The Wannabe Biologists are bragging about all the expensive toys physicists get to play with . . . and break. Philip scratched a 2.5" diameter gold mirror. I guess glass isn't expensive enough for physicists. I don't think I've ever broken anything really expensive. Sure, I cracked some glassware in freshman chemlab -- which I had to pay for at the end of the semester. I've broken my share of vials, and I've even broken a few bottles. But none of those things are very expensive.
The only real expensive thing we have in our lab is an automated sequencer. I've never done any damage to the machine, but a lot of other labs share this piece of equipment. One time, an undergrad from another lab was using the sequencer and managed to break a brand new capillary array. When loading the machine you have to be really careful not to touch the sensitive array, which hovers dangerously inside the loading bay over the platform on which you set your samples. One miscue, and it's $1000 down the drain.
Another undergrad -- once again, from another lab using our space to do their molecular work -- dropped a bottle of ethidium bromide. You see, we train our undergrads well. Other labs, not so much. EtBr is used to visualize DNA in an electrophoresis gel because it fluoresces under ultraviolet light when it binds DNA. Its ability to bind DNA is believed to give it mutagenic properties. Anyway, around 100mL of diluted EtBr was spilled all over the floor. I put on a pair of gloves and mopped up the mess the best I could with paper towels. Curious to see how well the clean up went, we turned off the lights, closed to blinds, and busted out the hand-held UV lamp. Man, the floor lit up real good. I called EHS to ask what we should do about our little accident. The reply: nothing. Just don't lick the floor, I guess.
What's the best worst disaster that's happened to you while in lab? Ever break anything expensive? Leave your stories in the comments.
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I've never set foot in a university lab in my life, but there's plenty of stories from high school. Like the time I thought the magnesium ribbon had finished burning, so I threw it in the bin, where it promptly reignited.
Or the time one of my friends put a bung in a test tube containing a gas-producing reaction and the resulting spray of liquid as the bung was ejected started to dissolve the ceiling.
Or the time where the rubber tube came out of a bunsen burner I was trying to light and the end caught fire. The resulting whiplashing ribbon of flame set half the teacher's desk alight.
Or the time one of my other friends played the "let's mix everything up" game and got the building evacuated.
Come to think of it, maybe there's a reason none of us go near labs any more...
No awesome stories of massive rotor failure? I'm starting to think they're all just urban legends.
One time the rotor for our ultracentrifuge broke. I wasn't around when it happened, I just know I couldn't use the centrifuge for a few weeks. I don't think it was anything spectacular. Those things are so gigantic, I bet they contain any rotor failure.
I didn't do it myself, but I've seen a massive rotor failure. RPM is right, ultracentrifuges (today) are designed to contain failures. They're sheathed in armor plating, the thinnest part of which is the 3/4-inch-thick sliding door on top.
What happened was a brain fart. A student wanted to get 100,000 g. He set the rotor for 100,000 RPM. A dumb mistake, yeah, but it's the sort of thing it's easy to imagine oneself doing, when short on sleep and high on caffeine. The rotors have overspeed disks which are supposed to prevent them from going too fast, but in this case the system failed. The rotor was an SW41, as I recall, so it was rated up to 41,000 RPM, and it blew at 48,000 RPM. The ultracentrifuge basically got up and walked around the floor. A tech in the room turned it off and ran; I think I would have just run.
The interior chamber was converted to iron and titanium filings. Nothing in there was larger than dust. The rotor was gone altogether. (Here I'll note that I didn't see the chamber immediately on opening -- a Beckmann tech did all that, but that's the story I was told.) But -- amazingly -- the motor and most of the internals were still functional. Because the overspeed disk failed, the system was fixed under warranty!
Since then I've been very cautious about setting speeds, and all my students roll their eyes when I tell them how to handle an ultracentrifuge.
The "gold" mirror I think was really gold deposited, it might have cost a lot but not probably because of the gold. That may have cost a few dollars maybe. I can't remember the prices on them but they weren't cheap even 20 years ago.
I haven't directly broken anything grand, although I've had a few close calls with oil immersion scope objectives for coal petrography. Fortunately the ends of those actually depress in if you hit the sample, and pop back out again after. The oil helps cushion things if you hit the sample as well. But I've seen students ram air objectives straight through slides.
The real clanger was in high school, working with some really nice binocular biology scopes. One of the girls was taking the scope case out of the storage cupboard and didn't see that the door of the case wasn't latched. As she swung it out, the door opened and the microscope hurled itself onto the floor. Smashed the whole head off.
They did have a centrifuge go awol in my Geology lab at IU though. Nasty old clunker of a thing, benchtop size, but tended to wobble a lot. You had to watch it while it ran to make sure it didn't get close to the edge of the bench. Of course, someone left it one day and it happily walked off the edge of the bench.
Then again, the electron microprobe director always liked to blame my coal samples for causing carbon buildup in the gun and blowing out the filaments. The entire gun blew out once, but that was lightining strike, thanks to the fact our building ground was non-existent.
Worst disaster? Not monetary but emotional damage. Grad student in central Illinois, winter, late night, driving home sees fresh road kill, an opossum. Hey I can use that, it's fresh it's cold outside so it should be ok. Stops opens camper shell on the truck and tosses in dead opossum. Drives back to the lab. Opens camper and shines the flashlight around, where's the opossum? Damn, it got better. Imagine now, 2 AM on a cold winters night in central Illinois, angry severely wounded opossum, grad student (yes some beer was involved), blunt instrument, enclosed camper shell on pickup truck. Eventual result, marsupials added in analysis becoming the outgroup, thesis defended, degree awarded.
Corkscrew reminded me of my own high-school story.
After a seeing chem class demonstration of electrolysis and exploding soap bubbles I set up the same thing at home to play with it myself. A flask with a two-holed rubber stopper held water and acid, electrodes and a plastic tube leading to a bowl of soapy water. I was so entertained by the little hydrogen/oxygen explosions as I set off the bubbles with a match that I didn't notice the plastic hose float its way to the surface. The next bubble I set off blew the whole apparatus up. The top half of the flask was blown off and shattered on the ceiling. Scared the tar out me.
I was so impressed (boys love blowing sh*t up) that I built a new setup. This one filled milk cartons with h/O2 and, with a remote igniter, setting off booming (and safer outdoor) explosions.
My first summer working in a molecular population genetics lab a postdoc was showing me how to take a picture of a polyacrylamide gel which was soaking in a bath of EtBr. He managed to spill the EtBr on his pants and the floor.
I did come close to breaking our centrifuge a couple of times.