• Question: Has an experiment that you've carried out ever gone horrifically wrong?

    Asked by Rachel to Alex, Laura, Lesley, Richard, vediacan on 22 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Laura Newton

      Laura Newton answered on 22 Jun 2015:


      Hey Rachel!

      Horrifically wrong as in I didn’t get any results: yes! Horrifically wrong as in my cells have got infected with fungus or I’ve spilt something and had to give up: yes! Horrifically wrong as in machines have randomly broken down: yes!

      But luckily I haven’t had any thing really dangerous happen due to what I was doing! In my chemistry lab, someone was doing a reaction that exploded and left brown sludge all over the fume hood which took them a good few hours to clean up but that’s about it. Safety measures are pretty good these days, luckily for us!

      Thanks for your question!
      Laura

    • Photo: Richard Prince

      Richard Prince answered on 22 Jun 2015:


      Hi Rachel,
      When I was a Ph.D. student I had to prepare some tissue for an experiment using a centrifuge. It rotates the samples round very fast, generating a kind of artificial gravity (about 20000x stronger than normal gravity though). This means that the sample gets separated into its component parts based on their density: the heavy stuff ends up at the bottom of the tube. One day I forgot to screw on the lid properly and started the machine. After it got up to about 5000 revolutions per minute, there was a loud bang. I had destroyed the machine (about £25000 cost!). When I opened the lid, a cloud of aluminium dust rose into the air from the bits that had broken. I didn’t get into any trouble though…. later that day the head of department dropped dead from a heart attack while he was fishing and everyone was too concerned about that to worry about my accident. I don’t think the two were connected….
      Best wishes
      Richard

    • Photo: Vedia Can

      Vedia Can answered on 22 Jun 2015:


      Hi Rachel,

      No not yet, and I hope it never does! 🙂 I’ve see other people’s experiment go horribly wrong and it has been scary to see (very life threatening situations)!

      Best Wishes,

      Vedia

    • Photo: Lesley Pearson

      Lesley Pearson answered on 23 Jun 2015:


      That depends on what you mean by ‘horrifically’. It’s pretty horrific to spend hours, even days on an experiment and get no result whatsoever!

      I did a research project when I was in university that required me to use PCR to generate a point mutation in a gene I was interested in, purify that, put it into a vector, then the vector into E Coli, grow that up, then extract the DNA from the bacteria and run a gel to confirm that my fragment was in there (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subcloning). The whole process took around a week or so. I repeated it 4 or 5 times and every single time, when I got to the end, my fragment was not there. I could have cried.

      If by horrific you mean explosive or dangerous, sadly not, my failures are usually quiet!

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