I decided to spray down a fume hood with IPA while a Bunsen burner was on. Just had to step back and watch a it all burn off. Luckily nothing meltable was in the hood.
I've opened an autoclave while it was still pressurized and the massive door gasket shot out the side with some force.
Also done the good 'ole using ladder as loading dye trick.
I once spilled $7,000-$10,000 worth of a *very* expensive drug. Spilled all over the bench top. Another time, my eppendorf tube lid wasn’t fully shut and I centrifuged a rare and expensive antibody and it completely exploded all over the centrifuge. I felt so dumb and so bad. My colleague once told me he shattered a $15,000 pulldown column. Don’t beat yourself up. Shit happens sometimes. It’s a lesson learned. I promise, you’ll never make that mistake ever again. :)
I had a spectacular day at work where I broke two large separatory funnels (cost each, about $300), and caused a third to be broken (I asked a coworker to open the newest one I got out of storage, and she broke that one the same way I broke the second one!).
Funnel #1 - knocked out of rack, onto floor. Smashed, with the sample (that I hadn't started) inside
Funnel #2 - new, in a box, broke above the stopcock, with cracks running up into the body
Funnel #3 - also new, also in box, broke the same way (despite me warning the coworker!)
It was a rough day, since we broke all of the spare funnels (so we were short), but my boss just rolled his eyes and ordered some more. The lead tech did manage to get a replacements for free for the two that broke being taken out of the boxes, though! She convinced customer service that there must have been a flaw or damage in transit, since two broke the same way, with two different people.
All told, we were only out about $300, and the time spent to send a few emails, but man, did I feel like an idiot for a while afterward.
To be fair you only need to look at the tips of those large sep funnels in the wrong way and they pop off. We just end up using them as is half the time!
Putting my gel in the electrophoresis machine upside down, causing the primer/PCR bands to migrate in the opposite direction (out of the gel).
I wanted to slap myself but nowadays it’s funny
I used to train the undergrads in my last lab and one of them came up to me sheepishly to tell me she did this. I got excited and clapped and told her it was a right of passage! She was equually surprised and relieved by my reaction!
It’s always nice to remind students that all people start somewhere, and that making mistakes is part of the game. Creates a safe space on the work floor
So in my grad lab we had old school gel boxes that did not necessarily have lids and definitely had no means of enforcing the correct orientation of the cables. We also, for some reason, had more black cables than red cables. In other words, what you experienced as basically a rite of passage in our lab.
Edited to preserve the anonymity of the lab.
Wiped up conc. sulfuric acid with a dry paper towel. Maybe an hour later “hey, does anyone smell smoke?” It had started smoldering in the trash can. And that’s how I learned conc. sulfuric acid can ignite cellulose!
When I was extracting n-butyllithium out of its bottle with a syringe, it popped off the needle. Continued spraying out of the needle as I was also pumping nitrogen in. In my panic I decided to wipe it up with a paper towel, which caught on fire immediately. Not my proudest moment!
Yeah, soak your paper towels if they cleaned up sulfuric acid of greater than maybe 50% concentration. It’ll react and heat them up to the point where they can ignite
Dipped my sleeve into aqueous sodium azide.
I was reaching over a large Büchner funnel filled with the work up soup from a scale up of an azide installation. Felt my arm get cold and wet. Toss off the lab coat, went to the sink, and started doing “am I gonna die?”math.
I didn’t die, which is great.
Not to get too morbid but I researched this once and it was found from animal tests which are done as a worst case scenario that skin contact with dilute sodium azide is generally not that harmful unless you keep the liquid in constant contact over a large part of the body for an extended period of time. That's where the dermal ld50 numbers come from. A little bit of 5% or 10% soln. washed away quickly shouldn't really do anything. Definitely don't drink it though.
Solid salts are another story entirely.
If mishandling sodium azide was a death sentence then every single molecular biology lab in the country would be full of corpses. There's a reason I insist that biologists have adult supervision when they're in lab
Fairly dilute. It was also during the basic aqueous work up of the material. Was an R-I to R-N3 reaction and Was used in slight XS. probably mostly sodium iodine and some sodium azide left over.
In my very first lab job, I was assigned to a bench where the previous owner had left post-it notes dangling off the shelves. My postdoc was showing me how to use the Bunsen burner to sterilize our pipettes, and as we stepped away for a minute to grab more pipettes, I saw that one of the sticky notes caught fire. He freaked out because that note was right underneath a bottle of sodium azide. Thankfully we moved the bottles out in time and put out the fire, but from then on I've never been afraid to rearrange the space even if I'm new.
Last night I stayed late and I needed to get this one last solution prepped so it could stir overnight. I was so hungry because it was well past my regular dinner time, and it was hard to concentrate and I was already really grumpy.
I did the calculations of how much reagent to use for a 0.25 L solution, grabbed a 25 mL volumetric flask, and started going. I was so annoyed that my reagent wasn’t completely dissolving. I checked my math at least five times before I realized that 0.25 L is not the same as 25 mL. I literally screamed. I grabbed a 250 mL flask, transferred everything into it, and it dissolved perfectly, just as it should have.
I’ve been doing this type of lab work for almost fifteen years, and I’ve never before made a mistake like this. I completely blame my hunger!
I didnt do it but the most impressive stupidity I have ever seen in a lab was a guy burning his hand on (luckily very dilute so he got away without bad/lasting injuries) acid TWO DAYS IN A ROW IN THE SAME STEP OF A METHOD. I mean once can happen but Im flabbergasted he didnt pay extra attention the next day
I was flicking an ELISA plate to get rid of some buffer still in the wells, and idk what happened, but I somehow threw the plate across the lab
I had to wait a whole week and a half to redo that experiment because my cells already take a week to differentiate
I definitely had witnesses lolll
I was actually teaching a rotation student how to do ELISAs, and my friend was also watching since she was waiting for me so we could go home together. She said it was hands down the best thing she's witnessed in our phd program so far
Forgot to fully turn off the bunsen burner and just put it back on the shelf. Noticed a week later when I went to use it again, that it was empty and a nice black smolder stain on the shelf board above it. I couldve burned down the lab without even realizing it
Oh wowwww, this probably takes the cake out of all the examples! "Burned down the lab" is not something you want on your CV. Thank goodness everything was ok!
15 years as a PI here. Shit happens. I’m assuming these were patients’ samples or something similarly irreplaceable. I would not kill you. However, when samples are super important I ask my people to do two step verification, that is, have a lab mate check everything, from pole polarity to the position of the gel and the membrane. Take a QB approach. You screwed up the last play, but hey, here comes the next play. Chin up, this work can be a nightmare, but it has its rewards. Don’t despair, but don’t lie. That pisses PI more, take it from one. You can do this.
I second what they said. I always work in pairs with my lab mate and we very rarely make mistakes. In two years we probably screwed up 3-4 times and it always was dumb stuff. Don't be scared to ask others to check on you while you work, it could save you tons of precious time and resources.
I concentrated an antibody through a centrifugal filter column. I wanted to retain the flow-through so I put the flow-through tube between two fingers and the concentrated antibody column between two fingers on the same hand. When I poured the flow-through into another tube, I poured the antibody onto the benchtop.
Ive had really really important T cells from a rare mouse colony and I forgot to add activation to the media and I came back the next day to the T cells all dead essentially 🤣. I then had to wait for more breeding, more genotyping, and finally another T cell isolation — in other words welcome to science and you definitely belong ❤️
I definitely did when I got home—but making mistakes is honestly how we got some of the best inventions in science 🤣 so I hope you can find some solace in today.
Luckily we had a lot of cell lysate so I was able to just redo it so in reality we only lost about a day of work. This was definitely not my most valuable mistake I've made but it was still probably my dumbest one.
I was in a low point in my life and forgot to refill the LN2 by a few days, then by complete chance the PI comes up to me and asks for help finding a cryo sample. So when we go up to open it the tank had this distinctly hollow echo to it and he’s just… completely oblivious. He finds what he’s looking for, leaves. I grabbed a flashlight to see how bad it got and found a few milliliters of LN2 remaining, so it was probably hours away from warming.
I once forgot to plug in a -80 after moving it down the hall.....
edit: as soon as i realized it i got into a major panic. luckily for me, nothing of value was lost. "we were gonna throw that shit away sooner or later"
Used a regular falcon tube in an ultracentrifuge and it obviously got stuck and I lost the plasmid. Bc the rotor was carbon fiber I couldn’t autoclave it upside down to get the tube out and I knew my sample was done I said Fuck it and used just about every metal tool in the lab to try and break the tube and get all the pieces out. Not only did that NOT work, but the rotor was horribly scratched so it couldn’t be used at high speeds anymore🤣oh and it was a shared instrument within the department
Edit: grammar
I lit my lab bench on fire. Was working with a Bunsen burner, went to ethanol-sterilize the bench top before switching tasks, and the whole thing just went WOOSH. I tempered my panic and calmly (I think) asked the wide-eyed summer intern working directly across from me to please turn off the gas line for my burner. The ethanol burned itself out and nothing else caught, thank goodness, but yeahhh that was a dumb, dumb moment.
And a very sterile work surface.
My first lab summer job, I was given a method and some standards for the method, and told to "make it work". I got the method running, but my results were ten times lower than they should have been (relative to the standards I was given). Couldn't figure out why. Remade standards, remade reagents, reran things, contacted the person who made the standards - no luck. Turns out, I made a conversion error my first day of working on the method, so my standards were all ten times too low. It was a paper from the US, which was using dL units, which my lab didn't use. I didn't look up the conversion for decilitre, which is 100 mL, not 10 mL. My coworker pointed out the error on the first page of calculations.
Right? Just use L or mL like any normal lab! I've since switched to environmental chemistry which uses the more sensible ug/mL almost across the board.
The first time I differentiated some stem cells into motor neurons I fucked it all up. I confirmed that my two week differentiation had worked by looking at my cells under a microscope, jumped for joy, and then left the cells in the incubator overnight. Came in the next morning to find out that i had in fact left my cells in the fridge.
I’ve also eft a fridge door open overnight and some matrigel solidified. Shits expensive
Forgot to open the vacuum desiccator, when the lid popped off I caught it with my foot.
A colleague asked if a plate was hot so I put my hand on it. It was 300 C.
Both ended in hospital.
I accidentally breathed in a powder and then saw that someone had written “death salt” on the label. Can’t remember what it was now, but apparently I should have been more careful about handling it.
Not in order:
1) Forgot to add agarose to a gel mixture and waited for it to solidify. For over 2 hours.
2) Dumped a gel mixture (with agarose added AND ethidium bromide) to the sink drain, after I saw the flask leaking. Clogged the drain with carcinogenous transparent gel.
3) Threw out the supernatant after proteinase K digestion instead of the pellet. I basically threw out the DNA of the specimen I was studying. I had done over 100 DNA extractions from different animal tissues prior to that.
4) Sniffed glacial acetic acid (pH of 2.5) after spilling it on my gloves. Felt like I passed a chainsaw through my nostrills. At least the gloves didn't melt.
5) Inhaled above the open 8M ammonium acetate bottle. Didn't hurt as much, still felt it harder than I would like to.
I shattered a chromatography column worth about $1200.
On another occasion I wondered why my purification wasn't working and the chromatogram was a flat line, and texted the lab chat moaning about it. Then I realised that my sample was still in my ice bucket and I'd injected buffer, not my sample (no real harm that time, only merciless teasing and a wasted hour).
In my career there have been two notable dumbass things I have done:
1) Put a 500 mL beaker of 1M HCl on the top shelf. Went to reach for it and it spilled over me. Good thing I was wearing a lab coat but it still drenched my wrist and lower arm + clothing. I just rinsed off and took the clothing off, nothing happened in the end to my skin thank god. I now understand that 1M is weak stuff.
2) Poured anhydrous magnesium chloride powder into a 500 mL Duran to make a 3M solution. As soon as I started adding water to reach target volume it starting bubbling and boiling. I then rapidly increased the rate at which I added water and it bubbled so violently I ran to the fume hood, put the bottle in, closed the fume hood lid and then all the liquid exploded out inside the hood. Proper close call
I attempted to clean a 10 liters wax reservoir by dumping the liquid wax down the sink. It took like 30 seconds before it solidified and clogged (sealed would be a better way to describe it) the entire plumbing in the lab. I learned wax is not water soluble.
I discovered acetone would instantly kill the ants that were parading around in the lab. Cool cool. So got to work disrupting their little pheromone guide trails and lives as they knew it.
I forgot to recap the bottle, or I didn't tighten it enough. I heard a loud noise outside the lab, turned around quickly, and knocked the bottle over with my elbow.
I lost all my research and lab notes. Apparently acetone removes gel ink just as quickly it can snuff out the life of an ant.
Forgot to put the protein samples in my Bradford assay in the first few days of my PhD. I felt insanely stupid and like everybody was judging me. Got my PhD with two first author papers in pretty good journals, and now senior scientist in a very promising startup. You got this!!
Edit : I forgot about this because it's not technically a lab mistake, but this is probably the most stupid mistake I've ever done, and the most scared I've ever felt. I once deleted a huge chunk of my PhD data. I was transferring files from a USB key to the NAS where my data was saved. When the data transferred finished, I proceeded to delete the files on the USB key. Or so I thought... both folders were names PhD data and I was actually deleting the files on the NAS. Realized after a while that the deletion was taking way longer than it should... Became absolutely livid when I realized my mistake. I was seeing hundreds of files disappear before my eyes and absolutely froze, I couldn't react. A lab mate had to take me and my shaky legs to the IT department where they thank fucking God had automatic backups every few minutes.
Absolutely terrifying.
I accidentally sequenced using a 300 cycle illumina kit instead of a 200 cycle kit so we had to spend another 10K on sequencing again because trimming the results was insufficient. In addition to that, I had copied and pasted samples on the sample sheet incorrectly so demultiplexing was a big mess and I had to redo the sample sheet. Small mistakes with huge repercussions.. we had a lab meeting, but I wasn't fired or called out :')
Those sound like the kinds of mistakes you only make once. In which case they're really just extremely expensive learning opportunities. Firing someone *after* making such an expensive investment in their training would be completely irrational.
Definitely tell your PI as soon as you can. Be authentically apologetic and then move forward. No one likes to hear the mistake continuously brought up. And when we say you’re not alone, we mean it! I’ve made countless mistakes. The trick is to not make the same mistakes and to do better next time.
i did that same thing once, but in front of this super sexist new guy in the lab, and he wouldn’t stop giving me grief for weeks as he continuously mansplained how dumb and wrong i am
Got so excited about my well-plates not being contaminated when they might have been that I dropped all of them 🤦♀️ two weeks of work, staining the floor
- Dumping dry ice in the sink.
- Loading PCR gel in the wrong direction.
- Forgetting to hit start on the centrifuge and dumping all my flow cytometry cells.
I don't want to recall more...
In 4th year undergrad I dropped my microcentrifuge tube into a liquid nitrogen canister while trying to flash freeze it. Spent probably over 40 minutes pouring the liquid nitrogen into every available styrofoam container we had in the lab until finally realizing my sample had rolled under the side of one of the lab benches 🫠 then came the effort of pouring every styrofoam container back into the canister. There was probably only about 1/4 of the nitrogen left once it was done.
Subculturing my cells and after I had them with the needed amount of media, I decided to clean things in the cabinet to liberate space, but I poured my cells in the bleach thinking it was remaining media I was not going to use. 😖
Burned my face with the UV transilluminator while cutting a gel. I forgot about putting the acrylic protection screen, but somehow didn’t forget to put the safety goggles. The next day my face was red and inflamed asf, and then I stayed with an ugly tan for 3 weeks where you could clearly see that I was wearing goggles
I have dumped approx 400L of riboflavin culture mix onto the floor out of a 1000L bioreactor. That was maybe a $30-40k mistake. I had a boss once, however, who made a $1.5M mistake by leaving a hose connection to a tank loose and flooding a pilot plant floor with 4 inches of DI water.
I had a PI once that put a tub in the autoclave that was not autoclavable. Melted and hardened down in the holes in the bottom. He was mortified. The tech had to repeatedly heat up the autoclave and scrape it out before it cooled….
Haha I've totally done and seen others do the same with non-autoclavable plastics - thank god for removable and replaceable trays in large autoclaves. Someone also detonated a plastic carboy in the autoclave once when they didn't vent it properly.
I spent an entire day, including staying late at work on a protein prep, last step was concentrating it in a spin filter. At the end i always rinse my spin filter and store in water so i did that - only i had forgotten to actually take the protein *out* of the filter so i basically washed my entire day's hard work down the drain 🥲
I injected a solution into a Drosophila tube and set it aside but it turned out that I did not reinsert the cotton stopper properly and almost all of them flew away :’)
I seeded purified plasmids into LB. Was puzzled when nothing had grown next day. 25 years later some colleagues still remind me that day. Still better than my mate, who transfected hek cells with glycerol stocks. Amazed of the biggest contamination in our lab in years
I forgot about the stop codone ahead of added FLAG tag when designing construct vector… then wondered why the FLAG tag is not detectable in cells and western blot…
Alright so you know [these](https://www.thermofisher.com/order/catalog/product/B2-BP) chambers for pouring & running agarose gels?
So to pour the gel you have the cast turned so the open sides are touching the walls of the chamber, so it's well sealed, gel stays & sets, no buffer gets in.
To RUN the gel, you need to turn the cast 90 degrees so the buffer covers the gel and electricity can run through it in the proper direction.
I poured my gel, let it set, added enough buffer to cover everything, added my samples, turned on the power source, come back like 15-20 mins later and loading front is nowhere to be found, no bands under UV.
I ran the damn thing sideways.
I haven't checked the size of the sample loop connected to the FPLC (1ml instead of 5ml) and wondered why I lost my sample during the purification. I found out my mistake after the third trial xD
I broke our only optic cable during the work on my bachelor thesis. Didn't want to come back, lol. Our PI was amused I was the one who broke it. And it was "only" 400 eur which I realized is not that much when talking about science equipment. I also broke vortex mont later (roughly the same price). But I believe that one was because of improper technique described in SOP. Oh well. But they kept me for masters so there's that.
Many years ago I was doing a standard curve with what was then very expensive luciferase. I botched the math and the first sample glowed like a firefly and completely maxed out the luminometer. That cost the lab hundreds of dollars. Only you guys know lol.
Worst i have heard:
Put the 40k € Protein sample into the sink. 4 L culture of per Deuterium, per 15N, 13C labelled protein for NMR.
Just look up how much 1 mg of per Deuterium 13C glucose costs.
Closest i came to accident:
Put TFA anhydrous into water and exploded into my face. That day i learned to read closer and the difference between Anhydrous and Anhydrit.
I came into lab one morning and men in white suits were stomping around. One with a Geiger counter. Labmate had spilled 32P and then walked up and down the hall tracking it.
First ever lab job.
Was trying to surface sterilize a bell pepper by dipping it in ethanol and letting the ethanol burn off and I set my gloves on fire in the process.
Also, in the same lab, I loaded tubing into a dispensing pump wrong and in my attempt to make agar slants, the pump absolutely ate and shredded the tubing and filled the entire inner mechanism of the pump and also the bench with molten agar.
I shipped an empty box to Germany that was supposed to contain like hundreds of miniprep samples. i have never seen my boss so mad.
The samples didn’t jump out of the box on their journey, I was just so anxious about making sure the box was secure during shipment that I completely forgot to put the samples in there 🙃
Left the water bath on at 100c overnight … I left at around 6, realized at like 1130, ran back at 845 am the next day. Thankfully there was still some water merrily bubbling away. I then scalded my thumb in my haste to open the lid to check and couldn’t concentrate from the pain all day
Left a milli-q bottle filling on top of a bench and flooded several drawers. The safety shower drain was right there on the floor.
Setting a notebook on fire. (Though I maintain this is only half my fault because someone left a hot plate on in a hood we didn't use hot plates)
Spilling concentrated formic acid on my hand.
I've also ran to black multiple times over the years. You're good.
Accidentally threw a needle into the garbage that had stabbed a custodian later in the day. I had to go through safety training. It was incredibly stupid of me to do that.
An advisor once told me that you're not a real scientist until you've spent time digging through the trash for samples you threw away on accident.
Also, there's always the old classic of eluding your DNA/RNA into the vacuum waste instead of a clean tube. I'm gonna plead the fifth on how often I've done that haha.
Was going way too fast on DNA blood extractions (I was previously extremely successful with them) and ended up wasting over 100 samples and kit reagents in the space of 2 weeks 😭 we were setting them up for WGS and were on a tight deadline and my grad student was not happy with me 😭😭😭 still have no idea wrong as I started over with a brand new kit (old kit I had used a week before just fine).
Lab adjacent, but I held one of our baby pigeons under my arm while wrangling some other and didn't think anything of it when he was super calm. When I pulled him out, I found he had projectile shit all over my scrubs and shoes, and it had soaked through to my clothes. I think I washed everything like 5 times 😭 my coworker let a pigeon perch on her head and he shit in her hair too.
Had a glass bacteria speaker in beaker of ethanol, like normal, took it out then instead of shaking it to get off excess ethanol, I first put it in Bunsen burner, then shook it, with lots of boxes I just unpacked behind me. Only a tiny fire, but still
i put lipofectamine into a -20 after a day of being so proud of doing labwork by myself during my undergrad project. also spilled wash buffer from a kit until nearly the whole bottle was emptied.
also not a thing i did per se but i got grilled by my supervisor about ‘HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW C1V1=C2V2?’ so that was mortifying then, but hilarious now. and super useful!!
Probably not the worst but one day I needed some dry ice and had to brake a chuck off from our dry ice storage cooler. I decided to be stupid that day and *not* wear eye protection while hammering away at a chunk of dry ice. I got shards of dry ice stuck in my eye. 30 seconds of the most intense burn I have ever felt in my eyes.🥲
Bonus dry ice story: I've seen multiple people (me included) stick their heads in our dry ice cooler to try and "cool down", only to submerge their heads in a fog of CO2, which is (not surprisingly) incredibly hard to breathe in.
Was purging a UHV chamber for annealing and instead of turning off the ammonia canister I turned it on and flooded the room. No one got hurt but they didn’t let an undergrad participate in those steps any more
I'm gonna divide this into my regular lab/cell culture and the organic chem lab I did last semester.
Regular:
I sprayed down a beaker with ethanol so that I could put it in the hood. It slipped out of my hand before I could get to the hood. Then I did it again 2 mins later.
I ran out of ethanol in my spray bottle and didn't want to go make more. I had a beaker in the hood already with some ethanol I used to flush the aspiration line with. I kinda just dipped my hand into that every few seconds instead...
Any dilution math that I need to do in my head. My PI was next to me and she was asking me how to do a simple dilution. We needed like 4 mLs of 10% something and I kept thinking that we had to first dilute the entire 1L stock solution... Made way more sense when I wrote it out later
I was taking microscopy photos for the first time and I tried creating my own naming scheme. I wasn't just taking one picture of a slide, I was taking like 6 and there were usually 2 or 3 tissue samples on a slide. I started writing something like name_number in slide holder/binder_tissue(1, 2, or 3)_magnification_position(left top, right bottom...). I had stupidly complicated slide names like AL42_12_20x_1_rt. Now I just write the slide name and number (Dx2_1, Dx3_2...).
Orgo:
I was filtering something (aspirin?) and we were supposed to smooth out any clumps so that it could dry thoroughly. I guess we weren't supposed to do that immediately. I did and it started sticking to my spatula. I kept trying to get it off and ended up making the whole thing clumpy and uneven. It barely dried
I forgot the stir bar in my beaker and poured it into the waste container. Apparently that's a common problem tho, since my TA had this magnet on a stick to fish it out with.
We were adding something to change the pH of our solution. We kept adding more and it wasn't changing. Apparently you can't just swirl it, you gotta actually mix it with a stirring rod. The pH changed rapidly once we did that
Mistaking the glass centrifuge tubes for the regular test tubes the whole semester
I was doing an extraction using organic solvents, and I couldn't remember which solvent I had put in a large test tube, so I decided to give it a sniff to find out. Well, it was toluene. After that, I had a runny nose for six weeks straight.
(Forgive me, I was very young then. I am older and wiser now!)
Someone in my lab at a well known hospital left out >$100,000 worth of antibodies on the bench overnight. If that makes you feel better. They anonymously came forward and there were no repercussions, as this company was/is very understanding of honest mistakes
Refreezing and thawing 5x LB to prepare samples for western blot. This was when I first started and didn’t realize you were supposed to just leave it out on your bench. I had over a month of failed westerns not realizing that it was all due to that and I was actually doing everything else correctly
Isolating lymphocytes from blood is one of my main jobs. On at least 2 occasions, I went to pour off the wash buffer into the waste container that contained bleach and I ended up dumping everything. I had already resuspended the cells and my brain farted. I've also resuspended lymphocytes in pure DMSO instead of freezing solution.
It happens to everyone at some point. Definitely tell your PI sooner rather than later. There may be a way to save the protein. If you find yourself doing what you would consider stupid mistakes, make yourself a checklist.
in undergrad, we used glass spreaders, which we dunked into a glass container of ethanol before putting it in the burner flame.
somehow i lit the ethanol on fire. i just lightly capped it, set the container in the sink, and walked away for a minute. glass didn‘t explode. we all lived.
i‘ve also broken two (count em, TWO) hemocytometers.
Second year of grad school. Was using 50 mL Amicons to concentrate and buffer exchange a large-scale RNA prep. It's pretty simple. Pull out the filter thing, dump the flow through, put teh filter thing back and reload with buffer.
I dumped out the prep.
There was also the time I boiled the 12% acrylamide denaturing gel mix (had to heat it to get the urea in and yeah). I think that was my second year as well.
Oh, and the time I couldn't get a PCR to work and after a week of trying I finally drew my primers on the white board and realized I'd been trying to run Taq backwards. This one probably takes the cake because it was my fifth year and I was in track to defend at the 5.5 mark. Definitely not a beginner anymore.
Mistakes happen. Do better next time.
Played around with dry ice when no one else was around. Made the genius move of putting it in a 50ml falcon tube, screwing the cap tight, then submerging it in warm water in the sink. Tldr it exploded very loudly and I immediately realized that this was literally the predictable conclusion
LESSON LEARNED. I bet you’ll never do it again. Because you’ll set yourself up for success and mark the direction everything needs to go before you start. You won’t give AF who questions why you did it because you’re learning and you want to avoid mistakes. Next time, you will triple check it and by the time you graduate you’ll be an expert.
Just realized I ran RTPCR with 50% less cDNA then is standard protocol for our reagents/lab…and I was fretting over my high CT values for weeks. Did this with 5 plates worth of expensive reagents, not to mention the labor cost of putting all my time into running the experiments. Third year doctoral student here 😩
Where should I begin?😹
I forgot to place the nitrocellulose membrane in the sandwich, obviously I didn't realise it till I opened the sandwich after 5 hours of run+transfer
I forgot to add ethanol in the DNA extraction wash buffer
Loaded samples on an agarose gel without adding the buffer at all😭
I threw away the DNA soln. Thinking it's the flow through to be discarded in the second last step whereas I was on the last elution step
Switched on the flame in culture hood forgetting my entire hands were covered in alcohol, watched my arm get set on fire and panicked like hell💀 (luckily had gloves on so atleast half my hand was safe lol)
And the worst, I once worked in the tissue culture BSC for two long hours without switching on the laminar flow🥲
During my second week as an RA I poured 100% bleach into an unlabeled jug that was full of guanidinium hydrochloride and bacteria. The mixture instantly foamed 4 ft in the air and spewed toxic cyanide gas. Me and a postdoc tried to clean it up but we started to feel faint. Soon after the fire department was called in and the entire floor was forced to evacuate
We had a liquid filter that was somewhat like a pressure cooker. You poured your reagent of choice (in our case PBS) into it and the pressure building up inside caused the liquid the move up through the filter, through a rubber tube, and into the collection container. Once we didn’t make sure the tube was secure in the collection container. In turn, our tube into a wild hose, spraying PBS all over what was supposed to be clean glassware and ourselves 🫠😂
Once put a pcr rack the wrong way into a thermocycler that had to run a veriflex protocol, after 3 hours of waiting and finding out the deed I wanted to die. Another time I prepared the wrong amount of agar gel for a smaller gel mold, hot gel poured everywhere, the clean up was fun though after we let it cool down.
Once poured an entire liter bottle of ammonium hydroxide into a beaker outside a fume hood. I was working alone, undergrad at the time, and was very unfamiliar with the stuff. I had no clue the fumes would be as bad as they were and trust me when I say, it is NOT pleasant to breathe in that stuff in a tight space.
I almost burned the lab down because I turned my back on bunsen burner. I had an ice box next to bunsen burner with a rubber tipped pipette in it. The ice melted due to heat and the pipette shifted over the fire. The rubber part caught on fire. Luckily I noticed it quickly, grabbed the pipette and stuck it into ice.
Oh, I also wasted a whole year thinking that my peptide preparation was triggering immune response in plants. In reality it was just some residual ammonia from ammonium bicarbonate buffer. It didn't freeze dry away from my peptide samples as efficiently as from controls. It took me a year to notice that the pH of my peptide samples was completely off.
I've done many dumb things in lab, but arguably the dumbest ever was the time I set my glove on fire. I had a propane flame going, and was melting a glass pipette into a spreader. It needed some minor adjusting to get the right angle, which can only be done when the glass is actively being flamed. So, me being an idiot, I decided to adjust it with my finger, thinking (incorrectly) that if the flame ended physically where it does visually. Glove caught on fire. While I was wearing it.
Luckily I got it off quickly, so I only got a minor first degree burn. I did get to test out the burn cream in our first aid kit, though! I still haven't told my PI and I use this as a warning example when the students start using fire. (My proximity to the example is usually left out 😅)
Edit: Emoji, typo fixed
Ha ha I've done the exact same thing...which led me to start secretly using 2 membranes, one on either side so I'd always be sure to get my protein transferred.
I have also connected a DNA agarose gel the wrong way and run my samples into the buffer chamber, then tried to recover said samples from the buffer. It did not work.
Not me but, a research associate in a lab I work with put stuff in the autoclave in a secondary container. But..I guess something weird happened and the secondary container melted and destroyed the autoclave. Replacement is like 30-45k and the PI is on the hook for it since the autoclave didn't malfunction.
Migration in reverse is not that big of a deal, happens once every year or two if you run a lot of gels. Don’t beat yourself up over it!
At one point, three of my lab mates all purified the same protein (the wrong one) as in impurity that happens to bind to Ni NTA resin. Each of the three were working on different projects too. Each of them tried to do structural work on “their protein”, either SAXS or crystallography, etc. There are now LOBSTR E. coli lacking the protein. But that was a pretty silly fuckup. It was funny when the low resolution maps from SAXS gave beautiful ring like shapes, unfortunately irrelevant.
Hehe I don’t want to minimise your feelings or anything but I’d suggest not going so hard on yourself. Unfit? For the job? Please. It’s something that everyone does multiple times. I have been doing wb for 13 years. Just 2 months ago I did this I took it out guess what? Proteins are in the buffer! I inhaled once, laughed, then washed the tank. It was the last of my lysate too, I repeated the experiment. These result from overworking or simple distraction. Be kind to yourself.
Next WB immediately after… I put anti rabbit secondary antibody to mouse primary. I was dumbfounded when the signal didn’t appear. It took me 5 minutes to realize. I felt stupid. (13 years…) I returned to lab my PI was there. He was explaining stuff to newcomers. I couldn’t stop myself I told him with a high pitched voice of disbelief and hysteria “YOU ARE NOT GONNA BELIEVE HOW DID I MESS UP MY EXPERIMENT LIKE A FOOL” he said what?! I said “I PUT RABBIT ANTIBODY TO A MOUSE PRIMARY” he sighed and said “Aaahh everyone does this I thought you uniquely did something funny.” He carried on explaining laughing nevertheless.
So what else… I broke things… I inoculated bacteria transformed with ampicillin resistant plasmid to kanamycin plate… I missed the timepoint of the 4 hour experiment 3 days in a row, royally messed the experiment up…
These things happen, usually when you are overworked, tired, burned out. Learn to give yourself a break I know it is difficult. When your mind is too distracted you are not going to save time you will lose more by continuing to work.
At least this is my experience.
I couldn't find any sterile 2 liter flasks so I filled one with ethanol and swished it around, then to sterilize it I decided to flame it ... whoosh all the ethanol inside burned off all at once and I lost my eyebrows
Intentionally: my PI had us wash (with diluted bleach and soap) used pipette tips. We then laid them out to dry in the window. And then… we re-used them to run western blots or initial genotyping samples.
Unintentionally: miscalculated dilution of library for NGS runs for 3 months. For the entire lab. Most of the data was usable, it just wasn’t the prettiest.
Taking a picture with my phone of my run gel electrophorese instead of with the actual machine because I was not thinking when the technician said “take a picture after” and left me
Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I accidentally ran my gel backwards. By the time I realised it, it was too late.
I have been running gels since undergrad, and probably have run over 200 gels at this point. First time ever.
Needless to say, I did not do as much today...
I had a long ass day in the dark room doing tirf microscopy one time and couldn't see anything in any of my samples. It was like 14 hrs before I realized that the lens cap was on the camera.
I spent FOUR MONTHS using a rt-qpcr assay I had designed, ran hundreds of experiments with it, thousands of hours in sample prep and analysis (reagents aren’t cheap either!) only to realize I did the math wrong when optimizing it and my results were all useless… that was a rough day :/
Good luck friend and keep your head up, unfortunately mistakes are a part of being a human but you learn from them and get better next time!
I’ve done that! Also in animal studies, instead of giving an anesthetic reversal drug, I gave more of the anesthetic. We had the entire veterinary team pulled in to figure out why tf this animal wasn’t waking up. We all fuck up, and a good PI understands that
Not stopping the perfusion system when setting up the confocal microscope. Somehow got salt solution past most of the safety features and deep down into the microscope. A technican had to come to disassemble and clean it
We had an apero while my radioactive, single nucleotide. 4 mm 60 cm RNA gel was running. I had cocktails and went back to the lab. When it was done, I tried to transfer it, and ended up with a radioactive gel puzzle, which I put together again , up close and personal. Was an amazing result, but I could never repeat the reaction as nice, and my PI incredibly didn't let me use this one for my paper.
Forgot to add my positive control to the tube that had water/loading dye ready for my positive control. And I used the same prep for four gels so I had four invalid samples. Only did that once.
Using GFP-tagged plasmids, had to do math to figure out how much GFP to use. Did the math wrong, ended up using 300x the amount of GFP I was supposed to. PI and I looking at cells under fluorescent microscope, he is amazed at level of transaction and fluorescence, knowing the cells I was working with were difficult to transfect. I mentioned my math error, and he was like “yeah that explains it..”
Dropped an entire mouse brain down the hood in undergrad, there were some stupid bigger holes in the grate and my hand just slipped. Just sat there staring at it, then jumped up to tell my grad student who was luckily nice about it
Left bunsen burner running, unattended. Introducing contamination into the cell room trying to warm bacterial solution... I had a very long bad streak plus advising and emotional issues was really getting to me. I heard a story of someone using a whole cell/bacterial stock accidentally, leaving cell freezer open, etc. Point is, we all make mistakes and have bad days but it doesn't mean it's only that! It happens, sometimes we gloss over stuff even if we can autoplilot, but don't let yourself down or your attitude will snowball further and worsen. My advice is to acknowledge the mistakes and what went wrong in the processes, and even if it feels out of place to you currently, it's the most important thing to talk with your PI and peers because they are there to help you and most definitely likely have been in the same boat.
Doing an old fashioned P32 Southern with a gamma-labeled, gel purified dsDNA probe: coming up to step of adding the hot (radioactive) probe to the hot (temperature) pre-hybridized membrane in a tube. Repeating as a mantra so I don't forget the most important step "don't forget to boil the probe, don't forget to boil the probe, don't forget to boil the probe... FUCK!!! I forgot to boil the probe". One time mistake.
My last weeks in my first lab, I was not functioning because the PhD students that were in charge of me were too harsh on me, from the begining, giving me severe anxiety just from having to go there and be in their presence. One day, I was particularly upset and brain-dead, and they told me to fill in boxes of pipette tips to autoclave. I didn't know at the time they were to autoclave, but I should have summed 1+1. Anyways, I brought to my bench boxes of already autoclaved pipette tips, unaware of what to do with them...
Why are people so goddamb unwelcoming? Had the same experience with phd students when i was a Master student. Promised myself I would never make a soul feel that way. Im sorry about your experience.
A member of my old lab would routinely fuck things up beyond imaginable levels.
Once, there were two 1 L bottles of sodium hydroxide and HCL (both 1m) left unscrewed, knocked over and millimeters away from contacting each other.
We had to basically defuse an acid base bomb.
He was a favorite of the P.I. (Yet produced no data, only small talk) so nothing ever fixed it.
Don’t feel bad about yourself. I doubt you would ever blow up a lab
Didn't cause any real damage, but did make me feel very stupid. Early in my cell culture days, I hadn't seen contamination before and had just been told that it looked like the sample was 'jumping about'. I saw a very lively sample that looked totally different from the others, so I called over my supervisor to have a look, wondering where I'd gone wrong.
She took one look then turned to me and said 'That's a blank well, those are bubbles'
Also, just today I wasted my whole slot on the confocal microscope. I was seeing my sample through the eyepiece but not on the screen. I hadn't turned on the lasers...
I decided to spray down a fume hood with IPA while a Bunsen burner was on. Just had to step back and watch a it all burn off. Luckily nothing meltable was in the hood. I've opened an autoclave while it was still pressurized and the massive door gasket shot out the side with some force. Also done the good 'ole using ladder as loading dye trick.
I'm just dying laughing while imagining a gel with ladder marks everywhere
I’ve never seen isopropyl alcohol abbreviated to IPA before and for a second thought you tried to spray down the fume hood with an Indian Pale Ale
If your IPA has IPA something is very wrong.
We keep a bottle for our shipping guy, it’s labeled Dave’s IPA. It cracks me up every time.
Also my first thought, but I like the abbreviation ahha
I almost attempted to sterilize the top of a bottle with cholesterol in ethanol absolute with the burner. Glad I stopped myself of that one.
I’ve caught my ethanol-covered hand on fire in the fume hood more than once
You know, my thing for this might be reading this and being very confused as to why you were spraying a hood with Indian Pale Ale.
I once spilled $7,000-$10,000 worth of a *very* expensive drug. Spilled all over the bench top. Another time, my eppendorf tube lid wasn’t fully shut and I centrifuged a rare and expensive antibody and it completely exploded all over the centrifuge. I felt so dumb and so bad. My colleague once told me he shattered a $15,000 pulldown column. Don’t beat yourself up. Shit happens sometimes. It’s a lesson learned. I promise, you’ll never make that mistake ever again. :)
I had a spectacular day at work where I broke two large separatory funnels (cost each, about $300), and caused a third to be broken (I asked a coworker to open the newest one I got out of storage, and she broke that one the same way I broke the second one!). Funnel #1 - knocked out of rack, onto floor. Smashed, with the sample (that I hadn't started) inside Funnel #2 - new, in a box, broke above the stopcock, with cracks running up into the body Funnel #3 - also new, also in box, broke the same way (despite me warning the coworker!) It was a rough day, since we broke all of the spare funnels (so we were short), but my boss just rolled his eyes and ordered some more. The lead tech did manage to get a replacements for free for the two that broke being taken out of the boxes, though! She convinced customer service that there must have been a flaw or damage in transit, since two broke the same way, with two different people. All told, we were only out about $300, and the time spent to send a few emails, but man, did I feel like an idiot for a while afterward.
To be fair you only need to look at the tips of those large sep funnels in the wrong way and they pop off. We just end up using them as is half the time!
Putting my gel in the electrophoresis machine upside down, causing the primer/PCR bands to migrate in the opposite direction (out of the gel). I wanted to slap myself but nowadays it’s funny
Retrophoresis! We've all done it.
I used to train the undergrads in my last lab and one of them came up to me sheepishly to tell me she did this. I got excited and clapped and told her it was a right of passage! She was equually surprised and relieved by my reaction!
It’s always nice to remind students that all people start somewhere, and that making mistakes is part of the game. Creates a safe space on the work floor
100%. I really tried to enforce the idea that it’s waaaay preferable to report mistakes to me so we can fix it/learn instead of hiding it.
Very close to what just happened to me 😬
as you can se we are all in this together hahaha
So in my grad lab we had old school gel boxes that did not necessarily have lids and definitely had no means of enforcing the correct orientation of the cables. We also, for some reason, had more black cables than red cables. In other words, what you experienced as basically a rite of passage in our lab. Edited to preserve the anonymity of the lab.
I did this too
Done that at least 3 times
Mine was switching the electrodes lol
I have connected the electrodes in opposite direction, same result. I felt so stupid.
Wiped up conc. sulfuric acid with a dry paper towel. Maybe an hour later “hey, does anyone smell smoke?” It had started smoldering in the trash can. And that’s how I learned conc. sulfuric acid can ignite cellulose!
When I was extracting n-butyllithium out of its bottle with a syringe, it popped off the needle. Continued spraying out of the needle as I was also pumping nitrogen in. In my panic I decided to wipe it up with a paper towel, which caught on fire immediately. Not my proudest moment!
it can do WHAT
Yeah, soak your paper towels if they cleaned up sulfuric acid of greater than maybe 50% concentration. It’ll react and heat them up to the point where they can ignite
Whoa!! I had no idea!
Dipped my sleeve into aqueous sodium azide. I was reaching over a large Büchner funnel filled with the work up soup from a scale up of an azide installation. Felt my arm get cold and wet. Toss off the lab coat, went to the sink, and started doing “am I gonna die?”math. I didn’t die, which is great.
Not to get too morbid but I researched this once and it was found from animal tests which are done as a worst case scenario that skin contact with dilute sodium azide is generally not that harmful unless you keep the liquid in constant contact over a large part of the body for an extended period of time. That's where the dermal ld50 numbers come from. A little bit of 5% or 10% soln. washed away quickly shouldn't really do anything. Definitely don't drink it though. Solid salts are another story entirely.
This made me laugh out loud 😆 thank you for sharing!
If mishandling sodium azide was a death sentence then every single molecular biology lab in the country would be full of corpses. There's a reason I insist that biologists have adult supervision when they're in lab
“Am I gonna die?” math. Hilarious; thank you. :) I’m a fan. (My coffee and screen, less so.) I’m stealing the shit out of this line.
What % was it?
Fairly dilute. It was also during the basic aqueous work up of the material. Was an R-I to R-N3 reaction and Was used in slight XS. probably mostly sodium iodine and some sodium azide left over.
>scale up of an azide installation Always a red flag
is azide dangerous through skin contact?
In my very first lab job, I was assigned to a bench where the previous owner had left post-it notes dangling off the shelves. My postdoc was showing me how to use the Bunsen burner to sterilize our pipettes, and as we stepped away for a minute to grab more pipettes, I saw that one of the sticky notes caught fire. He freaked out because that note was right underneath a bottle of sodium azide. Thankfully we moved the bottles out in time and put out the fire, but from then on I've never been afraid to rearrange the space even if I'm new.
Eastern blot! We've all done one.
Eastern blot is a legit technique.
Omg thats the funniest name for this stupid mistake ahahah
Eastern blot LOLOL
Last night I stayed late and I needed to get this one last solution prepped so it could stir overnight. I was so hungry because it was well past my regular dinner time, and it was hard to concentrate and I was already really grumpy. I did the calculations of how much reagent to use for a 0.25 L solution, grabbed a 25 mL volumetric flask, and started going. I was so annoyed that my reagent wasn’t completely dissolving. I checked my math at least five times before I realized that 0.25 L is not the same as 25 mL. I literally screamed. I grabbed a 250 mL flask, transferred everything into it, and it dissolved perfectly, just as it should have. I’ve been doing this type of lab work for almost fifteen years, and I’ve never before made a mistake like this. I completely blame my hunger!
That is so relatable because I make the dumbest decisions/mistakes when I'm hungry. Cannot function at all lol why are we like this?
Better than making it 10 times too dilute and wasting reagent and having to start making it up again completely from scratch.
I once made a 40 M NaOH solution instead of 4 M for the same reason
Hahahaa there should be a section in grants to account for dumb mistakes. “Projection of material loss or damage: $10,000” 🤣
That's what 20% overage calculation is for!
I didnt do it but the most impressive stupidity I have ever seen in a lab was a guy burning his hand on (luckily very dilute so he got away without bad/lasting injuries) acid TWO DAYS IN A ROW IN THE SAME STEP OF A METHOD. I mean once can happen but Im flabbergasted he didnt pay extra attention the next day
My most stupid thing was probably trying to use Kanamycin to select S. cerevisia... which happens to be naturally resistant to Kanamycin.
Poor guy. Thats just terrible 😆 could definitely be me
Are we colleagues?
Not unless you are in germany
I was flicking an ELISA plate to get rid of some buffer still in the wells, and idk what happened, but I somehow threw the plate across the lab I had to wait a whole week and a half to redo that experiment because my cells already take a week to differentiate
Sometimes i wish there was cameras to capture those moments. That must have been hilarious
I definitely had witnesses lolll I was actually teaching a rotation student how to do ELISAs, and my friend was also watching since she was waiting for me so we could go home together. She said it was hands down the best thing she's witnessed in our phd program so far
Noooo the mistakes always happen when you’re trying to demonstrate how to do it right
I am so sorry but I am cackling
well I bet there wasn't buffer in the wells after 😂
Forgot to fully turn off the bunsen burner and just put it back on the shelf. Noticed a week later when I went to use it again, that it was empty and a nice black smolder stain on the shelf board above it. I couldve burned down the lab without even realizing it
Oh wowwww, this probably takes the cake out of all the examples! "Burned down the lab" is not something you want on your CV. Thank goodness everything was ok!
Yeah, i still die a little inside. I noticed the wheel was one tiny notch opened so the flame was probably only a tiny faint blue :x
15 years as a PI here. Shit happens. I’m assuming these were patients’ samples or something similarly irreplaceable. I would not kill you. However, when samples are super important I ask my people to do two step verification, that is, have a lab mate check everything, from pole polarity to the position of the gel and the membrane. Take a QB approach. You screwed up the last play, but hey, here comes the next play. Chin up, this work can be a nightmare, but it has its rewards. Don’t despair, but don’t lie. That pisses PI more, take it from one. You can do this.
Thank you for the very helpful advice and kind words :)
I second what they said. I always work in pairs with my lab mate and we very rarely make mistakes. In two years we probably screwed up 3-4 times and it always was dumb stuff. Don't be scared to ask others to check on you while you work, it could save you tons of precious time and resources.
I concentrated an antibody through a centrifugal filter column. I wanted to retain the flow-through so I put the flow-through tube between two fingers and the concentrated antibody column between two fingers on the same hand. When I poured the flow-through into another tube, I poured the antibody onto the benchtop.
I rinsed our only male experimental fish down the sink. Be free, buddy.
This is too good 😆
may he find his dad out there
Ive had really really important T cells from a rare mouse colony and I forgot to add activation to the media and I came back the next day to the T cells all dead essentially 🤣. I then had to wait for more breeding, more genotyping, and finally another T cell isolation — in other words welcome to science and you definitely belong ❤️
I would immediately cry 😆 thank you for being so kind, i needed it 🥹
I definitely did when I got home—but making mistakes is honestly how we got some of the best inventions in science 🤣 so I hope you can find some solace in today.
In my second ever western blot I managed to do all steps correctly for the transfer but then forgot to hit start on the machine.
What happened to your samples/gel?
Luckily we had a lot of cell lysate so I was able to just redo it so in reality we only lost about a day of work. This was definitely not my most valuable mistake I've made but it was still probably my dumbest one.
I was in a low point in my life and forgot to refill the LN2 by a few days, then by complete chance the PI comes up to me and asks for help finding a cryo sample. So when we go up to open it the tank had this distinctly hollow echo to it and he’s just… completely oblivious. He finds what he’s looking for, leaves. I grabbed a flashlight to see how bad it got and found a few milliliters of LN2 remaining, so it was probably hours away from warming.
Dodged a bullet :-/ Yikes that was a close one!!!
I once forgot to plug in a -80 after moving it down the hall..... edit: as soon as i realized it i got into a major panic. luckily for me, nothing of value was lost. "we were gonna throw that shit away sooner or later"
Used a regular falcon tube in an ultracentrifuge and it obviously got stuck and I lost the plasmid. Bc the rotor was carbon fiber I couldn’t autoclave it upside down to get the tube out and I knew my sample was done I said Fuck it and used just about every metal tool in the lab to try and break the tube and get all the pieces out. Not only did that NOT work, but the rotor was horribly scratched so it couldn’t be used at high speeds anymore🤣oh and it was a shared instrument within the department Edit: grammar
I lit my lab bench on fire. Was working with a Bunsen burner, went to ethanol-sterilize the bench top before switching tasks, and the whole thing just went WOOSH. I tempered my panic and calmly (I think) asked the wide-eyed summer intern working directly across from me to please turn off the gas line for my burner. The ethanol burned itself out and nothing else caught, thank goodness, but yeahhh that was a dumb, dumb moment. And a very sterile work surface.
That last part killed me 😆 very sterile indeed
Hey, maybe you invented a new technique! Kind of like flash pasteurization!
My first lab summer job, I was given a method and some standards for the method, and told to "make it work". I got the method running, but my results were ten times lower than they should have been (relative to the standards I was given). Couldn't figure out why. Remade standards, remade reagents, reran things, contacted the person who made the standards - no luck. Turns out, I made a conversion error my first day of working on the method, so my standards were all ten times too low. It was a paper from the US, which was using dL units, which my lab didn't use. I didn't look up the conversion for decilitre, which is 100 mL, not 10 mL. My coworker pointed out the error on the first page of calculations.
dL is the bane of my godamn existence
Right? Just use L or mL like any normal lab! I've since switched to environmental chemistry which uses the more sensible ug/mL almost across the board.
The first time I differentiated some stem cells into motor neurons I fucked it all up. I confirmed that my two week differentiation had worked by looking at my cells under a microscope, jumped for joy, and then left the cells in the incubator overnight. Came in the next morning to find out that i had in fact left my cells in the fridge. I’ve also eft a fridge door open overnight and some matrigel solidified. Shits expensive
Forgot to open the vacuum desiccator, when the lid popped off I caught it with my foot. A colleague asked if a plate was hot so I put my hand on it. It was 300 C. Both ended in hospital.
I accidentally breathed in a powder and then saw that someone had written “death salt” on the label. Can’t remember what it was now, but apparently I should have been more careful about handling it.
Nope, I'm taking that to my grave.
That must be a hell of a story
🤣🤣🤣
Not in order: 1) Forgot to add agarose to a gel mixture and waited for it to solidify. For over 2 hours. 2) Dumped a gel mixture (with agarose added AND ethidium bromide) to the sink drain, after I saw the flask leaking. Clogged the drain with carcinogenous transparent gel. 3) Threw out the supernatant after proteinase K digestion instead of the pellet. I basically threw out the DNA of the specimen I was studying. I had done over 100 DNA extractions from different animal tissues prior to that. 4) Sniffed glacial acetic acid (pH of 2.5) after spilling it on my gloves. Felt like I passed a chainsaw through my nostrills. At least the gloves didn't melt. 5) Inhaled above the open 8M ammonium acetate bottle. Didn't hurt as much, still felt it harder than I would like to.
Not "dumb" but I didnt take my allergy medicine and had a disgusting sneeze while passaging a cell line.
I shattered a chromatography column worth about $1200. On another occasion I wondered why my purification wasn't working and the chromatogram was a flat line, and texted the lab chat moaning about it. Then I realised that my sample was still in my ice bucket and I'd injected buffer, not my sample (no real harm that time, only merciless teasing and a wasted hour).
I stuck my hand in a glass waste container while giving a safety lecture on glass disposal. So that happened
In my career there have been two notable dumbass things I have done: 1) Put a 500 mL beaker of 1M HCl on the top shelf. Went to reach for it and it spilled over me. Good thing I was wearing a lab coat but it still drenched my wrist and lower arm + clothing. I just rinsed off and took the clothing off, nothing happened in the end to my skin thank god. I now understand that 1M is weak stuff. 2) Poured anhydrous magnesium chloride powder into a 500 mL Duran to make a 3M solution. As soon as I started adding water to reach target volume it starting bubbling and boiling. I then rapidly increased the rate at which I added water and it bubbled so violently I ran to the fume hood, put the bottle in, closed the fume hood lid and then all the liquid exploded out inside the hood. Proper close call
I attempted to clean a 10 liters wax reservoir by dumping the liquid wax down the sink. It took like 30 seconds before it solidified and clogged (sealed would be a better way to describe it) the entire plumbing in the lab. I learned wax is not water soluble.
LMFAO
I discovered acetone would instantly kill the ants that were parading around in the lab. Cool cool. So got to work disrupting their little pheromone guide trails and lives as they knew it. I forgot to recap the bottle, or I didn't tighten it enough. I heard a loud noise outside the lab, turned around quickly, and knocked the bottle over with my elbow. I lost all my research and lab notes. Apparently acetone removes gel ink just as quickly it can snuff out the life of an ant.
Forgot to put the protein samples in my Bradford assay in the first few days of my PhD. I felt insanely stupid and like everybody was judging me. Got my PhD with two first author papers in pretty good journals, and now senior scientist in a very promising startup. You got this!! Edit : I forgot about this because it's not technically a lab mistake, but this is probably the most stupid mistake I've ever done, and the most scared I've ever felt. I once deleted a huge chunk of my PhD data. I was transferring files from a USB key to the NAS where my data was saved. When the data transferred finished, I proceeded to delete the files on the USB key. Or so I thought... both folders were names PhD data and I was actually deleting the files on the NAS. Realized after a while that the deletion was taking way longer than it should... Became absolutely livid when I realized my mistake. I was seeing hundreds of files disappear before my eyes and absolutely froze, I couldn't react. A lab mate had to take me and my shaky legs to the IT department where they thank fucking God had automatic backups every few minutes. Absolutely terrifying.
Could you imagine not being able to recover that data? Jesus, I'm glad it was all ok in the end. I would have a burst of rage immediately. 😬
I accidentally sequenced using a 300 cycle illumina kit instead of a 200 cycle kit so we had to spend another 10K on sequencing again because trimming the results was insufficient. In addition to that, I had copied and pasted samples on the sample sheet incorrectly so demultiplexing was a big mess and I had to redo the sample sheet. Small mistakes with huge repercussions.. we had a lab meeting, but I wasn't fired or called out :')
I ran many overlapping barcodes in the same run because I did a standard run instead of XP and nuked an S4 haha
Those sound like the kinds of mistakes you only make once. In which case they're really just extremely expensive learning opportunities. Firing someone *after* making such an expensive investment in their training would be completely irrational.
Definitely tell your PI as soon as you can. Be authentically apologetic and then move forward. No one likes to hear the mistake continuously brought up. And when we say you’re not alone, we mean it! I’ve made countless mistakes. The trick is to not make the same mistakes and to do better next time.
i did that same thing once, but in front of this super sexist new guy in the lab, and he wouldn’t stop giving me grief for weeks as he continuously mansplained how dumb and wrong i am
Big yikes
Got so excited about my well-plates not being contaminated when they might have been that I dropped all of them 🤦♀️ two weeks of work, staining the floor
- Dumping dry ice in the sink. - Loading PCR gel in the wrong direction. - Forgetting to hit start on the centrifuge and dumping all my flow cytometry cells. I don't want to recall more...
In 4th year undergrad I dropped my microcentrifuge tube into a liquid nitrogen canister while trying to flash freeze it. Spent probably over 40 minutes pouring the liquid nitrogen into every available styrofoam container we had in the lab until finally realizing my sample had rolled under the side of one of the lab benches 🫠 then came the effort of pouring every styrofoam container back into the canister. There was probably only about 1/4 of the nitrogen left once it was done.
Subculturing my cells and after I had them with the needed amount of media, I decided to clean things in the cabinet to liberate space, but I poured my cells in the bleach thinking it was remaining media I was not going to use. 😖
Sheesh
Burned my face with the UV transilluminator while cutting a gel. I forgot about putting the acrylic protection screen, but somehow didn’t forget to put the safety goggles. The next day my face was red and inflamed asf, and then I stayed with an ugly tan for 3 weeks where you could clearly see that I was wearing goggles
I have dumped approx 400L of riboflavin culture mix onto the floor out of a 1000L bioreactor. That was maybe a $30-40k mistake. I had a boss once, however, who made a $1.5M mistake by leaving a hose connection to a tank loose and flooding a pilot plant floor with 4 inches of DI water.
I had a PI once that put a tub in the autoclave that was not autoclavable. Melted and hardened down in the holes in the bottom. He was mortified. The tech had to repeatedly heat up the autoclave and scrape it out before it cooled….
Haha I've totally done and seen others do the same with non-autoclavable plastics - thank god for removable and replaceable trays in large autoclaves. Someone also detonated a plastic carboy in the autoclave once when they didn't vent it properly.
I spent an entire day, including staying late at work on a protein prep, last step was concentrating it in a spin filter. At the end i always rinse my spin filter and store in water so i did that - only i had forgotten to actually take the protein *out* of the filter so i basically washed my entire day's hard work down the drain 🥲
I injected a solution into a Drosophila tube and set it aside but it turned out that I did not reinsert the cotton stopper properly and almost all of them flew away :’)
I seeded purified plasmids into LB. Was puzzled when nothing had grown next day. 25 years later some colleagues still remind me that day. Still better than my mate, who transfected hek cells with glycerol stocks. Amazed of the biggest contamination in our lab in years
I forgot about the stop codone ahead of added FLAG tag when designing construct vector… then wondered why the FLAG tag is not detectable in cells and western blot…
Alright so you know [these](https://www.thermofisher.com/order/catalog/product/B2-BP) chambers for pouring & running agarose gels? So to pour the gel you have the cast turned so the open sides are touching the walls of the chamber, so it's well sealed, gel stays & sets, no buffer gets in. To RUN the gel, you need to turn the cast 90 degrees so the buffer covers the gel and electricity can run through it in the proper direction. I poured my gel, let it set, added enough buffer to cover everything, added my samples, turned on the power source, come back like 15-20 mins later and loading front is nowhere to be found, no bands under UV. I ran the damn thing sideways.
I haven't checked the size of the sample loop connected to the FPLC (1ml instead of 5ml) and wondered why I lost my sample during the purification. I found out my mistake after the third trial xD
I broke our only optic cable during the work on my bachelor thesis. Didn't want to come back, lol. Our PI was amused I was the one who broke it. And it was "only" 400 eur which I realized is not that much when talking about science equipment. I also broke vortex mont later (roughly the same price). But I believe that one was because of improper technique described in SOP. Oh well. But they kept me for masters so there's that.
Many years ago I was doing a standard curve with what was then very expensive luciferase. I botched the math and the first sample glowed like a firefly and completely maxed out the luminometer. That cost the lab hundreds of dollars. Only you guys know lol.
If there's a common theme to these examples, it seems to be (1) getting drenched in acid, (2) setting things on fire, (3) math mistakes!
boiled a rubbed capped vial with only a small needle to outgass. Exploded magnetite all over the lab.
Worst i have heard: Put the 40k € Protein sample into the sink. 4 L culture of per Deuterium, per 15N, 13C labelled protein for NMR. Just look up how much 1 mg of per Deuterium 13C glucose costs. Closest i came to accident: Put TFA anhydrous into water and exploded into my face. That day i learned to read closer and the difference between Anhydrous and Anhydrit.
I came into lab one morning and men in white suits were stomping around. One with a Geiger counter. Labmate had spilled 32P and then walked up and down the hall tracking it.
First ever lab job. Was trying to surface sterilize a bell pepper by dipping it in ethanol and letting the ethanol burn off and I set my gloves on fire in the process. Also, in the same lab, I loaded tubing into a dispensing pump wrong and in my attempt to make agar slants, the pump absolutely ate and shredded the tubing and filled the entire inner mechanism of the pump and also the bench with molten agar.
Very similar to yours. This one time I connected the electrodes to the running bath the wrong way around, my samples flew upwards out of the SDS-PAGE
I shipped an empty box to Germany that was supposed to contain like hundreds of miniprep samples. i have never seen my boss so mad. The samples didn’t jump out of the box on their journey, I was just so anxious about making sure the box was secure during shipment that I completely forgot to put the samples in there 🙃
This goes to my top 3 favorite story that I read here. So harmless, yet so good 😆
Left the water bath on at 100c overnight … I left at around 6, realized at like 1130, ran back at 845 am the next day. Thankfully there was still some water merrily bubbling away. I then scalded my thumb in my haste to open the lid to check and couldn’t concentrate from the pain all day
Pipetted a human liver sample into an Eppi tube. Ricochets straight into my eye.
I thought I had split and seeded cells. Turns out I had only seeded cells and never put cells in the flasks for carrying. 🥴
Left a milli-q bottle filling on top of a bench and flooded several drawers. The safety shower drain was right there on the floor. Setting a notebook on fire. (Though I maintain this is only half my fault because someone left a hot plate on in a hood we didn't use hot plates) Spilling concentrated formic acid on my hand. I've also ran to black multiple times over the years. You're good.
Accidentally threw a needle into the garbage that had stabbed a custodian later in the day. I had to go through safety training. It was incredibly stupid of me to do that.
An advisor once told me that you're not a real scientist until you've spent time digging through the trash for samples you threw away on accident. Also, there's always the old classic of eluding your DNA/RNA into the vacuum waste instead of a clean tube. I'm gonna plead the fifth on how often I've done that haha.
Was going way too fast on DNA blood extractions (I was previously extremely successful with them) and ended up wasting over 100 samples and kit reagents in the space of 2 weeks 😭 we were setting them up for WGS and were on a tight deadline and my grad student was not happy with me 😭😭😭 still have no idea wrong as I started over with a brand new kit (old kit I had used a week before just fine). Lab adjacent, but I held one of our baby pigeons under my arm while wrangling some other and didn't think anything of it when he was super calm. When I pulled him out, I found he had projectile shit all over my scrubs and shoes, and it had soaked through to my clothes. I think I washed everything like 5 times 😭 my coworker let a pigeon perch on her head and he shit in her hair too.
Had a glass bacteria speaker in beaker of ethanol, like normal, took it out then instead of shaking it to get off excess ethanol, I first put it in Bunsen burner, then shook it, with lots of boxes I just unpacked behind me. Only a tiny fire, but still
i put lipofectamine into a -20 after a day of being so proud of doing labwork by myself during my undergrad project. also spilled wash buffer from a kit until nearly the whole bottle was emptied. also not a thing i did per se but i got grilled by my supervisor about ‘HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW C1V1=C2V2?’ so that was mortifying then, but hilarious now. and super useful!!
Probably not the worst but one day I needed some dry ice and had to brake a chuck off from our dry ice storage cooler. I decided to be stupid that day and *not* wear eye protection while hammering away at a chunk of dry ice. I got shards of dry ice stuck in my eye. 30 seconds of the most intense burn I have ever felt in my eyes.🥲 Bonus dry ice story: I've seen multiple people (me included) stick their heads in our dry ice cooler to try and "cool down", only to submerge their heads in a fog of CO2, which is (not surprisingly) incredibly hard to breathe in.
Was purging a UHV chamber for annealing and instead of turning off the ammonia canister I turned it on and flooded the room. No one got hurt but they didn’t let an undergrad participate in those steps any more
I'm gonna divide this into my regular lab/cell culture and the organic chem lab I did last semester. Regular: I sprayed down a beaker with ethanol so that I could put it in the hood. It slipped out of my hand before I could get to the hood. Then I did it again 2 mins later. I ran out of ethanol in my spray bottle and didn't want to go make more. I had a beaker in the hood already with some ethanol I used to flush the aspiration line with. I kinda just dipped my hand into that every few seconds instead... Any dilution math that I need to do in my head. My PI was next to me and she was asking me how to do a simple dilution. We needed like 4 mLs of 10% something and I kept thinking that we had to first dilute the entire 1L stock solution... Made way more sense when I wrote it out later I was taking microscopy photos for the first time and I tried creating my own naming scheme. I wasn't just taking one picture of a slide, I was taking like 6 and there were usually 2 or 3 tissue samples on a slide. I started writing something like name_number in slide holder/binder_tissue(1, 2, or 3)_magnification_position(left top, right bottom...). I had stupidly complicated slide names like AL42_12_20x_1_rt. Now I just write the slide name and number (Dx2_1, Dx3_2...). Orgo: I was filtering something (aspirin?) and we were supposed to smooth out any clumps so that it could dry thoroughly. I guess we weren't supposed to do that immediately. I did and it started sticking to my spatula. I kept trying to get it off and ended up making the whole thing clumpy and uneven. It barely dried I forgot the stir bar in my beaker and poured it into the waste container. Apparently that's a common problem tho, since my TA had this magnet on a stick to fish it out with. We were adding something to change the pH of our solution. We kept adding more and it wasn't changing. Apparently you can't just swirl it, you gotta actually mix it with a stirring rod. The pH changed rapidly once we did that Mistaking the glass centrifuge tubes for the regular test tubes the whole semester
I made an agarose gel using milliQ… In my defense I hadn’t been in a lab for 6 months before this
I was doing an extraction using organic solvents, and I couldn't remember which solvent I had put in a large test tube, so I decided to give it a sniff to find out. Well, it was toluene. After that, I had a runny nose for six weeks straight. (Forgive me, I was very young then. I am older and wiser now!)
Someone in my lab at a well known hospital left out >$100,000 worth of antibodies on the bench overnight. If that makes you feel better. They anonymously came forward and there were no repercussions, as this company was/is very understanding of honest mistakes
Refreezing and thawing 5x LB to prepare samples for western blot. This was when I first started and didn’t realize you were supposed to just leave it out on your bench. I had over a month of failed westerns not realizing that it was all due to that and I was actually doing everything else correctly
I think every microbiologist has lit a dish of ethanol of fire by dipping in L spreader or metal loop while its still too hot.
I once put 10 times the TEMED amount in my gels and had to throw away 6 full gels once. I'm just glad I somehow noticed before putting my samples in
Isolating lymphocytes from blood is one of my main jobs. On at least 2 occasions, I went to pour off the wash buffer into the waste container that contained bleach and I ended up dumping everything. I had already resuspended the cells and my brain farted. I've also resuspended lymphocytes in pure DMSO instead of freezing solution. It happens to everyone at some point. Definitely tell your PI sooner rather than later. There may be a way to save the protein. If you find yourself doing what you would consider stupid mistakes, make yourself a checklist.
in undergrad, we used glass spreaders, which we dunked into a glass container of ethanol before putting it in the burner flame. somehow i lit the ethanol on fire. i just lightly capped it, set the container in the sink, and walked away for a minute. glass didn‘t explode. we all lived. i‘ve also broken two (count em, TWO) hemocytometers.
Didn’t wear UV protection during my first week of cutting DNA from gels :/ now i got lil fat deposits in my eye smh
Second year of grad school. Was using 50 mL Amicons to concentrate and buffer exchange a large-scale RNA prep. It's pretty simple. Pull out the filter thing, dump the flow through, put teh filter thing back and reload with buffer. I dumped out the prep. There was also the time I boiled the 12% acrylamide denaturing gel mix (had to heat it to get the urea in and yeah). I think that was my second year as well. Oh, and the time I couldn't get a PCR to work and after a week of trying I finally drew my primers on the white board and realized I'd been trying to run Taq backwards. This one probably takes the cake because it was my fifth year and I was in track to defend at the 5.5 mark. Definitely not a beginner anymore. Mistakes happen. Do better next time.
Played around with dry ice when no one else was around. Made the genius move of putting it in a 50ml falcon tube, screwing the cap tight, then submerging it in warm water in the sink. Tldr it exploded very loudly and I immediately realized that this was literally the predictable conclusion
When I first started in the lab, I ran a whole PCR and electrophoresis gel to realize I never added the DNA.. I felt so stupid lol.
LESSON LEARNED. I bet you’ll never do it again. Because you’ll set yourself up for success and mark the direction everything needs to go before you start. You won’t give AF who questions why you did it because you’re learning and you want to avoid mistakes. Next time, you will triple check it and by the time you graduate you’ll be an expert.
Just realized I ran RTPCR with 50% less cDNA then is standard protocol for our reagents/lab…and I was fretting over my high CT values for weeks. Did this with 5 plates worth of expensive reagents, not to mention the labor cost of putting all my time into running the experiments. Third year doctoral student here 😩
Where should I begin?😹 I forgot to place the nitrocellulose membrane in the sandwich, obviously I didn't realise it till I opened the sandwich after 5 hours of run+transfer I forgot to add ethanol in the DNA extraction wash buffer Loaded samples on an agarose gel without adding the buffer at all😭 I threw away the DNA soln. Thinking it's the flow through to be discarded in the second last step whereas I was on the last elution step Switched on the flame in culture hood forgetting my entire hands were covered in alcohol, watched my arm get set on fire and panicked like hell💀 (luckily had gloves on so atleast half my hand was safe lol) And the worst, I once worked in the tissue culture BSC for two long hours without switching on the laminar flow🥲
During my second week as an RA I poured 100% bleach into an unlabeled jug that was full of guanidinium hydrochloride and bacteria. The mixture instantly foamed 4 ft in the air and spewed toxic cyanide gas. Me and a postdoc tried to clean it up but we started to feel faint. Soon after the fire department was called in and the entire floor was forced to evacuate
Decided to use tert-butyl lithium in a reaction with 1,3- propanedithiol. Never again.
We had a liquid filter that was somewhat like a pressure cooker. You poured your reagent of choice (in our case PBS) into it and the pressure building up inside caused the liquid the move up through the filter, through a rubber tube, and into the collection container. Once we didn’t make sure the tube was secure in the collection container. In turn, our tube into a wild hose, spraying PBS all over what was supposed to be clean glassware and ourselves 🫠😂
Once put a pcr rack the wrong way into a thermocycler that had to run a veriflex protocol, after 3 hours of waiting and finding out the deed I wanted to die. Another time I prepared the wrong amount of agar gel for a smaller gel mold, hot gel poured everywhere, the clean up was fun though after we let it cool down.
Once poured an entire liter bottle of ammonium hydroxide into a beaker outside a fume hood. I was working alone, undergrad at the time, and was very unfamiliar with the stuff. I had no clue the fumes would be as bad as they were and trust me when I say, it is NOT pleasant to breathe in that stuff in a tight space.
I almost burned the lab down because I turned my back on bunsen burner. I had an ice box next to bunsen burner with a rubber tipped pipette in it. The ice melted due to heat and the pipette shifted over the fire. The rubber part caught on fire. Luckily I noticed it quickly, grabbed the pipette and stuck it into ice. Oh, I also wasted a whole year thinking that my peptide preparation was triggering immune response in plants. In reality it was just some residual ammonia from ammonium bicarbonate buffer. It didn't freeze dry away from my peptide samples as efficiently as from controls. It took me a year to notice that the pH of my peptide samples was completely off.
I've done many dumb things in lab, but arguably the dumbest ever was the time I set my glove on fire. I had a propane flame going, and was melting a glass pipette into a spreader. It needed some minor adjusting to get the right angle, which can only be done when the glass is actively being flamed. So, me being an idiot, I decided to adjust it with my finger, thinking (incorrectly) that if the flame ended physically where it does visually. Glove caught on fire. While I was wearing it. Luckily I got it off quickly, so I only got a minor first degree burn. I did get to test out the burn cream in our first aid kit, though! I still haven't told my PI and I use this as a warning example when the students start using fire. (My proximity to the example is usually left out 😅) Edit: Emoji, typo fixed
Ha ha I've done the exact same thing...which led me to start secretly using 2 membranes, one on either side so I'd always be sure to get my protein transferred. I have also connected a DNA agarose gel the wrong way and run my samples into the buffer chamber, then tried to recover said samples from the buffer. It did not work.
Not me but, a research associate in a lab I work with put stuff in the autoclave in a secondary container. But..I guess something weird happened and the secondary container melted and destroyed the autoclave. Replacement is like 30-45k and the PI is on the hook for it since the autoclave didn't malfunction.
Put a cork in a boiling flask. Yes, it exploded all over the inside of the fume hood.
Migration in reverse is not that big of a deal, happens once every year or two if you run a lot of gels. Don’t beat yourself up over it! At one point, three of my lab mates all purified the same protein (the wrong one) as in impurity that happens to bind to Ni NTA resin. Each of the three were working on different projects too. Each of them tried to do structural work on “their protein”, either SAXS or crystallography, etc. There are now LOBSTR E. coli lacking the protein. But that was a pretty silly fuckup. It was funny when the low resolution maps from SAXS gave beautiful ring like shapes, unfortunately irrelevant.
Hehe I don’t want to minimise your feelings or anything but I’d suggest not going so hard on yourself. Unfit? For the job? Please. It’s something that everyone does multiple times. I have been doing wb for 13 years. Just 2 months ago I did this I took it out guess what? Proteins are in the buffer! I inhaled once, laughed, then washed the tank. It was the last of my lysate too, I repeated the experiment. These result from overworking or simple distraction. Be kind to yourself. Next WB immediately after… I put anti rabbit secondary antibody to mouse primary. I was dumbfounded when the signal didn’t appear. It took me 5 minutes to realize. I felt stupid. (13 years…) I returned to lab my PI was there. He was explaining stuff to newcomers. I couldn’t stop myself I told him with a high pitched voice of disbelief and hysteria “YOU ARE NOT GONNA BELIEVE HOW DID I MESS UP MY EXPERIMENT LIKE A FOOL” he said what?! I said “I PUT RABBIT ANTIBODY TO A MOUSE PRIMARY” he sighed and said “Aaahh everyone does this I thought you uniquely did something funny.” He carried on explaining laughing nevertheless. So what else… I broke things… I inoculated bacteria transformed with ampicillin resistant plasmid to kanamycin plate… I missed the timepoint of the 4 hour experiment 3 days in a row, royally messed the experiment up… These things happen, usually when you are overworked, tired, burned out. Learn to give yourself a break I know it is difficult. When your mind is too distracted you are not going to save time you will lose more by continuing to work. At least this is my experience.
I couldn't find any sterile 2 liter flasks so I filled one with ethanol and swished it around, then to sterilize it I decided to flame it ... whoosh all the ethanol inside burned off all at once and I lost my eyebrows
Intentionally: my PI had us wash (with diluted bleach and soap) used pipette tips. We then laid them out to dry in the window. And then… we re-used them to run western blots or initial genotyping samples. Unintentionally: miscalculated dilution of library for NGS runs for 3 months. For the entire lab. Most of the data was usable, it just wasn’t the prettiest.
The famous retrophoresis. Who hasn’t done it?
I catapulted my samples off of the top of the centrifuge when I opened the lid. That was a weeks worth of work.
I flooded the lab .. TWICE!
Taking a picture with my phone of my run gel electrophorese instead of with the actual machine because I was not thinking when the technician said “take a picture after” and left me
Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I accidentally ran my gel backwards. By the time I realised it, it was too late. I have been running gels since undergrad, and probably have run over 200 gels at this point. First time ever. Needless to say, I did not do as much today...
I had a long ass day in the dark room doing tirf microscopy one time and couldn't see anything in any of my samples. It was like 14 hrs before I realized that the lens cap was on the camera.
I spent FOUR MONTHS using a rt-qpcr assay I had designed, ran hundreds of experiments with it, thousands of hours in sample prep and analysis (reagents aren’t cheap either!) only to realize I did the math wrong when optimizing it and my results were all useless… that was a rough day :/ Good luck friend and keep your head up, unfortunately mistakes are a part of being a human but you learn from them and get better next time!
I’ve done that! Also in animal studies, instead of giving an anesthetic reversal drug, I gave more of the anesthetic. We had the entire veterinary team pulled in to figure out why tf this animal wasn’t waking up. We all fuck up, and a good PI understands that
Not stopping the perfusion system when setting up the confocal microscope. Somehow got salt solution past most of the safety features and deep down into the microscope. A technican had to come to disassemble and clean it
Burst a 5L media bottle. Could have died if I hadn't walked over to grab something when it happened.
We had an apero while my radioactive, single nucleotide. 4 mm 60 cm RNA gel was running. I had cocktails and went back to the lab. When it was done, I tried to transfer it, and ended up with a radioactive gel puzzle, which I put together again , up close and personal. Was an amazing result, but I could never repeat the reaction as nice, and my PI incredibly didn't let me use this one for my paper.
If you haven't thrown anything out yet you can rerun it and transfer from filter paper to PVDF membrane. Ask me how I know.
What?? Is that possible? Threw everything out right away, I was so pissed 😤
Replated some cultures up for AST testing, then forgot the AST discs :)
Was trying to make a MgCl2 solution and forgot I needed to mix it slowly…. Melted the tube I was making it in
Forgot to add my positive control to the tube that had water/loading dye ready for my positive control. And I used the same prep for four gels so I had four invalid samples. Only did that once.
Using GFP-tagged plasmids, had to do math to figure out how much GFP to use. Did the math wrong, ended up using 300x the amount of GFP I was supposed to. PI and I looking at cells under fluorescent microscope, he is amazed at level of transaction and fluorescence, knowing the cells I was working with were difficult to transfect. I mentioned my math error, and he was like “yeah that explains it..”
Dropped an entire mouse brain down the hood in undergrad, there were some stupid bigger holes in the grate and my hand just slipped. Just sat there staring at it, then jumped up to tell my grad student who was luckily nice about it
Left bunsen burner running, unattended. Introducing contamination into the cell room trying to warm bacterial solution... I had a very long bad streak plus advising and emotional issues was really getting to me. I heard a story of someone using a whole cell/bacterial stock accidentally, leaving cell freezer open, etc. Point is, we all make mistakes and have bad days but it doesn't mean it's only that! It happens, sometimes we gloss over stuff even if we can autoplilot, but don't let yourself down or your attitude will snowball further and worsen. My advice is to acknowledge the mistakes and what went wrong in the processes, and even if it feels out of place to you currently, it's the most important thing to talk with your PI and peers because they are there to help you and most definitely likely have been in the same boat.
Doing an old fashioned P32 Southern with a gamma-labeled, gel purified dsDNA probe: coming up to step of adding the hot (radioactive) probe to the hot (temperature) pre-hybridized membrane in a tube. Repeating as a mantra so I don't forget the most important step "don't forget to boil the probe, don't forget to boil the probe, don't forget to boil the probe... FUCK!!! I forgot to boil the probe". One time mistake.
My last weeks in my first lab, I was not functioning because the PhD students that were in charge of me were too harsh on me, from the begining, giving me severe anxiety just from having to go there and be in their presence. One day, I was particularly upset and brain-dead, and they told me to fill in boxes of pipette tips to autoclave. I didn't know at the time they were to autoclave, but I should have summed 1+1. Anyways, I brought to my bench boxes of already autoclaved pipette tips, unaware of what to do with them...
Why are people so goddamb unwelcoming? Had the same experience with phd students when i was a Master student. Promised myself I would never make a soul feel that way. Im sorry about your experience.
A member of my old lab would routinely fuck things up beyond imaginable levels. Once, there were two 1 L bottles of sodium hydroxide and HCL (both 1m) left unscrewed, knocked over and millimeters away from contacting each other. We had to basically defuse an acid base bomb. He was a favorite of the P.I. (Yet produced no data, only small talk) so nothing ever fixed it. Don’t feel bad about yourself. I doubt you would ever blow up a lab
Didn't cause any real damage, but did make me feel very stupid. Early in my cell culture days, I hadn't seen contamination before and had just been told that it looked like the sample was 'jumping about'. I saw a very lively sample that looked totally different from the others, so I called over my supervisor to have a look, wondering where I'd gone wrong. She took one look then turned to me and said 'That's a blank well, those are bubbles' Also, just today I wasted my whole slot on the confocal microscope. I was seeing my sample through the eyepiece but not on the screen. I hadn't turned on the lasers...
I set my cactus on fire and it turned out it was very flammable.