The most recent Ask A ScienceBlogger question is:
What’s the funniest lab accident you’ve ever had?
Those who know me can tell you I like to laugh, but I’m having trouble coming up with a lab accident that I’d call funny.
During my doctoral research in chemistry, lab accidents were anything but funny. The time the waste-trap didn’t work right? We had to call a HAZMAT team to clean it up. The time my glass reaction vessel went smashy-smashy? I had to hie myself to a glass-blowing shop with the detailed internal dimensions (which, luckily, I had measured and recorded mere weeks before) and hope like mad that they would be able to fabricate a replacement (plus a spare) sufficiently similar to the original that the experiment would work properly in it.
In my experience, lab accidents produce tears more often than laughter. Perhaps that’s because so much is riding on one’s ability to get the damn experiments to work.
Even in student labs, the accidents were not so funny. What about that time I was teaching organic lab, and two of my students just couldn’t get the melting points for their owns that they were supposed to, no matter how many times they tried or enlisted my help — and it turned out the stockroom had mixed up the labels on their two unknowns, thus giving me the wrong melting point information against which to check their measurements? All three of us found the wasted hours hilarious, because there’s nothing like being in a rush to get through the rest of the tests you need to do to identify your unknown and make a derivative.
The time one of my lab mates splattered sulfuric acid over a bunch of us? Holes in my one decent pair of blue jeans.
The time the girl in AP biology who devoted rather more attention to her appearance than the rest of us leaned into her alcohol lamp and singed her bangs? Smelly.
The only lab mishap I can recall that strikes me as even a little humorous, in one of those experiments on the power of amylase to hydrolyze starch, had to do with the isolation of a reagent. Amylase is found in saliva, so each of us had to fill a 10 mL graduated cylinder with spit. Gum was provided to help students who were not sufficiently drooly to obtain the required volume of spit. One of my lab mates chewed and chewed, and spat and spat, filling his graduated cylinder at a painfully slow pace.
Then, moments after it was filled, he turned and accidentally knocked it over with the corner of his lab notebook, spilling the precious saliva all over the lab bench. So he had to chew and spit some more.
That’s a little funny, but only because I have ample saliva.
Maybe chemistry lab accidents just don’t have as much humor potential as those in other scientific fields?
I agree. I did not answer this week because I cannot recall any accident that was funny – usually it produces at least a lot of tension in the lab.
I’m with you on this one… even if there are no really dire consequences, the negative impact of wasted time, effort, and damaged self-confidence generally overrides any potential humor-of-the-situation. Unfortunately some of my labmates (we’re all microbiology grad students) are not of the same opinion, and when somebody has a mishap they find it hilarious and you can hear the mocking laughter all the way to the lab next door. They say it’s ‘all in good fun’ but I’ve seen younger students go to pieces over this kind of thing.
I’ve got a good one. Of course a good laugh often involves booze and this is no exception although none was imbibed purposefully.
During a full scale experiment in the pilot winery lab someone was taking off a hose after a tank transfer but they undid the wrong clap and took off the valve instead. It was a tall 500 gallon tank and they and a very self-sacrificing friend got blasted with about 40 gallons of fermenting red wine before they got a cap on it.
That was funny to watch and not tragic because there was still plenty of wine in the tank. I laughed then and later had the privilege of making the same mistake with a 5,000 gallon tank at my first job.
Good times.
I agree as well, which is why I didn’t answer this Ask-a-ScienceBlogger question, either. I’ve had two accidents in my career that caused injury to me: When I was an undergraduate, I was accidentally splashed with Aqua Regia (fortunately it was only a couple of drops that ate through my lab coat and shirt and left two small drop-shaped burns on my upper arm), and when I was a fellow I fell and sliced my hand badly on a broken Erlenmeyer flask, requiring numerous stitches.
Neither were funny.
I had a funny lab accident just the other day. We have two trays we often use for quick, benchtop cold-temperature experiments by filling them with liquid nitrogen. Unbeknowest to me, one had several holes drilled in the bottom. I filled it up the other day, and I couldn’t figure out why my LN2 was boiling off at an incredible rate, and I kept hearing popping noises all around the bench in front of me. Turns out the low-viscosity liquid nitrogen was pouring out through these tiny holes as fast as I could pour it in, and then spreading out over the bench and freezing everything in sight. The usual cloudy haze of boil-off prevented me from seeing either the holes or the ever-widening “puddle” of nitrogen. Lucky for me I didn’t break anything.
I can’t believe people who spend as much time in the lab as scientists do, haven’t experienced amusing minor mishaps. When accidents aren’t tragic, expensive, or injurious, I’ve always tried to laugh at them. Grad school is long and miserable enough without losing your sense of humor!
Now, whether these incidents make humorous anecdotes for nonscientists is a different matter. . .
Maybe there were minor mishaps that were funny at the time, but it’s been more than a decade since I’ve spent serious time in the lab and try as I might, I can’t remember any.
I have been a TA in a CC microbiology lab for the last couple of years and have had few accidents except spills of liquid cultures of microbes, never a funny thing.
The strange and in the end funny one was a couple of weeks ago during the yogurt lab. A Pyrex beaker on an electric hotplate failed at the bottom and hot milk went everywhere. Of course the room smelled like burnt milk for the rest of the day and there was a big mess to clean up. The other group at the table who had help with clean up realized about a half hour later that their milk was getting colder. After they told me I soon realized that the spilling milk had tripped the GFIC and cut their power. We all got a chuckle out of that as well as being a half an hour late out of lab.
Well, here’s an unusual one. I accidentally let our lab mascot (a snake) escape down the lab sink. I frantically dismantled all the plumbing until I caught the very end of his tail, and held on. I was stuck that way, with my head and torso inside the wall, holding onto the snake, hollering for help. It was about fifteen minutes before another student finally wandered by (we had a BIG lab). He started laughing so hard, it took several more minutes to make him understand why exactly I had ripped out the plumbing and crawled inside the wall with my legs sticking out.
The snake was fine though – otherwise, it would not be funny. We successfully blocked his egress, and he eventually crawled up out of the sink in the next room over, none the worse for wear.
I remember a funny story that happened to one of the student lab assistants during a summer cleaning in one of the labs at my old high school…
It seems that someone had a rather large container of Butyric acid in the storage room, and one of the teachers told the assistant to dispose of the acid… Well they went out the front door of the school and dumped the entire bottle right next to the steps leading to the entrance…
I was told the smell was truly horrible and lasted for several months…
Dan
Isaac Asimov’s autobiography told the story of a colleague in one lab, who got promoted and thought he was hot stuff. He used to come back and visit his lower lifeform former associates wearing his expensive suit.
Apparently, one day he came buy, and while making idle chit-chat, picked up a flask of something and started swirling it.
Isaac told him, “Careful, that’s pretty caustic stuff!”
“Nonsense,” the snob replied. “A good chemist should be able to work in a tuxedo” – and immediately the stopper popped off and he sprayed all over his new suit.
Isaac said he regretted the fact that he was so doubled over with laughter, that others nearby who hadn’t heard the comment, had to grab the fellow and dunk him under the safety shower, ruining the rest of his suit.
I guess you had to be there…
Now that I think of it, there really aren’t many things that could happen to make a lab funny. You’ve ruined data, got to do something over, or spilled something dangerous over yourself, etc. That’s not to say labs can’t be fun and interesting, which I hope they are for you as much as they are for me.
I’m an electrical engineer undergrad and about the only funny thing you see in EE labs is exploding capacitors when someone hooks them up backwards. And it’s only funny because it’s relatively painless to replace a cap and the explosion is more startling than dangerous.
My personal non-amusing story came about when building my first power supply. I had attached the power cord, but hadn’t thrown the switch. I was searching around inside the box to make sure everything was hooked up correctly before turning it on. Aha, a ground wire wasn’t attached where it was supposed to be. So I pick it up and move it towards the back of the case where my grounding terminal is. Due to my inexperience, I hadn’t bothered insulating the power terminals like I should have and the ground wire brushed against the 120VAC coming into the box. The resulting current surge up through my ground plane blew out half of my electrolytic capacitors, blew UP (as in disintegrated, all that was left were the legs) half of my tantalum capacitors, shorted out 3 of my voltage regulators and split a 4th one in half.
Decidedly unfunny at the time since I had spent the last 8 hours soldering the thing together. The only real positive was the experience. Never again do I let a hot lead go uninsulated, even if I’m “just testing it out” and plan to “come back to it later”…
The first one that comes to mind is as follows. I was a senior grad student in an immunology lab that did a lot of tissue culture work. I was training a new student on passing adherent cells. This involves the use of trypsin, which we kept aliquoted in 15 ml centrifuge tubes. It was diluted in HBSS so it had the reddish color of phenol red. Next to the rack of trypsin tubes were tubes containing 2N HCl in clear water, which we used to adjust the pH of the culture media.
Enter the overly-eager and self-starting new grad student. I’d shown him once how to pass his cells and he felt he knew it well enough not to wait for me to watch him do it anymore. He reached into the fridge, grabbed a 15 ml cent tube and added about 2 ml to the flask of cells. And much to his dismay, all his cells were killed.
He complained to me that someone had sabotaged his cells (this became a recurrent theme with him). It wasn’t until I went over exactly what had happened that we figured out he had mistaken the HCl with the trypsin. His excuse was that I had not sufficiently explained that not all the solutions in 15 ml tubes were the same. He didn’t last too long in the lab.
I have a story which was not amusing at the time, but has grown more so with time. In high school, I used to work in a lab doing all kinds of DNA reactions, most of which required verification via electrophoresis. We’d mix up the buffer in big carboys and then dilute it out into 4L Erlenmeyer flasks. One time, I needed to pour a gel, so I picked up one of the flasks and promptly heard a large “clank”. The “clank” was the bottom ‘elbow’ of the flask banging against another flask, which caused the flask I was holding to develop a large hole. 4 liters of electrolytic buffer leaked out onto the table in about 1 second, covering it (and barely avoiding the power supplies) and my pants! Fortunately, nobody was there, so I cleaned up as best I could and finished the experiment. And then there was that time I got phenol in my eye. See why I don’t work in labs anymore?
I’ve got one for you. Though this didn’t occur in a formal lab per se, it was a part of a scientific experiment.
Dr. Michael Charney, a noted forensic pathologist, was called upon to determine if a pelvic bone recovered from a pile of ashes could have been those from a missing person in Colorado. It was known that this individual was very tall and so Dr. Charney was trying to get average pelvic bone measurements of very tall people to see if it could have been a match. He had already measured several members of the basketball team in town but needed more subjects to establish a reliable baseline. I was visiting my Aunt and Uncle’s family across the street from where he lived and since I was 21 years old, and six foot nine inches, he asked if he could include me in his research. I’ve always loved science and was happy to be a part of his study.
He came over to my Aunt’s home and proceeded to measure me, standing up, sitting down, waist height, hip height, and every other imaginable way. During the course of the measurements he had some of the most facinating stories of bodies found in all different states of decay and the information that he was able to obtain using many various methods. Dr. Charney is without a doubt one of the most interesting people you could ever talk to, but some of his stories you really have to have a strong stomach for, or have a strong interest in his subject. He was riding the edge for my stomach with a story about a woman who had been pulled from a resevoir after being under water for 3 weeks. I asked him if he had special tools for measuring these kinds of bodies that had to be specially sealed or disposed of after use. He said, “No! I use these!” All of a sudden I realized that the instruments in his stories were the very ones that had been touching my face, had been in my hair, etc. My poor Aunt almost went into a panic (and I wasn’t real happy either!). When Dr. Charney was finished and left, my Aunt handed me a bar of soap, set the shower up so I wouldn’t have to touch anything and told me not to come out until the soap was completely gone!
I still laugh when I recall this, but in hindsight, it was an honor to play a small part in furthering man’s understanding of this important field of science, and I sincerly hope I was of some help to Dr. Charney’s project.
I think in most cases lab accidents seem much funnier later. One I remember was when I was working as a Master’s student in a geochemistry lab. I had spent two days preparing a high concentration 20L solution of CaCO3 and was finishing it up late one Friday night. As I was setting the carboy holding the solution down the bottom broke away spilling all 20L onto the floor. The worst was that I couldn’t find a mop and had to clean it up using a broken dust pan and broom. Not a nice way to end the week.
The funniest thing that happened in a lab for me (chem 100) was when a bunsen burner was accidentally hooked up to a water line instead of the gas line.
Water flew everywhere as soon as it was turned on.
During a physics lab to check focal-length of glass lenses:
*crash*
Guy in class: “Uh, professor? I broke a lens.”
Professor: “Then pick up the pieces and slit your wrists with them.”
When I was a physics tech doing fusion research, we had a very large vacuum chamber that was pumped with liquid Helium. One night an internal water line froze and split, there was just enough spray coming out not to trip off the pumping system on loss of vacuum. The water sprayed all night into the chamber. The next morning the tank was half filled with snow. After the usual disaster recovery, we all took turns climbing in with our ski gear and having our photo taken. Alas, as the lowly tech, I got to shovel snow in California during a August heat wave.
Well, this is not a lab accident, but a hilarious intentional act: Put a little piece of dry ice in a 1.5 ml snap-cap Eppendorf plastic test tube. When the dry ice sublimates the pressure inside the tube increases until the cap blows open with a *loud* bang. When I was in grad school we used to sneak into other labs and silently roll these under the bench of an unwitting victim and wait for the hilarity to ensue.
In high school I was making a high power dye laser, and I had to make my own front-silvered mirrors for it, for which I made some concoction of a mercury compound. On a Friday I wasn’t able to finish, so I left it over the weekend, and then was sick on Monday.
That Monday, one of my classmates was assigned to clean up the lab and picked up the beaker which exploded. My chemistry teacher told me about it, explaining that the solution I had created had a tendency to convert into mercury fulminate if allowed to sit, and said that “Fortunately, the glass completely disintegrated and no one was hurt.”
Not really hah hah funny, but a lab accident nevertheless.
While I know lab accidents aren’t something to laugh at, I find lab stupidity something to laugh at, particularly my own. I excelled at chemistry, but despite my aptitude always managed shut down my common sense in lab (especially when cleaning up).
The first stupid story I have comes from second semester chem lab. We were making esters and at the end of the lab I was washing out my test tubes. Wanting to hurry up and get out of lab I had all my test tubes in my left hand (about 6) and my wash bottle (full of water) in my right. I was next to the waste chemical deposit and began to wash out my test tubes spraying water in each of them. Well, to my surprise my left hand quickly got really hot. After rapidly dumping all the test tube contents into the waste I remembered I had some sulfuric acid in two of the tubes. I didn’t drop anything but man was I surprised.
The second bout of lab stupidity was in orgo lab. Again an lab with esters (think we were making them and then distilling them). Anyhow, again I was cleaning up at the end and washing out my test tubes and cylinders. I always enjoyed the ester labs because of what I find to be their pleasant smells, so as I’m cleaning up I’m smelling the tubes as I’m dumping them out. Now I know the proper way is to waft the air towards you to smell it. My common sense had left me at this point and I was sticking my nose right in the tubes and taking little sniffs. So as I’m doing this I come to a graduated cylinder and take a little sniff before I dump it out. To my sup rise there is a little tingle when I sniffed it. To some this would raise a red flag, but not for me. So I stick my nose further in there and take a big sniff. The burning was instant and it painful. Yep, I had just taken a nice whiff of the 16M sulfuric acid. Quickly I tried to get some water and flush my nose out. The pain subsided rather quickly but I still wonder if I have some lingering damage (don’t think I’m smelling quite as well). I can only imagine the faces of those that might have saw me snorting water from my hand.
While stupid, I always enjoy telling these stories.
A story was told in my freshman chemistry lab 30 years ago of the previous year’s demonstration of the thermite reaction gone awry. Thermite is an exothermic reaction where powdered aluminum is oxidized when it burns with powdered iron oxide, giving off great amounts of heat, smoke, and molten iron.
Apparently both the ingredients of the reactions, and the initiating reagents used to start the reaction were used too liberally, and the reaction proceeded at a much faster and explosive rate than normal, spraying drops of molten iron on the ceiling and in the front rows of the lab. The molten iron dropped as a globule through the bucket of water placed under the crucible and burned on through through the top of the lab table.
Great excitement was had by all as the building was evacuated and fire trucks came!
High School blackface
In chem class we were generating oxygen by heating black powder in a test tube (Manganese oxide?) with a hose running from the rubber stopper and into an inverted bottle in water. The instructions were to heat the top of the powder using the burner. At another bench someone was heating the bottom of their test tube. As I watched, the oxygen suddenly pushed the slug of powder up until it blocked the hole in the stopper, and there was a loud pop and a black cloud.
And in the next team over, suddenly one of the guys faces was entirely pitch black, except for white rings around his eyes and lips.
Can I play anyway? When I was in the military, I worked in a machine shop. Well, when you get a bunch of 18-25 year old, slightly crazed, very bored folk together and hand them ground and powdered metals, hilarity ensues. My favorite story is of the guy who managed to ignite a small pile of metal shavings that was maybe 10% magnesium. His first response was to throw more metal shavings on the pile–unfortunately, those shavings were mostly magnesium, so that just fanned the flames. So the guy, who, come to think of it, must have been new to the job, did what any brand-new, clueless person would do: threw his cup of coffee on it.
You could hear the “whoosh!” of the flames from outside the shop; which was good since that meant that someone showed up with a fire extinguisher. Before the flames reached the ceiling.
And since I was across the room getting coffee at the time, and thus out of the blast zone, it was pretty darned funny. By the time the guy had a few drinks in him at the NCO club later, he thought it was pretty funny too.
After sticking an allen key into a live 240 circuit and getting thrown across the room, my boss asked me if I had melted or deformed the tool.
I was dumping out the rest of liquid nitrogen in a tank at the end of one of my undergrad semesters. It had been raining all day mind you, so my shoes were fairly wet. I ended up freezing my shoe quite stiffly and shattering it in the toes when it banged against a lab bench. That was a long walk home through icy puddles.
After being unable to get the lid off a vacuum dessicator, I switched the vacuum line over to the AIR line and turned it on. My brilliant idea was that the pressure would loosen the seal and I could lift it off. Instead the heavy glass lid shot about five feet into the air, hit the ceiling and crashed down on top of the dessicator, shattering both.
This was doubly embarrassing because I had gone into the lab while there was another class using the space; I was trying to be as quiet and unobtrusive as possible.
Oooh…I wanna play….
In my physical organic chemistry research group, a common reaction performed was the formation of a diazo carbene precursor by heating a tosylhydrazone. The bright red diazo compound sublimes as it is formed and is collected on a cold finger. You then rinse the diazo compound off the cold finger into a vacuum tube and evaporate the solvent.
A previous member of the group, apparently forgetting that diazo compounds are contact explosives, instead of rinsing off the diazo, tried to scrape it off with a spatula…poof! No injury or serious equipment damage, but this particular method was thereafter referred to as the “*student’s name* Stick Test for Diazo Compounds”.
One more: a fellow TA related a story from a lab he was teaching using spectrometers. A student broke a test tube and got shards of glass in the well of the spectrometer because he tried to force the rather obviously too large test tube into the spectrometer instead of the cuvette. The TA said that he was tempted to get one of those shape sorter toddler toys, give it to the student, and tell him that was his activity for the day…get all the shapes inside, and you can go home.
I now teach organic chemistry…I find that the most humorous moments come when I unrealistically expect that a novice student will just “know” the right way to do something, and they end up doing it incorrectly (in some hilarious way). Their creativity in this area is really boundless.
My company has just setup a non-commercial site for the unburdening of lab confessions. I enjoyed reading these and thought that your readers might enjoy the ones on the http://www.confessionsfromthelab.com website. Please feel free to add your own.
Here is an example from the site:
“I used a 4 liter glass flask to collect the waste from my DNA synthesizer. The flask overfilled and had liquid on the outside when I went to empty it. I made the mistake of setting the flask on the floor and it glued itself to the floor. I decided to get it off the floor by lightly tapping a wedge under the flask. Apparently three taps are required to invoke the flask cracking gods. The whole floor to my small lab filled with stinky DNA waste. I spent the rest of the day with Hazmat.”