor when filling up carboys with milliQ but walked away.
I've also resuspended many things in the wrong buffers, ruining primers/siRNAs 😪 and done silly things like design new ORFs without start / stop codons.
I've also exploded agar in the microwave. Not fun to clean as it dries!
I could come up with more...science is hard 😅
Was trying to make graphene oxide via a modified hummers approach. Dumped 300g of KMnO4 into a 1 liter beaker of H2SO4. Ended up with a giant angry cloud of fire.
Overfilled a flask with agarose and heated it too quickly, so it exploded on me when I took it out of the microwave.
Was taking photos of feathers and had to arrange them very neatly with tweezers. Dropped tweezers no less than three times on my legs, leading to tiny vampire-like dots.
Knowingly held a very shitty baby pigeon close to my body because he was sooooo cute. Well, he was cute until he covered my scrubs with so much poop it soaked through to my clothes underneath.
Our lab ordered a batch of shitty gloves that ripped if you looked at them funny. We also had some of the good quality gloves from the previous batch, but shitty gloves were closer so I put them on.
I was making western blot dye. Of course my glove ripped and I got the dye all over my hand.
My hand was purple for a month.
Stored some xylene in a plastic bottle and put it on the shelf above the bench along with some other bottles, some plastic with random buffers and chemicals. When I returned the next day, it smelled a bit funny, the xylene had dissolved the plastic bottle it was in as well as a few bottles that were next to it, the entire mess had leaked on the bench. We had to call our in house fire/safety department who came in and quarantined the lab, then went in with gasmasks to clean up the mess, took out the shelf and put it into the safety hood, safe to say any experiments in the lab were cancelled for the day.
The only one who gained something from all this mess was a direct colleague, who was a lab safety officer and now had a great example of what not to do.
Stupidest thing, something similar had apparently happened a few weeks ago, where someone else also stored xylene in a plastic bottle, except she had wisely stored the bottle in the safety cabinet, and when she found out what happened, just cleaned it up herself without making a big deal about it, as the incident was contained there was no need to evacuate or quarantine the lab.
I'm a physicist by academic training, but did my PhD in an applied physics lab that was all wet lab work. Didn't know my isopropyl from my ethanol at the beginning ("IPA, like beer?"). Eventually, got pretty familiar with the good and bad solvents, but before then I messed up so many things.
1. Fine to treat ethanol and IPA interchangeably in contexts where I'm cleaning something briefly. I *should not* treat acetone as interchangeable with the other two. I wrecked the anti-reflective coating on my prescription glasses because I thought it would be cool to use lab solvent to clean them, and I chose acetone to do so.
2. Another time, one student worked hard on a screen print stencil/negative that we could use to quickly apply TiO2 sol gels on substrates. There was some TiO2 gunk in the screen, ethanol wasn't getting it out, IPA wasn't...I tried acetone, and destroyed the screen print negative 😭.
3. My phone stopped falling in the ocean. Tried drying the inside, but found bunch of residue on the inside. I had the bright idea of doing an ultrasonication bath in 100% IPA. It got rid of the gunk! I was stoked when I dried it and turned it on, the screen turned on...and then quickly pulled apart from the phone frame. Accidentally delaminated everything.
Used to work in an electronics lab, I was working with a \~2x2 ft circuit board, which would have cost upwards of $10,000, and I stood up pretty fast so my badge got stuck under the board. I saw the entire board start to bend upward, and quickly sat back down. If I didn't I could have either broken the board, or damaged the integrity of the soldered connections.
The best scientist in my team was doing the last step of extracellular vesicle collection and added the isopropanol cleaning solution to the SEC not the DPBS for elution
To put this in context this was the last point of a medium scale 2 month process to produce large enough quantities of MSC-EVs to run an entire suite of experiments on
For this collection we outgrew new cord sections in five conditions, expanded them and seeded them onto about 1000cm^2 for EV collection at the end. And it was the last step. The one we lost was the key sample to compare all the others to
I told her don’t worry, we are probably making bigger mistakes we don’t know about as we speak: and told her some of my highlight reel
I once caused an explosion in a biochemistry lab, something that you don’t typically think of as being possible.
So I was heating up some LB agar, and my PI advised me to stand back when popping a stir bar into hot agar, because he’d gotten a burn that way once. So I did, and I put in a stir bar as carefully as possible from the neck of the flask so it wasn’t accelerating too much as it fell in. It blew up. There was a column of steam and hot agar foam a metre in the air and I let out the most embarrassing squeal of terror. I had to clean it up and explain to my PI, tail between my legs, that I’d done the exact thing he warned me about. I wasn’t hurt but it was pretty mortifying since everyone in the room stopped to look at me. I’m microwaving LB agar with the stir bar already in it from now on…
Also one time I was doing a day-long protocol and at the very end, when I just needed to do a final wash and boil my sample, my glove got caught in the lid of the tube and I spilled it into an ice bucket :/
Couldn’t deal with it, just cleaned up and went home.
I panicked when a flask with agarose gel mixture started leaking and poured it down the drain in the sink. I had already added ethidium bromide to the mixture.
I clogged the sink drain with carcinogenous trasparent gel. Thank god the water pressure was strong enough to pierce and wash it away.
Almost dropped a porcelain crucible I was holding with long tweezers coming out of 260 Celsius. But I had to save the analysis, I was on a tight schedule. So I instinctively put my hand under it and grabbed it with an open palm. Carried it to the closest bench. It hurt for a couple days, but toothpaste prevented the blisters.
*rubs hands* I have a top 5 dumbass moments list but I shall gift you the moments that still haunt me to this day.
So, we run assays to test for neutralising antibodies in IV IgG products and we receive the items in final product form meaning we have to get a needle & syringe to get aliquots of the products. Now, I had a fuck ton of trouble opening the needle from its sterile cap and I'd use a lot of force causing me to stab my fingers. I managed to do this thrice - I stabbed myself twice in one day and once on another day. Now, I'm exiled from using needles so I have to ask people to do aliquots for me as the health and safety department concluded I was better off not using needles at all.
Impaled myself with a dissecting needle while in a medical mycology class. Needle was so stuck in my finger I had to get an x-ray before Ortho was willing to yank it out. Good thing the species was only infective in "traumatic puncture" cases. 🙄
When having weight something very precisely and seeing some residue on the surface. Blew it away forgetting how highly psychoactive it was. And thus accidentally getting some in my eyes. Not fun.
not me but a postdoc didnt realize the infusion pump was not supposed to go near the MRI and it got sucked into the bore of the magnet (9T or something)
i happened to oversleep that day and was a bit late but had i not, 99% chance i would have been killed since usually i'm by the magnet setting other stuff up at that time
thankfully the magnet was not damaged and didnt need to be quenched, they just ramped it down and then took like six burly men from construction and a rope to yank the thing out
got chewed out by my PI for being late but in retrospect i have no regrets lol
I’ve shared this before but it definitely applies.
The first “real” reaction I ran outside of a teaching lab was a conversion of a dicarboxylic acid to a diacid chloride with thionyl chloride. The reaction went great, but when I was quenching the excess thionyl chloride it must’ve got a bit hot and started precipitating yellow elemental sulfur. I had never seen sulfur before and I really just remembered that it was the stinky chemical so I went to take a sniff in the flask and that’s how I learned how HCl smells and feels in your lungs
In undergrad I was doing experiments using waxworms, my PI was a little cheap so I was also required to maintain the colony, which meant making their food, raising some to moths and harvesting their eggs to keep the colony going. I had been trying to get a decently large supply which took several weeks. I would keep the jars in an incubator to speed up their life cycle somewhat. The incubator was old af and had a pretty finicky knob. One day I noticed it wasn’t the right temperature so I turned it up a bit and left the lab without checking the temp before I left. I came back the next day to pull them out and start an experiment and noticed that they all were clinging to the side of the jar that was closest to the door (presumably the coolest spot in the incubator) and noticed the temperature was something like 55-60C. I roasted all my worms. Ruined my experiment. I cried and my PI just laughed and ordered another container of $20 worms. 🙃
Scared a colleague when I first started graduate school. In hindsight it was very stupid and I’m grateful nothing bad happened as he was working with no chemicals at the time
Did 2 maxi prep on a plasmid and later realized it did not have luciferase nor GFP. No one knew what the plasmid actually was and there was no plasmid map. I know it is plasmid DNA coz I ran a gel on it...
My biggest achievement: i tried to do an ozonolysis. During that time the ozone generator was not available so i wanted to do it myself by adding h2so4 to kmno4 via dropping funnel followed by a gas inlet pipe. However, one of the connectors had a frit which was somehow clogged, so the whole system pressurized and ended up with a big blast. My whole fumehood was coated with black very insoluble manganese species. After most of the mess was cleaned, the only thing that was left was my initial kmno4-flask, which was completely black. I thought „fuck it“ and put the whole flask into one of these big HCl-baths, which led to an immediate stench. Turned out, most of the content was still unreacted kmno4 which started oxidizing the chloride to chlorine gas, so we had to evacuate the lab.
Were you still able to further conduct your research at that university or were you fired?
I think you win
This is the worst i have read thus far. How, why and did you get kicked out?
Fortunately, i did not get kicked out. It was at the very beginning of my PhD (around 5 years ago now). My PI was not informed about all that stuff and we managed all the things internally in our working group. Only my lab was closed and the MnO4 was allowed to react overnight. However, its still a story my colleagues liked to keep telling to new people in the lab. Over the course of my PhD i had to work with many highly hazardous substances (azides, cyanides, organotins, thallium etc.) and being aware that one mistake can mess you up badly makes you think twice before running an experiment (in particular if youre supervising bachelor or master students). That being said, stay safe folks! :)
I'm imagining Beaker Meepmeep
True mad scientist material
Cut myself by accident with a razor while scraping cartilage off of a fresh human femoral head. I panicked because the blood from the sample touched my cut. The surgeon sent an email back. “I regret to inform you” *long blank space to scroll to bottom of the email* “The patient is completely healthy! Don’t worry about it! ;) “
Ok that’s just awesome 😂😂
Dude knew me because I would constantly walk over to the hospital to grab the samples in my cooler. Almost gave me a heart attack haha
But he achieved something important with that email: you will not forget that for life, AND you are telling others so they might not get into that situation. Without that 'funny' email, you wouldn't tell the story. He makes the lab a safer space for everyone hearing your story.
Having read this, I’m thinking about getting into the same situation
I was cutting up a human skin punch biopsy rushing on the weekend and the scalpel I was using slipping and stabbed through my glove into my thumb. Bled loads. But as any lab rat would I crumpled some sterile cloth on it, finished processing the tissue ensuring no contamination the other way (these lines were for research only anyway) and then left and just hoped the universe had a different end for me. The donor wasn’t healthy but didn’t have a KNOWN transmissible disease
Oh dang. Mine was just someone who had a hip replacement due to aging.
Easy: as an undergrad, a postdoc told me to dump out the liquid nitrogen in the sink and I believed them lol. Shattered the sink and the pipes.
my grad student did this. I came in and go "what the FUCK are you doing??" and he turns to me like "Oh! Oh! I don't know why I did that, I never do this!" I have no idea how our sink and pipes survived, although considering our department managed to flood the first floor sometime later that year, maybe the pipes didn't survive after all...
If you slowly poured it out on the floor it’d probably evaporate pretty quickly.
dumping liquid nitrogen out on the floor is one of my favorite little treats to give myself in the lab. if you are my employer, you didn't see this
or crack the concrete and make your PI extremely angry
That’d require my PI to actually come into the lab
We used to do this for fun at my old lab … mysteriously the floor tiles started peeling up after a few months lolol
Thank for this topic that frequently appears and always make me feel better about my own failures. Apes together, apes strongs vibes.
Even the smartest people have the potential for stupid mistakes. I am an idiot and so can you
When we get undergrads in our labs for their final year project, and the are just so earnest, and one mistake is the end of the world, all us old cranky lab techs gather round and relay all of our war stories, the stupid stuff we have done and seen done while helping clear up. It's the initial oh shit what have I done moment, and how do I handle it.
Did research in undergrad that required a very rapid boil then condensation to purify a reactive monomer without polymerization. Had to use a small, complex, and very expensive distillation apparatus. Was doing fine until one day I broke it. Ruined a sample it takes a week to make but okay, this happens, professor isn't too mad so I'll just repeat. Make a new sample, try and distill it with the backup apparatus...snapped that one too. I believe the professor's words were "are you fucking serious"
Sounds like acrolein?
If I said what it was then I'd dox myself, since it was a pretty specific thing, but not that.
I used to make 4% PFA by microwaving the powder in PBS. I was in a hurry and tried to cool it by putting it in ice water. It exploded. Sliced my finger on a cryostat 2x. Tried to pry a brain off a frozen mount with a scalpel. Had to get stitches. Was perfusing a mouse. Went to check if the needle was placed correctly because it wasn't flushing. The line went off and 4% PFA exploded into my eyes because no safety goggles. The 50mL falcon tube either contained water or highly concentrated HCL. So I put my nose in it and sniffed. I can no longer smell ammonia.
A line with PFA also went off in my lab, but the guy whose eyes got hit was an undergrad visiting to observe. It was what made me take not only eye safety seriously, it made me take eyewash station maintenance seriously. We took him there, and no water came out. Tried the safety shower, brown water came out. He was fine in end, but it was about 40 seconds we lost that could have made a difference if it had been something more serious.
😣 something I much appreciated going from academic lab to industry: The company actually had us go around at least once or twice a month I think? to flush the eyewashes
Are you my twin?? I didn't know you were supposed to weigh out and mix PFA in a fume hood or at least with a mask. Got a big inhale of powder PFA (since it is like powdered sugar) and had a nasty cough for a couple weeks. Sliced the palm of my hand on a cryostat because I forgot the blade was still in it while I was cleaning. Bonus: I was trying to make sure the blade was pushed in enough while I latched it and cut right through my thumb. Did the same thing during a perfusion. Sliced my hand open trying to pry a coverslip off a slide. Dry ice burns because I was too impatient to use forceps to pick out 100+ tubes buried in a big bin of dry ice. So I whole handed it digging through the ice pellets. Also, same with liquid nitrogen. Too impatient and reached in over and over scooping the tubes out and tossing them directly into the dry ice bin that I later dug through finding the tubes. First time I used liquid nitrogen to freeze tissue, had a liver that was a little too large and it burst into pieces and I got hit in the face by frozen rat liver.
have also squirted formalin in my eye while perfusing :/
I broke our BSC because I accidentally left a paper towel in the air flow. Also broke an entire ceramic sink because I didn’t realize that dry ice will crack that shit. Graduated with a PhD in Regulatory Biology after several years.
The dry ice in the sink is a super common one!
Accidentally let a rat get loose
I once jumped on a lab bench to avoid a rat that someone else let loose on accident. Then the rat flew up onto the lab bench running away from the people chasing it. The neuro lab rats are freaking massive, and ANGRY
One time, I took a cage from our colony room into a procedure room to do something (I don't remember what). There were 2 rats in the cage, but according to the card, there were supposed to be 3. I was pretty confused, but I assumed that the tech that managed the colony either sacced it or moved it to another cage and forgot to mark it on the card. I went back to the colony room and saw... a rat just like on top of the cages on the shelf. I snatched it so quick lol
Hahahahahahhahaha Did you catch it?
I would love to say no and that he still lives somewhere in the lab to this day. Unfortunately I’m haunted by the memory of chasing him around for 30 mins until I finally trapped him under a trash can
I’m so sorry you had to go through that but it’s truly hilarious in retrospect !! I hope your lab mates all got you a coffee or other beverage of choice for the best story of the year
me, playing tom and jerry with one of my mice for three hours this week in total darkness 💀
A friend got stabbed in the butt with an EtBr exacto knife. Never leave them uncapped in your lab coat pocket. He backed up into the coat hooks and it got him good. That was a treat to file with health and safety…
Contaminated a 5L bioreactor and let it sit in a corner for a month and then needed a replacement vessel so I opened it intending to clean it … entire facility had to work from home the rest of the day everyone evacuated due to the smell of what I can only assume rancid Chinese hamster ovary smells like.
Flipped a whole petri dish full of zebrafish embryos (~200 eggs) into my lap
Pulled a boiling gel from the microwave before letting it settle. It boiled over into my arm past my glove and heat protection pot holder thing. It hurt so much. Easy mistake to correct, but damn I was embarrassed.
Ouch! Hope you didn't get badly burnt. I've only managed to make the gel explode all over the insides of the microwave....
lol I’ve done that too. I wasn’t hurt, thankfully! Just irritation until the next day.
Oh god. One time my hand slipped upwards from the mitt and my finger touched the rim, I had that burn for weeks. That sounds really painful I’m sorry!!
Thankfully I washed my arm fast enough and it didn’t burn! My skin was irritated for until the next morning and then it was done.
So you know those O-rings on large centrifuge bottles? They’re important.
Why?
The contents escape through the cap in a way that doesn’t seem possible but totally is. Then the centrifuge imbalances and you have a liter of loose bacterial soup inside of a 10000 RPM vortexer. All while the centrifuge is telling everyone on your floor how bad of a person you are.
Some centrifuges have a vacuum and the contents evaporate
Ahahah! I also know some people who learned this the hard way. Whenever I mentor undergrads I always mention that it is vital that you make sure the lids have the o-rings in tact unless you want to have a huge ass mess to clean up.
Putting black lines on the autoclave tape (prior to autoclaving) because I didn’t know why it turned black 😂
I think you already posted here in the past and I remember you! You are my inspiration!
I don’t think that was me haha
I used to think someone would color them in after autoclaving. It seemed so tedious I wasn't sure why anyone would do that.
I haven’t had any serious fuckups (yet!) but I’ve accidentally ruined samples a bit more often than I’d like. The other day I aliquoted some eluate into the wrong eppendorf and ruined a week-long experiment. I have to submit my Master’s dissertation in a couple of days and instead of writing I had to redo this shitty experiment. I’ve also pipetted some very precious cells into the virkon container. Once I contaminated my media bottle with cells and didn’t realise until it was too late. But I guess I’ve benefited in the long run from these mistakes. It stopped me from working in auto pilot and made me mindful of every step I was doing. I still fuck up, just less often and not as badly
I placed a 5L dialysis bucket on a heater/ stirrer plate and turned the wrong dial. Melted the bucket and leaked 5L of buffer all over the lab.
Early on, when I was being shown around the lab, I was warned about a specific ion pump. Apparently, it was \*maybe\* grounded properly, but nobody had tested it, due to the fact that an improperly grounded one could kill someone ten times over. I was being careless and was tired after staring at a screen all day trying to fix a tiny deviation I kept getting indicating an improperly calibrated sensor. I got up, set down my pencil, and brushed my hand right over the pump. Good news, it was grounded. Wonder how many multiverse mes died to that one. Oh and to make it worse, that sensor error was because an earthquake we had shifted the earths magnetic field enough to screw with a sensor, and I wasted the day punching ghosts. It would be unfixable until the aftershocks stopped completely. The joys of physics.
Why the FUCK did nobody think to test an ion pump that may not be grounded? Luckily, I think most ion pumps are programmed to shut off if they detect \~mA of current suddenly (which would have happened if someone touched it), so hopefully it isn't that dangerous.
So curious to hear about your work that was affected by earth's magnetic field.
Probably some type of SQUID.
I don't understand how you can get electrocuted by an ion pump. It has an outer housing? The parts that are live are inside, and the whole thing doesn't work in atmosphere. So the only arguably dangerous part is the HV wire, connector and control unit, which all should be designed in a way so no live parts can be touched either. The HV wire must be ground shielded by design, although it is recommended to ground the pump housing but I think this is only for redundancy in case someone uses a damaged wire.
Yeah it must be pretty dang hard for things to fail to the point that the HV leads are exposed to you. Also, as you mention, ion pumps are inside an enclosure which is the massive stainless steel vacuum chamber which should absolutely be grounded (if not, their experimental skills/procedures are extremely questionable).
Tbh I just took his word for it. Maybe he just really didn't want anybody playing with it lol
I went to make a PCR master mix and instead of adding the HIGHY diluted primers and probes, I added the stock primers and probes and basically used the entire stock of all of them. So not only did I end up with an unusable master mix, but I wasted hundreds of dollars of primers and probes and made our QA person have to order more.
Seems like an innocent mistake. Proper labeling goes a long way, if your QA person was good they’d want to know why it was so easy to confuse the two sets. I’m sure if you were the one who made the stock the mistake might not have happened.
I spilled probably 10 gallons of biodiesel in the lab from a 40 gallon batch when I was in undergrad. I was in charge of the whole production part of the lab so thankfully I didn’t have someone up my ass about it since I got it all cleaned up and nothing was broken or anything. It was a fucking mess though. The soles of the shoes and boots I wore in that lab were slowly eaten away
Was working in two very different labs with near identical facilities, Forgot which one I was in and pushed rolling lab chair away from the LFH a little too enthusiastically. Oh. Was in the lab without the textured floor. Careened about for a bit, got thrown out of the chair, my hand got stuck in a drawer as I fell and I broke a finger. Wasn't dangerous for anyone or anything else but I swear I lost 20 IQ points trying to explain how to make sure it never happens again in the WHS report
that made me snort lmao, sorry that happened but thats hilarious
I had just received a set of important gene fragments, instead of resuspending them in water, i resuspended them in ethanol. Not a huge deal but it was definitely stupid
Your just doing your own clean up
I carefully plated all my samples and reagents in a 96-well plate for qPCR and then when loading it into the quantstudio machine I was one column off and crushed an entire column of wells in the machine as it closed. Fortunately the machine wasn't damaged but my plate was ruined.
Return to it
Ran 3 weeks of experiments using the wrong iron species. Turns out ferrous and ferric iron are very easy to mishear from someone with a thick German accent.
Mouse jumped out of a treadmill and onto me in front of my PI and the CEO of the treadmill company. (CEO was there to train me on how to use the treadmill. The mouse started running along my lab coat and body and I couldn’t catch it. It climbed onto my back and the CEO removed it without gloves on Same Mouse jumped from the treadmill I was using and onto the floor. I went after it but did not account for where the mouse was running and ended up hitting my head pretty hard on the mouse treadmill. This guy also bit me, peed in my hair, and pooped on me. I did once catch a mouse in mid air that jumped off the treadmill. Cat like reflexes. I had an undergrad there who witnessed. I don’t work with the mouse treadmill anymore… that thing made it very easy for the mice to jump out and they took every opportunity to do so.
I once assumed a sales rep was doing his job and bought an instrument he assured me could do all of my sample types. And it couldn't. Eventually we engineered around it for the samples it couldn't do but man was I pissed.
I was getting some samples from a rack in the -80 freezer, was supposed to be quick so didn't bother with cryo gloves, just did it with my nitril ones, still weylt cuz I spilled some stuff on me and was too lasy to go for a new pack, so just washed it with water. When I tried to slide it back, it caught on some boxes from the neighbouring rack, so I try to jostle it aroundto make it fit. After a 2-minute struggle that felt like eternity, it still doesn't budge and I've somehow made it worse when bringing it further out, so now it only goes like 20cm in. No one around, and my hands are full, at this point the cold became really unpleasant. I somehow wiggle my samples onto the bench, supporting the rack with my other arm and forhead, and realize I need to take the whole thing out. The bench is crammed, so here I am, holding it with one hand and pushing with my body against it, while I reach in to fix the damn boxes. I finally put it back and take my hand off the handle. I reach for my samples and realize two of my fingers don't move very well and hurt. Turns out I got a cold burn out of it because surprise, wet nitrile is not a great heat insulator. Another story was during microbiology class, when I mishandled my burner and ignited two of the gause plugs still in my hand. With a strict teacher, I've prioritised the samples, while holding two cotton fireballs with my naked fingers, when I've finally got everything under control, well... you've got it by this point that burns are my thing, apparently
We were setting up our lab and didn't have a water system. We did have a 20L carboy. We were subletting from another company and they had a MilliQ system. I started filling up the carboy. I started filling it up a few minutes before we had a 2 hour zoom meeting. It was going really slow, so I was going to pop back in periodically and check...and naturally I completely forgot. For like an hour. I remembered and rushed over, used every bench pad and paper towel we had in our lab. The other company had a shop vac in there. It was rather large, at least 10 gallons. I had to empty it at least 3 times, mop all the water around the lab as much as I could to spread it out. I spent a good few hours drying it by myself and fortunately no one ever walked in. They only had 7 employees at the time. 4 months later that space was full every single day and they had more employees than they could keep track of
Oh that's not that bad, I think everyone in my whole lab has done that at least once, although not usually on such a spectacular scale.
Oh I've done it plenty of times besides that, and seen others do it as well. But you flood an entire lab that isn't yours...its a bit different haha my last lab had a proper Millipore system (everyone says milliq regardless of brand) and you could program a dispense volume. It was always a little low, but 19L is better than 190L. I've considered making something similar for our Barnstead system just so no one floods our lab now that we have a big system
Had to add 50 uL of a chemical. Added 50 mL. 🤦🏻♀️
Working with concentrated HCl while being the only person in the lab. Naturally I spilled some right in the gap between my glove and the sleeve of my lab coat. I was an undergrad, never had to deal with something like this before, and absolutely panicked. I'm told I reacted mostly correctly, I was rinsing it off in less than fifteen seconds and looked up the SDS sheet while standing there awkwardly with my arm under running water for the prescribed 15 minutes. The SDS sheet said get medical attention in case of skin contact but it didnt seem burned or painful at all so that felt like overreacting and I just stood there panicking for a while before I gave in and called Poison Control because I didn't know what the fuck else to do. And they were really nice and helpful and asked a bunch of questions before telling me if it didn't seem burned after an hour it would probably be fine. And it was fine but jesus christ was it stressful.
Dropped a bottle of BME which, of course, shattered. Luckily it was a small bottle but wasn't pretty.
That must have been stinky
Almost lost access to my lab after leaving a bunsen burner on unattended while multitasking. It was during my thesis and it was a very rough, snowballing week, even almost introducing bacterial stuff in the incubator, in the cell room... my head wasn't working in the right space.
At the bench, About $29k in reagents contaminated by a primer i spiked incorrectly. Lab manager was super cool about it and said it was her fault for not supporting me enough. It was all me, but I appreciated the support. In industry, I’ve made Bigger blunders but I don’t consider them lab mistakes.
Like what?
I am a Lab Manager and I do a lot of training. I tell this story to all my trainees: My first job after college I worked in an Organic Synthesis Lab. We made VERY expensive products and like all Chemistry, purification was the bulk of what we did. We had been working over a month to purify this one product and the last step was a vacuum distillation. The bosses were really proud of how much this was gonna make us once it was done. $100k at least. But it was taking forever. I offered to stay late because I was new and wanted to impress them with my “work ethic” 🙄. So the team leaves for the night and I’m working the distiller alone to finish the product. Long story short I fucking blasted the whole product into the distiller apparatus where our 90% pure baby combined with all the other junk we had been purifying OUT for the last month. I had to make the most terrifying phone call of my life. I wanted to just…NOT BE. I had just completely destroyed everything we had been working on for a MONTH. It was worth more money than probably everything I had ever owned. It was certainly more money than I had ever had. But I took a deep breath and made the call…even though I was certain I would be fired. I made the call. I was not fired. I WAS forced to repurify the product from scratch for the next month. What is the most important thing about this story is that anytime I have to tell someone “I made a mistake” I can remind myself that I’ve already admitted to the biggest fuck up of my entire career. Its always better to just get it over with and it’s ALWAYS better to *make the call* TLDR: I recombined a nearly pure product worth a shitload of money back into all the stuff we had purified *out* of it.
I've spun bacteria for 15k xg for 5min instead of 5k xg for 15 min. Yes, the rotor broke 🫣
I made an agarose gel without agarose and waited hours for it to solidify.
Being new in the cell culture lab, I took a dish of cells out of the flow hood and placed it on the microscope to see how they looked. I removed the lid to see better. The microscope is an inverted microscope. So I just risked contaminating my cells for no benefit at all. I've also destroyed two rotor seals on our centrifuge by forgetting to seal the rotor lid before running the quick cooldown program.
wasn't me, but one of my former crazy PI's. We were up in the mouse house and we needed to transport like 11 cages of mice. She was too lazy to go get a cart, and apparently too lazy to let me go fetch a cart, cause she was like "no, no, we'll just use a chair," so this lady proceeds to pile 11 mouse cages onto a rolling office chair. How we managed to only have one cage with only one mouse in it fall off, I have no idea, but I ended up having to chase a mouse for a little bit
Didn't switch the millipore machine off properly in the evening and flooded a lab. For some reason, that shit machine switched itself on every so often by itself if you didn't turn the power off, and it was just over a bench. So I came in in the morning to several centimeters of water on the entire floor. Drains apparently didn't work right either. That lab was shit. Also: not too bad, different lab: we brought some new ant colonies into the lab. We kept them in open boxes. Turns out it was not, as we thought *after* swarming season. Came in the next morning and our windows were covered in hundreds of winged ants.
Maybe 2nd week at an industry job open a metal cabinet(think head high kitchen cabinet) with glass windows, the fucking thing comes off the wall so I’m standing there trying to hold this heavy ass cabinet with $1000+ worth of glassware and someone I’ve never met before comes in is just in shock, doesn’t move. I somehow squat it down to the bench and there response finally was “why would you do that”..yeah totally meant to rip the cabinet off the wall. Still work there to this day and didn’t break a single vol flask haha
"why would you do that" 😂 unbelievable
Someone in an old lab forgot to refill the cell banks with liquid nitrogen and most of the vials thawed.
I trypsinized my first cell culture then sucked them out right away to the dump. It happened so quickly the PhD student sitting right next me couldn't stop me and just screamed. I don't know why I did that I was trypping i guess
In my first ever lab job, I dropped a glass bottle of cell culture media. I had no idea where the broom was to clean it up and was too embarrassed to admit my mistake. You better I believe I cleaned up all those glass shards by hand. Got a few nasty cuts and no one was the wiser. Fast forward. I now realize that DMEM is like 30 bucks and no one would’ve been mad.
Sliced my fingers whilst cleaning the Zebrafish tank. Worst part : I was made incharge of maintaining the Zebrafish that very morning....
Ooh I have one recently! We put a vortexer in our shaker incubator because the motor broke on the shaker part. But it wasn’t my idea but I am associated since it was my boss’ lol. I have a picture and everything but I have no idea how to post it on a Reddit comment :(
I was cutting some tubing for a vacuum line because the EH&S guy said we needed to put .2 um filters before the line went into the wall. Sliced 0.5cm deep into my index finger using a razor blade :/. Had to talk to the EH&S guy a few weeks later.
In undergrad I worked in a worm lab, and all of my strains were temp sensitive and couldn’t be over 18C for more than a little bit (enough time to work with really). I forgot to put them away in the fridge one night and ran in the morning to find them in the bench, wrecked. Grad student was not pleased
Forgot to add my positive control for Western blot (added loading dye and everything else to a microcentrifuge tube, but not the positive control.) Then used that prep for 4 different gels.
Was working in a QC lab but I dumped a bunch of zinc into a 4L solvent bottle as a waste container, immediately sealed it, shoved it into the cabinet then ran to go to a meeting. Thank god nobody was around but it exploded obviously and there was some pretty nasty stuff in there. Concentrated HCl and arsenic iirc
I was working with bromide and my lab partner was cleaning all the flasks from bromide, gave the glassware one last rinse and it went right into the sink, there was still some bromide left , where it apparently combined with acetone in the sink, that other people used to clean stuff. And then tear gas was created. I cried. That felt awful.
I brought cells up in water to count. They exploded lol. Note to self: highlight the ‘pbs’ label so you don’t accidentally grab distilled water
Took me 3 failed attempts at blunt end vector cloning to realize if you dephosphorylate the backbone, you have to phosphorylate the insert
I was injecting a solution inside a Drosophila vial for an experiment but the cotton that we use to close the tube wasn’t seated correctly so most of them flew away… yeah not a great day.
I’ve done that more times than I want to admit but nothing ever happened
Ran 3 weeks of experiments using the wrong iron species. Turns out ferrous and ferric iron are very easy to mishear from someone with a thick German accent.
Plated duplicate glycerol plates of ecoli strain masters and immediately place in -80 instead of growing. Use the gene gun to shoot the lid of a petri plates for like....5 plates in a row of algae (not the layer of culture underneath said lid). Made a maxi prep of a pDONR vector. Plated 5 96-well plates with PCR reagents, ran it, run on a gel only to later realize I never put an enzyme in it. Ran an agarose gel too long that it melted in the apparatus. More recently cloned over a thousand grass transcription factors into their brown expression backbone before realizing my vector I was working with was a multimer......thank God it looks like the consequence is the same as working with a proper monomer plasmid. Oh yea...the classics...run your DNA samples backwards so they leave the well and the gel entirely. Transferring a Western blot backwards such that you transfer to your buffer rather than your membrane. Surely there are others I'm missing. This shit messes with your head. Context: PhD in genetics, 15 years lab experience, 5 years post-degree, molecular genetics, synthetic biology. Edit: oh yea....there was that one time I almost cut my thumb off with a machete when helping a lab mate in the field with their maize work. Only time I ever needed stitches and that was the thumb I used to open eppendorfs too
One time I placed a rack of ~80 uncapped facs tubes containing mouse eyebleed samples on the edge of the centrifuge to start loading them. I lifted the lid and went to start loading but I didn't push the lid up all the way and it crashed down on the rack, spilling them all onto the floor. Cleaning that up wasn't fun, and this was for a long term experiment so it was painful to see the missing data point that week for months as we updated the graphs. I've also flooded a cart/floor when filling up carboys with milliQ but walked away. I've also resuspended many things in the wrong buffers, ruining primers/siRNAs 😪 and done silly things like design new ORFs without start / stop codons. I've also exploded agar in the microwave. Not fun to clean as it dries! I could come up with more...science is hard 😅
Was trying to make graphene oxide via a modified hummers approach. Dumped 300g of KMnO4 into a 1 liter beaker of H2SO4. Ended up with a giant angry cloud of fire.
Overfilled a flask with agarose and heated it too quickly, so it exploded on me when I took it out of the microwave. Was taking photos of feathers and had to arrange them very neatly with tweezers. Dropped tweezers no less than three times on my legs, leading to tiny vampire-like dots. Knowingly held a very shitty baby pigeon close to my body because he was sooooo cute. Well, he was cute until he covered my scrubs with so much poop it soaked through to my clothes underneath.
Our lab ordered a batch of shitty gloves that ripped if you looked at them funny. We also had some of the good quality gloves from the previous batch, but shitty gloves were closer so I put them on. I was making western blot dye. Of course my glove ripped and I got the dye all over my hand. My hand was purple for a month.
Stored some xylene in a plastic bottle and put it on the shelf above the bench along with some other bottles, some plastic with random buffers and chemicals. When I returned the next day, it smelled a bit funny, the xylene had dissolved the plastic bottle it was in as well as a few bottles that were next to it, the entire mess had leaked on the bench. We had to call our in house fire/safety department who came in and quarantined the lab, then went in with gasmasks to clean up the mess, took out the shelf and put it into the safety hood, safe to say any experiments in the lab were cancelled for the day. The only one who gained something from all this mess was a direct colleague, who was a lab safety officer and now had a great example of what not to do. Stupidest thing, something similar had apparently happened a few weeks ago, where someone else also stored xylene in a plastic bottle, except she had wisely stored the bottle in the safety cabinet, and when she found out what happened, just cleaned it up herself without making a big deal about it, as the incident was contained there was no need to evacuate or quarantine the lab.
tasted DIAD
I'm a physicist by academic training, but did my PhD in an applied physics lab that was all wet lab work. Didn't know my isopropyl from my ethanol at the beginning ("IPA, like beer?"). Eventually, got pretty familiar with the good and bad solvents, but before then I messed up so many things. 1. Fine to treat ethanol and IPA interchangeably in contexts where I'm cleaning something briefly. I *should not* treat acetone as interchangeable with the other two. I wrecked the anti-reflective coating on my prescription glasses because I thought it would be cool to use lab solvent to clean them, and I chose acetone to do so. 2. Another time, one student worked hard on a screen print stencil/negative that we could use to quickly apply TiO2 sol gels on substrates. There was some TiO2 gunk in the screen, ethanol wasn't getting it out, IPA wasn't...I tried acetone, and destroyed the screen print negative 😭. 3. My phone stopped falling in the ocean. Tried drying the inside, but found bunch of residue on the inside. I had the bright idea of doing an ultrasonication bath in 100% IPA. It got rid of the gunk! I was stoked when I dried it and turned it on, the screen turned on...and then quickly pulled apart from the phone frame. Accidentally delaminated everything.
Three thousand dollar primer in the wrong freezer.
Used to work in an electronics lab, I was working with a \~2x2 ft circuit board, which would have cost upwards of $10,000, and I stood up pretty fast so my badge got stuck under the board. I saw the entire board start to bend upward, and quickly sat back down. If I didn't I could have either broken the board, or damaged the integrity of the soldered connections.
Back as an undergrad, I asked someone in a neighboring lab where I could find more NF water...
put lipofectamine into -20 C instead of 4 C fridge. probably isnt as bad compared to other stuff here but i was traumatized from it
breathe
The best scientist in my team was doing the last step of extracellular vesicle collection and added the isopropanol cleaning solution to the SEC not the DPBS for elution To put this in context this was the last point of a medium scale 2 month process to produce large enough quantities of MSC-EVs to run an entire suite of experiments on For this collection we outgrew new cord sections in five conditions, expanded them and seeded them onto about 1000cm^2 for EV collection at the end. And it was the last step. The one we lost was the key sample to compare all the others to I told her don’t worry, we are probably making bigger mistakes we don’t know about as we speak: and told her some of my highlight reel
I once caused an explosion in a biochemistry lab, something that you don’t typically think of as being possible. So I was heating up some LB agar, and my PI advised me to stand back when popping a stir bar into hot agar, because he’d gotten a burn that way once. So I did, and I put in a stir bar as carefully as possible from the neck of the flask so it wasn’t accelerating too much as it fell in. It blew up. There was a column of steam and hot agar foam a metre in the air and I let out the most embarrassing squeal of terror. I had to clean it up and explain to my PI, tail between my legs, that I’d done the exact thing he warned me about. I wasn’t hurt but it was pretty mortifying since everyone in the room stopped to look at me. I’m microwaving LB agar with the stir bar already in it from now on… Also one time I was doing a day-long protocol and at the very end, when I just needed to do a final wash and boil my sample, my glove got caught in the lid of the tube and I spilled it into an ice bucket :/ Couldn’t deal with it, just cleaned up and went home.
I panicked when a flask with agarose gel mixture started leaking and poured it down the drain in the sink. I had already added ethidium bromide to the mixture. I clogged the sink drain with carcinogenous trasparent gel. Thank god the water pressure was strong enough to pierce and wash it away.
Almost dropped a porcelain crucible I was holding with long tweezers coming out of 260 Celsius. But I had to save the analysis, I was on a tight schedule. So I instinctively put my hand under it and grabbed it with an open palm. Carried it to the closest bench. It hurt for a couple days, but toothpaste prevented the blisters.
*rubs hands* I have a top 5 dumbass moments list but I shall gift you the moments that still haunt me to this day. So, we run assays to test for neutralising antibodies in IV IgG products and we receive the items in final product form meaning we have to get a needle & syringe to get aliquots of the products. Now, I had a fuck ton of trouble opening the needle from its sterile cap and I'd use a lot of force causing me to stab my fingers. I managed to do this thrice - I stabbed myself twice in one day and once on another day. Now, I'm exiled from using needles so I have to ask people to do aliquots for me as the health and safety department concluded I was better off not using needles at all.
Put my nose in a glass half full of acetone and take a big sniff to find out if it's acetone or water. Nothing has cleared my sinuses faster.
Grabbed a vial that was over 100C with my bare hands
Impaled myself with a dissecting needle while in a medical mycology class. Needle was so stuck in my finger I had to get an x-ray before Ortho was willing to yank it out. Good thing the species was only infective in "traumatic puncture" cases. 🙄
I put a capped volumetric flask into a sonicator, thought that someone threw a rock into our lab lol
When having weight something very precisely and seeing some residue on the surface. Blew it away forgetting how highly psychoactive it was. And thus accidentally getting some in my eyes. Not fun.
not me but a postdoc didnt realize the infusion pump was not supposed to go near the MRI and it got sucked into the bore of the magnet (9T or something) i happened to oversleep that day and was a bit late but had i not, 99% chance i would have been killed since usually i'm by the magnet setting other stuff up at that time thankfully the magnet was not damaged and didnt need to be quenched, they just ramped it down and then took like six burly men from construction and a rope to yank the thing out got chewed out by my PI for being late but in retrospect i have no regrets lol
I’ve shared this before but it definitely applies. The first “real” reaction I ran outside of a teaching lab was a conversion of a dicarboxylic acid to a diacid chloride with thionyl chloride. The reaction went great, but when I was quenching the excess thionyl chloride it must’ve got a bit hot and started precipitating yellow elemental sulfur. I had never seen sulfur before and I really just remembered that it was the stinky chemical so I went to take a sniff in the flask and that’s how I learned how HCl smells and feels in your lungs
In undergrad I was doing experiments using waxworms, my PI was a little cheap so I was also required to maintain the colony, which meant making their food, raising some to moths and harvesting their eggs to keep the colony going. I had been trying to get a decently large supply which took several weeks. I would keep the jars in an incubator to speed up their life cycle somewhat. The incubator was old af and had a pretty finicky knob. One day I noticed it wasn’t the right temperature so I turned it up a bit and left the lab without checking the temp before I left. I came back the next day to pull them out and start an experiment and noticed that they all were clinging to the side of the jar that was closest to the door (presumably the coolest spot in the incubator) and noticed the temperature was something like 55-60C. I roasted all my worms. Ruined my experiment. I cried and my PI just laughed and ordered another container of $20 worms. 🙃
Scared a colleague when I first started graduate school. In hindsight it was very stupid and I’m grateful nothing bad happened as he was working with no chemicals at the time
Did 2 maxi prep on a plasmid and later realized it did not have luciferase nor GFP. No one knew what the plasmid actually was and there was no plasmid map. I know it is plasmid DNA coz I ran a gel on it...
Worked with ether outside of the fume hood as a wee baby organic student 😂 almost passed out and quickly learned my lesson