31 of the Wildest Mistakes Made in Science Labs

‘When I first joined my lab, a grad student created a bomb’
31 of the Wildest Mistakes Made in Science Labs

Most levelheaded, non-scientist folks that find themselves in a lab probably tuck their arms in and move as little as possible, like someone trying to navigate the aisles of a particularly expensive vintage store. No one, save those who serve as plot devices in pandemic movies, are fucking around with mysterious beakers. We just assume everything is acid or a bottle of black plague and try not to breathe too deeply.

But if you’re one of the actual scientists who works there, you’re going to have to get your hands dirty, which involves some obvious, inherent risk. You’re well-trained in how to do so safely, of course, but a trained human is still a human, and humans make mistakes. Everybody messes up their job sometimes, but it’s a lot less stressful when you’re moving milk jugs at the grocery store and not corrosive acids. 

Over on Reddit, lab workers shared some of the biggest beef-ups they’ve ever seen at work, and the best are below.

chickenpotpiee a 10y ago a girl in my lab forgot to turn the blower on in the hood and inhaled a small amount of an e. coli toxin we were supposed to put in solution. didn't feel well, went to the ER, got pneumonia, then got an intestinal infection. her mom had to fly to the east cost from california to take care of her when she couldn't leave her apartment for two weeks. it's a month later and she still hasn't fully recovered.
solinaceae 10y ago I was an undergrad, getting some experience in a mosquito genetics lab. I heeded my copious amounts of safety and PPE training, and always made sure to wear pants, close- toed shoes, gloves, and goggles. However, contrary to what my professors had always told me, absolutely nobody else gave a shit about wearing PPE. After a decent while of being teased by my supervisors and fellow undergrads, I decided to cast off my previous training, and wear shorts and sandals. On that very day, we were moving some (glass) mosquito cages around the lab. The bottom fell
razor108 C 10y ago Ph.D. student didn't have any pipette bulbs so he sucked the chloroform into the pipette with his mouth... For months until someone saw it. edit: Another student was sitting for hours next to open bottles of chloroform, ethanol and other chemicals and was complaining about headaches.
NorthernSparrow IN 10y ago Edited 10y ago Grad student left a hot plate on, burned down his/her advisors' lab, entire floor of the building destroyed by smoke and water damage. Nobody killed but the advisor's rare collection of butterfly wings went up in. smoke - he'd been studying evolution of butterflies and had to abandon that. Took about a year to rebuild everything and get back on track. That was 20 years ago and I still have a big sign in the lab where people will see it when they leave: IS THE HOTPLATE OFF?
joskelb . 10y ago I spilled a load of 35% NaOH solution over myself. Burned right through my coat, overalls and pants. Quickly pulled down my pants, and ran half naked to the showers. The pain and humiliation... I've never been more angry with myself.
KirkLucKhan 10y ago a Edited 10y ago A (really dumb) postdoc in my previous lab placed an unrinsed bottle in the bleach bath to be picked up by the glassware folks. She didn't sink it; just left it floating. When the glassware guy got up there, he sank it to rinse/clean it. Too bad the bottle had a bit of HCI in there, and created chlorine gas when he sank it into the bleach water. A staff scientist found him passed out next to the sink. EDIT: because a couple people have asked, no, he didn't die. A visit to
 10y ago Boil copious amounts of acid in our NOT corrosion-resistant fume hood. People call it the crying fume hood because the walls inside are leaking acid and the bottom of it has this weird viscous liquid that never evaporates. | tend to keep that fume hood closed.
blackday44 . 10y ago Various stories from around the lab: Coworker accidently spilled a mercaptan in a hood. Being a shitty old building, the entire building filled up with the smell and had to be evacuated for the day.
Blitz7x . 10y ago An undergrad intern was autoclaving large glass containers and screwed the threaded tops in as tight as she could. Then she brought them downstairs and left them to cool in our lab. Luckily we were all out at lunch when the lab absolutely exploded in glass shards and death. We found shards wedged into the back of our lab chairs, notebooks, etc
pandodle 10y ago Previous Post Doc in my lab had a bad habit of touching/pushing hair away from her face whilst wearing gloves. She continued this habit whilst making her own poly acrylamide gels for protein seperation. Only figured out it was very bad when her hair started to fall out in a very specific spot on her head.
Applebiten 10y ago Edited 10y ago It was the second week of my PhD, so my supervisor was still hovering around, making sure I wasn't disastrous in the lab. I was making viral stocks, so I was growing up about 10 flasks of virus-saturated RK-13 cells. I'd taken a load out of the incubator and put them in the hood, when suddenly my supervisor says why is there media all over the floor? I check all the flasks lay down in the hood - no leaky lids, no puddles in the hood, but one flask has a huge crack on the front.
NuklearAngel 10y ago 3rd Year Chemistry student chucked a lump of sodium in the aqueous waste (chemicals dissolved in water that can't go down the sink) by mistake. Blew the container apart, and ignited at least one of the more flammable waste containers it was next to, which blew the fume cupboard apart and a hole in the wall. After that everyone in the university had to fill in a full COSHH assessment for every single lab, no matter what it involved.
cyclopspanda 10y ago I'm a lab manager, where do I begin? The worst one I have seen is when someone placed a vial of some HCI on a top shelf then threw a giant funnel up there as well, you know, for fun. Of course the funnel rolled around, hit the bottle of HCI and came crashing down on one of my co-workers. She handled it with grace, ran into the shower immediately and I got to go on a shopping trip and buy her some new clothes. Also saw some get hit in the eye with Trizol and mouse
 10y ago Edited 10y ago 1. Someone cleaned out a lab, found a jar filled with oil, in the oil was a big lump. The jar had no label. They took this and put it in the queue for the autoclave. Anyone with some chemistry knowledge is probably cringing right now. So yeah, the oil was there because the lump was reactive metal, best guess sodium. The autoclave heated the whole thing up to 121°C, and when the operator opened it, it exploded like a bomb in their face. They suffered terrible, terrible injuries. It is a terrible story,
AnthraxCat . 10y ago We had a grad student working with a relatively benign strain of Vibrio cholerae who didn't wear gloves, or wash her hands before eating lunch. She got cholera. The doctors were baffled. We're in northern Canada, so cholera is not a thing. If you ever see a map of cholera cases, that one red dot in the middle of Canada is our lab.
Fidilisk 10y ago We do a lot of fieldwork in my lab, all by SCUBA. I've had labmates lost at sea (we found them after a few hours), threatened by aggressive sharks, our boat almost capsized during a storm, couple broken bones and injuries. Once another boat almost dropped an anchor on my dive buddy, if it had hit him I wouldn't have known until it was too late. Science can be dangerous.
Deae Hekate 10y ago I set the table on fire. Finishing dissecting a human brain for the day and go through flame sterilizing every implement after soaking them in EtOH, one of the forceps had too much ethanol stuck in the gap and a flaming drop landed in a puddle of more ethanol. The entire table was covered in plastic for easy disposal (also biohazardous waste precautions) and went up in flames in an instant. Resorted to putting it out with a squirt bottle. No lasting damage, the specimen had already been put back into storage, but the entire lab
LostinWV 10y ago Not my lab, but a graduate student in an adjacent lab needed to sterilize cultures of anaerobic Clostridium. Rather than simply bleaching the culture and leaving it in the fume hood like you were supposed to they opted to autoclave the live culture. For those who don't know what anaerobic bacteria smell like, imagine smelling someone else's liquid shit thats been incubating in a hot, stale room for a couple days, that's about it. Bleaching a live culture and then leaving it in a fume hood essentially kills the culture slowly and then the fume hood exhausts
angrytrousers 10y ago Edited 10y ago | had a really thick suspension of a nasty mixture of bacteria (non-pathogenic but still gloopy and grim) in a syringe. The needle got blocked, and like an idiot I tried to push harder on the plunger and force it through. It exploded. Luckily I was working in a cabinet so my face was ok but everything in the cabinet got coated in this nasty shitmix of bacteria. It took me an hour and a half to clean everything, and even longer to sterilise the place. Nobody got hurt so it wasn't too bad
PlaysWithGenes 10y ago When I first joined my lab, a grad student created a bomb. It wasn't intentional, but he sealed a glass bottle of isopropyl alcohol he had just used with dry ice to flash freeze glycerol stocks. It exploded a soon as it came up to room temp, sending shrapnel through the lab breaking more bottles and embedding itself in the ceiling. Somehow it didn't hit a single person and that guy has his PhD.
Writtenfrommyphone . 10y ago Undergrad accidentally pricked himself with a syringe full of mouse breast cancers cells. Не was convinced he was going to die for weeks. Не lived.
my_rug_was_stolen 10y ago I'm an astronomer, so most of my work is done on my laptop either in my office at work or at home. My biggest screw up occurred one early morning when I was using a rather large radio telescope to observe a distant galaxy. However, looking at the data I noticed the galaxy just wasn't there. After a few frantic minutes I realized I had the telescope pointed WAAAAAAY off of the source and just wasted many precious hours of telescope time pointing at a blank sky. I'm still getting shit for that one.
SuppressiveFire . 10y ago Edited 10y ago | was a student assistant during an Organic Chemistry lab in college (not sure if this counts, but here it comes anyways). Here are a few I have: One of the labs was to distill pure alcohol from a couple hundred mL of Jack Daniel's whiskey. One of the kids in the class decided it would be a great idea to drink the final product. Не had to be rushed to the hospital and have his stomach pumped.
One girl (wasn't the brightest crayon in the box) was working with her lab partner (who barely spoke English) doing a lab that required quite a bit of acid, which needed to be heated. Any chemist knows that you add acid to the water and not water to the acid. These two didn't know this apparently. They had a beaker over an open flame, and they added the water to the acid. The mixture started boiling violently, exploded, and burned/cut both girls. I left the school shortly after that incident, but I was told later by the professor that one
scientist_tz 10y ago I was running attenuated Yersinia pestis (black plague) through a system designed to test its vulnerability to UV light. It was attenuated meaning the DNA that results in it causing disease had been removed. So I had a carboy of approximately 4 liters of buffer solution with the Y. pestis at a relatively high concentration and some caramel coloring to simulate the water being dirty and shielding the bacteria from the light. | start pumping the buffer through the system and in a freak defect one of the barbed hose clamps on one of the tubes (picture
Delphicdragon 10y ago I've got a few stories from my PhD.... We (myself, technician and postdoc) were doing multiple CT scans on mice. There was a leak in the anesthesia line going to our live animal microCT scanner and it was only after three hours of giggling uncontrollably about nothing and trying to figure out why we had splitting headaches that someone realized we were all high on isoflurane. Trying to stand up and go to fresh air was super complicated as the connections between our legs and brains seemed to malfunction.
primordialrain 10y ago We use ethanol to clean our cell culture room, one of the grad students was working on cleaning the racks in our incubator and ended up spraying me right in the eyes. like i know that were supposed to be good at biology but apparently physics is a whole different story.
Hombre_Sin_Nombre 10y ago 20 years ago, I dropped a 4 liter beaker. Instead of getting away from falling glassware as we are all trained to do, I tried to catch it. The beaker struck the bench and shattered just as my hand went through it. It shaved off the side of my right middle finger. Went to the ER, but there wasn't enough skin to stich...just had to leave it open and wrapped for weeks until the tissue scarred over. I've now got a large keloid scar on that finger, which always reminds me to be more careful. I'm now
hutima is 10y ago Edited 10y ago I spilled 48% Hydroflouric acid over an ероху fume food. It fumed and my head was in the fume hood at the time and I could smell the off gassing. Freaked me out though I wasn't in the hood long enough to have any effects. The list of symptoms from HF exposure is scary and long and may take up to 24 hours to manifest so I was freaking outfit a whole day.
SleepDeprivedPuppy 10y ago Working with antibiotic resistant, bioluminescent Е. Coli (we inserted the bioluminescence gene from jellyfish into E. Coli). One student jokingly offered another student $20 to lick the petri dish. Everyone thought he was kidding. Nope. The kid licked the plate, collected his $20, and was then out of class for a week with glow in the dark diarrhea.
ThreadNinjah . 1 10y ago I wasn't actually present for this particular occurrence, but apparently someone left a hydrogen tank open. Somehow a flame became involved, and the thick brick wall separating our lab from the hallway was blown clean through.

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