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!
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
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)!
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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