• Question: Have any of your experiments ever gone wrong, if so what was it and what went wrong?

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      Asked by Go Ruth! to John, Laura, Luke, Ruth on 22 Jun 2016.
      • Photo: Laura Finney

        Laura Finney answered on 22 Jun 2016:

        Yes! I once had a fire 🙁 An oil bath fire which is kind of like when a chip pan goes on fire. Luckily I managed to use a fire blanket to put it out before any of the alarms went off but it was very scary! I think other than an explosion, a fire is up there with about as wrong as a reaction can go!

      • Photo: Luke Williams

        Luke Williams answered on 22 Jun 2016:

        Oil baths are horrendous, poor you Laura! I just had one overheat and leak everywhere….overnight (over weekend?!) and somehow didn’t ignite. Still not sure how it didn’t ignite.

        I’ve managed to force an enzyme solution into a syringe so hard the whole thing just exploded all over my flow hood. Fortunately was inside the hood at the time so only the inside of the hood got coated rather than me and the lab. Its painful when that happens, as it takes a fair while to get to that stage.

        Lost count of the number of times I’ve knocked over a vial of my enzyme solution all over the bench – days, perhaps weeks of work wasted. Also left columns uncovered (meant to store them in liquid when not using them), needing me to throw out column after column.

        My final report will include experiments where I used the wrong buffers because I was too tired to think straight and use the right ones!

        Things go wrong all the time! Thankfully nothing quite like the acid gas cloud of doom that caused an evacuation of the chemistry dept a few years back.

      • Photo: Ruth Patchett

        Ruth Patchett answered on 22 Jun 2016:

        I have had LOTS that went wrong. It is something you just have to get used to when you do research and not get too upset.
        The worst I ever had was when I was using potassium as a reagent. It reacts VERY strongly with water so you have to be careful. The reaction itself went fine but I had a few tiny flakes of potassium to throw away like 0.01 grammes. We store it in a hydrocarbon liquid which is flammable to stop it reacting with water. Well…it caught fire, and the liquid it was in caught fire too. We had to evacuate the lab and the whole department which was very embarrassing. Luckily because of safety procedures there was actually very little damage, my workspace was very smoky but the only think that was damaged beyond repair was the flask that the fire was contained in. Phew!

      • Photo: John Fossey

        John Fossey answered on 23 Jun 2016:

        The best examples are where we predicted one thing would happen but we observe something different – indeed we have made molecules with excellent drug-like properties as a result of something going wrong / unexpected
        We are now looking at those results and trying to develop new pharmaceuticals to treat disease

        So nothing is every really wrong – we observe and learn and try to apply the new knowledge.

        We try very hard to avoid accidents and something going wrong in an accident sense could be quite terrible. As i said we are extremely careful in that regard and I hope nothing like that ever happens

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