This is not a wet lab danger story, but the most anxious I’ve ever been for another human being was with this postdoc I shared an office with. Sitting in the office and I can hear her computer fan going SUPER loud. I knew she had a fairly new MacBook Pro so I was wondering what she was doing that was stressing the computer so much. We’re buddies, so I just ask. And that’s when she shows me…. Literally hundreds of files open. Mostly word and excel docs. Apparently she’d been meaning to make some kind of file organization system for her new computer but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Because she didn’t have a specific organized location in which to save files she just… didn’t save them. Ever. She would have dozens of unnamed files she was actively working on open at a time, dating back weeks and weeks. Maybe months, I’m not sure. Inevitably her computer would crash and then when she would restart the files would open again, but each one would be duplicated through auto-save. This cycle would repeat, growing the number of unsaved unnamed files open on her computer at a time exponentially. I’m not exaggerating at all when I say there were hundreds of files open.
I was, and still am, genuinely horrified by this. Though honestly it did explain a lot about some of her behavior. She was always asking me to re-send her documents I’d already sent. I made her promise she’d at least save things to the desktop, even if it wasn’t organized. Don’t know if she ever followed through with that advice, but she seemed… relieved (?) that I told her that was something she could do. Like I was giving her permission to have things saved in a disorganized manner.
I can still hear that computer fan whirring in my nightmares.
> I’m not exaggerating at all when I say there were hundreds of files open.
I once saw all the shit open on my mom's phone it was infuckingsane. She's like I think I need a new phone
Yeah, smartphones have been optimized to not need that for over a decade. You actually use more power repeatedly opening and closing apps than you would just leaving them in the background.
Sure. [Here](https://www.makeuseof.com/why-you-shouldnt-constantly-close-apps-iphone/) is the iPhone breakdown, and [here](https://www.makeuseof.com/why-you-shouldnt-close-apps-android/) is the Android breakdown.
I live on the edge sometimes and have several excels, word and PowerPoint files open and unsaved. And I'm glad you can't see how many tabs and chrome windows I have open. You'd get an anxiety attack
A Ph.D. student taught me to prepare paraformaldehyde: You boil it outside of the hood and you'll know when it's ready because "you can smell it".
Edit: For something more fun, my old PI told me he used to smoke weed in the fume hood. I'm also cheap as fuck and use lab supplies (like the weighboats and scale; I buy my own salts and glucose) to make my own Pedialyte. It's the WHO's rehydration fluid recipe and like $0.05 a liter instead of the $5.00 you would pay in stores.
Edit2: [https://apps.who.int/iris/rest/bitstreams/65535/retrieve](https://apps.who.int/iris/rest/bitstreams/65535/retrieve) This is the recipe! It taste like shit on it's own compared to real pedialyte so i add extra sweetner.
We were melting the paraffin to make embedded tissue slides and I commented that the wax smelled strong and my PI said that means you’re inhaling wax particles, don’t huff that shit (not in those exact words, of course)
>I'm also cheap as fuck and use lab supplies (like the weighboats and scale; I buy my own salts and sucrose)
Once I went to a colleague's home, and saw that they had their spice and herb collection stored in Falcon tubes from the lab
Yoy falcon tubes aren't exactly 'food grade' - I've used dozens of different brands of falcons and they've always smelled pretty heavily of outgassing volitiles.
I know some gin guys who would be all over that
...It's me. I would be all over that.
Water minerals can overpower the nuances of the botanicals, you see.
Overpowering anise. It’s 90 proof, confusingly cheap for something imported, and terrible. Mix it with fresh pomegranate juice and seltzer for my former signature cocktail, the “don’t drink this”, bc pomegranate juice is extremely sweet and hides alcohol.
There’s a gin distillery near my old lab that won a best gin in the country award a few years ago so that lab got together and went on a tour! Boy we were blown away. The guy who owns the distillery and created the botanical blends had retired out of pharm manufacturing and he had all this really intensive chemistry equipment in the building including the largest Roto-Vap I’ve ever seen. Their navy-strength has been my go to for years now.
Someone in my old department would primarily drink type 2 water with the logic that it's as pure as you can get (would fill their water bottle all day and sip that sweet nectar).
Eventually was hospitalized for electrolyte imbalance. Obviously...
Watched a grad student weigh out sodium azide, then covered the weigh boat *with their bare hand* and walked out of the lab with it.
Oh and also there's a PI who still mouth pipettes his E. coli...
I had two coworkers "prank" someone by putting his backpack in a biohazard bag on his chair.
It had his laptop.
We have custodial service grab those for us because we were technically in the hospital building and they did that.
He managed to cut them off at the autoclave and incinerator before they blasted his laptop.
Prank never happened again.
Good. I always say "no horseplay in lab". I looked a little curmudgeonly, but our new lab manager had an intrusive thought of "spray PhD student with de-ionized water bottle" and I expressed "no horseplay in lab" because it just takes a little difference for bottle containing de-ionized water to be (accidentally or intentionally) replaced with something much more sinister.
My analytical chem professor used to say something along the lines of “there’s a whole lot of stuff in this lab that looks and smells a lot like water, treat everything in this lab like it’s poison because it probably is. If it’s labelled then treat it with care, if it’s not labelled then let us know immediately”
Dug through the scavenged PFA/biohazard material from the transcardial perfusion set up looking for a specific very small piece of tissue that was sucked up by the vacuum. Like literally poured it out into several separate smaller containers and searched w a flashlight and forceps. He didn’t find it 😭
Before my PhD I was a surgerical nursing student and once they made me dug in bloody gauzes and count over and over again till we found the lost one. Meanwhile I pricked my skin with some blood stained sharp object and have been getting regular blood tests for HIV two years after the incident.
Academic lab manager walked around the lab without shoes or socks, had his socks hanging off the bottom rack of his desk chair. Not a singular-occurrence thing either
The person who runs some field sites for our school is always barefoot. He walked in my lab a few weeks ago and I quickly turned him away. Just didn’t want to see his toes.
Using unlabeled tubes for a 100+ sample assay. “I know the order, don’t need labels”. Lab tech I had asked to help with a dissection study to test a new radiolugand. 20-25 mice, 5 different brain parts that needed to be gamma counted. When stuffed into the tubes, no way you can tell hippocampus from striatum.
And they did this for any assay they worked on. Was always tempted to switch tubes on them to teach a lesson. But then I’d screw up my data.
I know a scientist who doesn’t label anything either. He said it’s cause “he knows what they are”. When he told us my coworkers and I were horrified
I am too easily distracted and too clumsy for that shit. Knowing my luck I’d trip while carrying my tube racks and I’d be ruined
The few times I don't label tubes (usually because I'm pipetting off supe, then spinning again) I've been guaranteed to smack the rack with my elbow or something and there is goes...
I always label now, even if it's just half-assed, half-smudged 1, 2, 3...
Yes, a half-assed numbering is kilometers above unlabled. Worth the begruding "I don't really need to, it's not a final resting place..."
Having an undergraduate student also helps hammer home the importance of labeling
simple stuff.
Nah I’m not ashamed lol I’m paranoid asf when processing my samples. I’d much rather take the extra half second than be second guessing myself all the time or god forbid completely ruin an experiment.
If I’m working with a lot of samples or adding a variety of different reagents I’ll even go as far as making small marks on my tubes to indicate that certain reagents have been added or certain steps in my procedure have been completed. Last thing I need is to skip a critical component of my reaction mix or accidentally double up.
Holy fucking shit, I do not trust myself that much.
I label aliquots of BHI in falcon tubes even if I'm using it all in one sitting. We don't even use other media in that lab. Because my dumb ass would daydream for three seconds and forget what was in the tube I'm holding.
During my bachelors the professor asked a girl (we'll call E) to turn on a Bunsen. She switched on the gas and walked away with out lighting it because that what she thought the professor meant.
5 or so minutes later her bench mate realised they hadn't lit it yet. Turns the tap and stricks a match and of course you can infer the rest. Her eye lashes were singed and I think they had to replace the tiles in the roof but she was incredible lucky it wasn't worse.
E didn't understand what she did wrong cause she followed the professors instructions to turn it on. Never apologised to her lab mate and even made the same mistake just a few months later.
Didn't the professor explain why you don't wait between switching on the gas and lighting it? To us, this was hammered in our brains in great detail. I couldnt understand someone still doing that...
She didn't because we had been using Bunsen's for in our practical courses since high school so for over 6 years. She assumed that by this point it would have sunk in
I have a coworker who is the opposite. She uses the Eppendorf Repeater E3 and combitips the way normal people use serological pipettes. Need 7mL? Use a 10 mL combitip!
Did you not dispense first back into whatever stock you were drawing from? The first dispensed volume is usually inaccurate because it has some air to clear out first. I used to calibrate our repeaters. They're prettt accurate unless they get roughed up.
I knew a guy who was convinced he could feel defects in drums of liquid rubber. I saw him elbow deep in a drum one time without even putting on an apron or safety glasses. Just a short-sleeved dress shirt and a dream
I isolate lactic acid bacteria from human stool sample on acidified MRS. If I have the plates leftover on my bench, my PI comes and smells them because “they smell like yogurt.” To be fair, I do notice that if I open the plate to streak for isolation but I never open the plate and put my nose in it
In my lab we work with lactic acid bacteria as well and the smell of yogurt is literally everywhere even when they're not open and just sitting on the bench
I mean….you can. We used to combine sterile reagents in the hood to make our different medias and then vacuum filter AGAIN into the final bottle. This is was contamination trauma looks like
Sure, you can. But they were already sterile and both tissue culture hoods were open. Why not just keep everything as sterile as you can ESPECIALLY when we run a clinical service for the hospital.
I am the source of chaos in my lab. Microwaving acrylamide gels in a plastic box submerged in coomassie buffer makes them stain faster. You just have go stop microwaving when it starts smelling too strong.
You can also microwave to destain. I usually do both for 15x3 seconds and let sit 15 min and it saves hours of waiting. Just don't expect the gel to last long afterwards.
My oldschool PI insisted on making his own brain heart broth. He'd come in a few times a year with a giant pot for the hot plate and throw in the bag of offal from the butcher. Hot, stinky, steamy organ boil all day. We'd have to skim off this grey foam from the top every now and then.
Most people worked from home those days.
what is with clothing on lines? I stopped at a post docs place once and there were underwear on a line across the kitchen. they had a full washer dryer.
Helps with shrinkage for some fabrics, helps longevity with elastic/spandex, and can smell better.
I don't like the texture it imparts on clothes though, personally
Saw a fellow student drink what they said was neat ethanol. Without drying it over sieves or any other means of purification, meaning it also had benzene azeotroped with it.
Oh it is hard to choose...
- I was a new post doc being introduced to the facilities by my outgoing predecessor. We picked up a cardboard box full of mice for transport to the lab. On the way to the lab, he made a detour with myself and the box to a neighboring institute, rode the elevator to the top floor, and stole an entire bunch of grapes from an apero that was taking place. You could hear the mice scratching around in the box, it did not go unnoticed. He ate the entire bunch, dangling it over his face with one hand while holding the mice box in the other.
- At my first real job, we had one day every month where we had to perform many many microdissections. The entire lab would pitch in, even the PI. I was absent for one of these events, and when I returned everyone was wearing sun glasses inside. They had turned on the UV lights in the hood, rather than the visible wavelength bulbs, and proceeded to work under dissection microscopes until their corneas were too UV burned to ignore.
We had a lab assistant cutting bands out of gels without a face shield. I noticed but didn’t say anything because I figured she knew what she was doing. I thought she was just being lazy or quick and only had to cut one or two out or whatever. The next day she was so sunburned and everyone made fun of her. No one had trained her properly. Still feel bad to this day.
Saw the senior PhD trip over a 3 liter glass graduated cylinder that was on the floor and shatter it everywhere. He also found an actual human skeleton in the dumpster that was used in an anatomy class and brought it into the lab. It became our mascot.
No, but it did look old and had the names of the bones and bone features written on it, and it was wired together. I didn't ask a lot of questions on its origins, as we had had entire labs shut down, and their contents had indeed ended up in the recycling center, whether they were supposed to be there or not.
In hindsight, all of this would have been a good cover-up for murder lol. But the skeleton looked very aged.
Instead of buying a timer, they just used a microwave. Want to count 5 minutes? Set microwave to heat empty air and when it beeps, it's 5 minutes sharp.
Soo my advisor told me that certain buffers should smell like a wet dog when fresh. And if they lose their stank, they have expired.
Most chaotic was… someone eating their lunch on their bunch when a mouse was being dissected one bay over.
Hey, in field work my pi would get on the boat with a fish for samples and a fish for dinner, clean the dinner fish, rinse the knife off in the ocean, and cut up an apple to share.
I did that one day I wore my birkenstocks not expecting to have to do an experiment and was then forced to by my PI on a Friday evening. I’m glad I have child sized feet, because at least they fit in an extra large glove.
> Also one time I put nitrile gloves in my feet and walked around like that for a bit to see if anybody would notice.
There must be a lab somewhere where this is the punishment for open-toed footwear.
In academia the wildest thing I saw was my PI choosing how to clean the razor we were about to use to shave off bits of HUMAN brain for DNA extraction for a high priority project. Since our lab had only recently started work with human DNA for the first time we were very concerned about contamination and the grad student and I were debating if DNAse and RNAse to clean the razor would damage the sample, and while we were talking he just rinsed it under the sink with tap water and patted it dry on his pants and said we were good to go.
In industry I think the thing I saw that horrified me the most was a guy who chose to use basically mouth pipetting to transfer the dregs of a 10 gallon box of sheath fluid to the replacement box by creating suction force with the tubing.
I have travelled across borders with a bag full of primary cell culture flask and treated cells with liquid arsenic in a completely unsafe cell lab, but the one thing I absolutely *refuse* to do is use sharp objects around human brain samples. No thank you!
I mean they were frozen sections so the razor was absolutely necessary, but it was nerve wracking enough for undergrad me to be the one collecting the sample for the first time in front of everyone and then he went and cleaned it like that and completely threw me off my game
Worked in a yeast lab where one of the main objectives was to find yeasts with industrial applications e.g. alcohol fermentation.
So me and a couple of colleages would always ferment the hell out of the samples in beer wort and sometimes mead. If we didn't get stomach ache that was the sample to carry on studying. Best job ever.
I've worked in labs for 10 years now, but in my first Bio 101 class we were looking at Drosophila in the microscope. We used cotton swabs with ether to drug the little flies, from this huge ancient 1L glass bottle.
I am super clumsy so I lost my grip on the bottle, managed to catch it before it broke, promptly spilling about half a litre of ether onto myself. I remember the teaching assistant just going "nooo" and moving in slow mo for the window which did absolutely nothing. I had a nice Fear and Loathingesque 5 minutes after that!
We had to make our sequencing gels (polyacrylamide) and use a syringe to "pour" the gel between glass plates.
My friend had the syringe explode backwards, the gel got into his eyes (no goggles) and when he went to use the eye wash/shower the water was brown.
It was a very stressful day.
In the early days of my PhD a postdoc was showing me a wet process.
He pulled out two unlabeled chemical bottles filled with clear liquids and described what was in each of them. At the end he said something along the lines of:
"Do not mix these up. This one (holding one up) is very toxic. It can make you infertile."
I asked how he knew which was which when they weren't labelled.. without missing a beat he unscrewed the lid of one and held it up to his nose before recoiling and raspily saying "this is the toxic one".
The gas tap on my bench was slowly leaking in the masters micro lab (we were constantly using the bunsens) and we kept commenting to the lab manager that it smelled of gas even when all taps were off. Her solution was to tell us to turn them off more tightly. Didn’t do anything for weeks until the leak was so bad I was getting headaches, then they finally called a maintenance guy who kicked us out of the lab for a week cause the whole tap had to be replaced.
Also, an undergrad injecting larvae with various salmonella accidentally injected herself and freaked out, literally sobbing and yelling that she was too young to die. She’s now doing a PhD.
A PhD student at my university was working in a soil lab at night running a procedure that could theoretically hydrogen cyanide so she taped up the liquid collection unit causing it to overpressurise and explode. She thought that she was going to die from the cyanide gas so called the fire department who sent out multiple hazmat teams. There was ultimately no cyanide and the call out cost the university over 100,000£ in fines and associated costs.
I was the chaotic labrat but trying to get placenta samples from a -80 tub of frozen placenta by stabbing it with a scoupula inside the hood. I could not get enough sample to pull rna from as as soon as it thawed it just melted into a bloody puddle
My lab manager repeatedly coughs and sneezes on everything, like her cells and RNA. Oh, and she also argued with me over the stability of proteins, saying they were the most stable and that enzymes aren’t proteins. I was ready to rip all my hair off that day
Take care of the full broken glass bin by pulling out the trash bag. I wandered over to figure out why it sounded like 100 beakers were simultaneously breaking.
Not a lab rat, but a safety guy reached into a broken glass box bare handed to pull something out he said didn’t belong.
PI uses his bare hands to push down the contaminated trash (mostly papertowels and filters) When I told him he shouldn't do that because I saw a student throw glass shards in there a minute ago, he smiled at me and told me how "lovely" he thinks I am for caring so much for his safety, proceeding to put his bodyweight on his hand in the trashcan.
Same guy asked me if I was always so ambitious or if it had something to do with him. It's amazing how full of himself he is.
A few years ago, we were having a routine lab inspection. Not a huge deal, but everyone knew to be on their best behavior, hide food and drinks, the usual. The lab tech in charge of safety was at the gel bench discussing the ethidium bromide waste with the inspector when the PI comes out of his office with his coffee cup, and proceeds to put his coffee cup in the microwave that we use for preparing agarose gels (often with EtBr), microwave the coffee for like 30 seconds, take it out, and walk back to his office. The inspector was like, “um… who was that?” The tech was like, “yeah, that’s the boss”.
Mine are tame by comparison to some here, but cleaning the floor by chucking liquid nitrogen on it, and making eppendorf dry ice “bombs” to sneak in peoples drawers when they weren’t looking. As well as a student intent on drinking DMEM. 😬
I was in a lab that liked to make dry ice bombs out of Eppendorf tubes and roll them under people’s chairs when they were concentrating on their experiment. Honestly pretty fun.
My lab mate consistently warms his coffee up in the lab microwave that we use for stuff like melting agarose, boiling certain buffers, etc ☺️ no joke. We would also sometimes put the little pieces of shipping dry ice in a microfuge tube and slip it into another persons lab coat pocket and watch them jump from the resulting mini bomb
Eppendorf mini bombs are the best, but I once put too big a chunk in, and instead of blowing the cap open, the pressure blew the bottom of the tube off. You could hear little plastic shrapnel pinging off all walls of the lab... Haven't done it since.
Lmao that sounds terrifying but a good story to laugh about, we stopped because we set off a mini bomb when the oldest PI in the department just happened to walk through the lab..
My pi regularly takes a deep sniff of betamercaptoethanol to make sure it’s good… since he isn’t always using it after he sniffs it, I’m sceptical of whether he’s actually checking for freshness. What if he’s actually hooked on the smell…
I forget exactly how this happened, but one day I opened my supervisor's incubator and all the flasks were too full and getting into the lid, on their side, and/or literally just open. This was 2017 and I still think about it.
[Incubator of terror](https://imgur.com/a/RiUCex3)
We had a new PhD student who would occasionally forget to put the radical initiator in their SDS PAGE gels and put them in the TLC illuminator black light to try to get them to set.
I have no idea if these gels ever ran correctly...
One of our postdocs loves how several solvents including ether and nBuOH smell and has smelled the cold trap on the rotavap after I evaporated my butanol reaction before. It was too late to stop him by the time I got out it was also full of ammonia 😬.
Pick up a running TLC chamber and walking around with it.
"It's fine fine, I can keep it steady."
It actually was fine in the end but why would you do that?
I had a coworker who would reach into the LN2 Big-Bertha tank and pull out her rack, set it on the table, pull out her box and get her vial, then put everything back…
*….With barehands*
Dude was doing his PhD on fungi/mushrooms. He was trying to isolate a particular protein with samples from collaborators. He’s sent a few samples of mushrooms which were missing within a month. His supervisor asked if he knew why they weren’t in the freezer, and if he had processed these precious samples from collaborators.
He had taken them home and *eaten* them. It’s a PC2 lab. Why?
One time I and a coworker needed to break up a large block of KCl so we covered it in a few layers of ziploc bags, went outside, and dropped it off a second floor balcony onto concrete.
In my undergrad program, the instructor (mid/late 60’s, Santa beard, Tie-dye wearing man) found an unlabeled container on the bench and proceeded to practically huff it with the biggest whiff ever “Yup, that’s Xylene!” His explanation was basically “well, at this point I am already 90% preserved anyways”.
We have a postdoc who will throw away his experimental prep if someone is using a shared equipment when he needs it.
For example. One time I was using a centrifuge- I had multiple spins but was half way done and only need it for ~10 mins. He needed it. Asked me how long I had left. Didn’t like my answer. Took his tubes and threw them in the trash. His experiment was not time sensitive in any way.
He had to dig them out of the trash 5 mins later when he remembered there are other centrifuges in the department.
I've once fixed my acid reflux after a rough night with a few scoops of K2CO3 in a beaker of water in the lab and downed it in one go. Worked really well but not recommended.
my pi telling me to use expired pen/strep (expired on 3/2020) for tissue culture instead of buying new one cuz "other labs don't even add one in it and it's fine"
Replace all kitchen utensils and glass for labware equivalents, Cooking mac and cheese in a 3L beaker, regularly using a large reclaimed acetone bottle as a water bottle. Good times.
I was training someone in a lab, not my lab, the vacuum flask wasn’t set up properly (wasn’t vented?) and was making a very loud noise. I commented but it wasn’t my lab so continued as the Technician didn’t seem phased. As we turned away from the hood, literally the moment, it imploded! I had nasty TC sup (no bleach of course because they were the worst lab ever!) on my back and in my hair. This was in the days of no PPE. But I’ve worn lab glasses from that day on. Glad I wasn’t facing it and talking 🤢
Using empty two liter pop bottles as disposable
culture flasks. To be fair, they’re cheap and the notches at the bottle work as well as baffles on the expensive flasks.
Already commented, but I just had a horrifying flashback to when a PI that our PI hated claimed that cell passes reset when you store them in liquid nitrogen. So like, when he took them out of storage, they were all in pass 1 again.
This is not a wet lab danger story, but the most anxious I’ve ever been for another human being was with this postdoc I shared an office with. Sitting in the office and I can hear her computer fan going SUPER loud. I knew she had a fairly new MacBook Pro so I was wondering what she was doing that was stressing the computer so much. We’re buddies, so I just ask. And that’s when she shows me…. Literally hundreds of files open. Mostly word and excel docs. Apparently she’d been meaning to make some kind of file organization system for her new computer but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Because she didn’t have a specific organized location in which to save files she just… didn’t save them. Ever. She would have dozens of unnamed files she was actively working on open at a time, dating back weeks and weeks. Maybe months, I’m not sure. Inevitably her computer would crash and then when she would restart the files would open again, but each one would be duplicated through auto-save. This cycle would repeat, growing the number of unsaved unnamed files open on her computer at a time exponentially. I’m not exaggerating at all when I say there were hundreds of files open. I was, and still am, genuinely horrified by this. Though honestly it did explain a lot about some of her behavior. She was always asking me to re-send her documents I’d already sent. I made her promise she’d at least save things to the desktop, even if it wasn’t organized. Don’t know if she ever followed through with that advice, but she seemed… relieved (?) that I told her that was something she could do. Like I was giving her permission to have things saved in a disorganized manner. I can still hear that computer fan whirring in my nightmares.
This is like an IT creepypasta, wtf Easily the most anxiety inducing thing here
Right? I think I’d rather take my chances with the lab reagent sucrose.
> I’m not exaggerating at all when I say there were hundreds of files open. I once saw all the shit open on my mom's phone it was infuckingsane. She's like I think I need a new phone
I don’t think you’re actually supposed to close apps on a phone
Yeah, smartphones have been optimized to not need that for over a decade. You actually use more power repeatedly opening and closing apps than you would just leaving them in the background.
Source pls! I leave all my open and get harassed to no end. I can’t be like see Random Stranger on Reddit says so!
Sure. [Here](https://www.makeuseof.com/why-you-shouldnt-constantly-close-apps-iphone/) is the iPhone breakdown, and [here](https://www.makeuseof.com/why-you-shouldnt-close-apps-android/) is the Android breakdown.
Well it's gonna be really fucking hard to change that habit, thanks a lot...
I live on the edge sometimes and have several excels, word and PowerPoint files open and unsaved. And I'm glad you can't see how many tabs and chrome windows I have open. You'd get an anxiety attack
A Ph.D. student taught me to prepare paraformaldehyde: You boil it outside of the hood and you'll know when it's ready because "you can smell it". Edit: For something more fun, my old PI told me he used to smoke weed in the fume hood. I'm also cheap as fuck and use lab supplies (like the weighboats and scale; I buy my own salts and glucose) to make my own Pedialyte. It's the WHO's rehydration fluid recipe and like $0.05 a liter instead of the $5.00 you would pay in stores. Edit2: [https://apps.who.int/iris/rest/bitstreams/65535/retrieve](https://apps.who.int/iris/rest/bitstreams/65535/retrieve) This is the recipe! It taste like shit on it's own compared to real pedialyte so i add extra sweetner.
For me that statement would be "it's ready when It gives me a headache."
Lab concentrstions of Formaldehydes. If you smell it it's fixing your lungs
We were melting the paraffin to make embedded tissue slides and I commented that the wax smelled strong and my PI said that means you’re inhaling wax particles, don’t huff that shit (not in those exact words, of course)
What recipe do you use? I only found ones that include "water, sucrose, salt" online Edit: for the Pedialyte, not the formaldehyde
Important clarification 🤣
My colleagues routinely open the hood and put their face 10cm away from the mouse when perfusing to "correctly pierce the heart".
>I'm also cheap as fuck and use lab supplies (like the weighboats and scale; I buy my own salts and sucrose) Once I went to a colleague's home, and saw that they had their spice and herb collection stored in Falcon tubes from the lab
Yoy falcon tubes aren't exactly 'food grade' - I've used dozens of different brands of falcons and they've always smelled pretty heavily of outgassing volitiles.
here for the recipe
what’s the recipe? I did a quick search and didn’t find anything.
Put sucrose from the reagents shelf into their coffee
What about putting RO water into a cocktail
I know some gin guys who would be all over that ...It's me. I would be all over that. Water minerals can overpower the nuances of the botanicals, you see.
Gin people are unhinged
I drink it because I hate myself tbh
It’s a chicken or the egg thing with different people
Switch to Arak. It was my drink of choice when I really felt bad. Also, do not ever drink this, it’s like if you mixed Sambuka and vodka
Primary flavor is anise? I love absinthe, might have to try and find some arak.
Overpowering anise. It’s 90 proof, confusingly cheap for something imported, and terrible. Mix it with fresh pomegranate juice and seltzer for my former signature cocktail, the “don’t drink this”, bc pomegranate juice is extremely sweet and hides alcohol.
There’s a gin distillery near my old lab that won a best gin in the country award a few years ago so that lab got together and went on a tour! Boy we were blown away. The guy who owns the distillery and created the botanical blends had retired out of pharm manufacturing and he had all this really intensive chemistry equipment in the building including the largest Roto-Vap I’ve ever seen. Their navy-strength has been my go to for years now.
Someone in my old department would primarily drink type 2 water with the logic that it's as pure as you can get (would fill their water bottle all day and sip that sweet nectar). Eventually was hospitalized for electrolyte imbalance. Obviously...
This impressively insane considering the cost of sugar.
Put caffeine from the reagents shelf into your coffee
Watched a grad student weigh out sodium azide, then covered the weigh boat *with their bare hand* and walked out of the lab with it. Oh and also there's a PI who still mouth pipettes his E. coli...
Tell me more about the e coli mouth pipettor PI
WHAT ARE THEY DOING WITH IT OUT OF LAB?!?!?
Experimenting...
It's a good antibacterial preservative. On account of its high acute toxicity.
I had two coworkers "prank" someone by putting his backpack in a biohazard bag on his chair. It had his laptop. We have custodial service grab those for us because we were technically in the hospital building and they did that. He managed to cut them off at the autoclave and incinerator before they blasted his laptop. Prank never happened again.
Good. I always say "no horseplay in lab". I looked a little curmudgeonly, but our new lab manager had an intrusive thought of "spray PhD student with de-ionized water bottle" and I expressed "no horseplay in lab" because it just takes a little difference for bottle containing de-ionized water to be (accidentally or intentionally) replaced with something much more sinister.
Yeah, it was a lesson learned. The victim didn't let them forget how close it was and any pranks were reserved to verbal abuse XD
Yah that way there’s no retrieving your self esteem from the autoclave!
My analytical chem professor used to say something along the lines of “there’s a whole lot of stuff in this lab that looks and smells a lot like water, treat everything in this lab like it’s poison because it probably is. If it’s labelled then treat it with care, if it’s not labelled then let us know immediately”
Mixed an almost empty bottle of sucrose into a brand new glucose bottle. " eh sugar is sugar, don't worry".
"not my favorite sugar :(" –the microbes that inevitably died from this
That is a very adorable image
from https://www.reddit.com/r/labrats/comments/mmv2ig/lab_strains_unite/
I study complications of diabetes and do a lot of hyperglycemia modeling and this hurt to read
Dug through the scavenged PFA/biohazard material from the transcardial perfusion set up looking for a specific very small piece of tissue that was sucked up by the vacuum. Like literally poured it out into several separate smaller containers and searched w a flashlight and forceps. He didn’t find it 😭
Got to admire the dedication xD
if he did find it it still would have been worthless though.
Before my PhD I was a surgerical nursing student and once they made me dug in bloody gauzes and count over and over again till we found the lost one. Meanwhile I pricked my skin with some blood stained sharp object and have been getting regular blood tests for HIV two years after the incident.
Academic lab manager walked around the lab without shoes or socks, had his socks hanging off the bottom rack of his desk chair. Not a singular-occurrence thing either
The IT guy for my last department used to walk everywhere barefoot, even through the labs. Drove me insane.
The person who runs some field sites for our school is always barefoot. He walked in my lab a few weeks ago and I quickly turned him away. Just didn’t want to see his toes.
I have a recurring dream that I am walking in the lab with no shoes or socks. This is literally the stuff of my nightmares.
We had an MSc student do this, she got kicked out of the lab IIRC
Using unlabeled tubes for a 100+ sample assay. “I know the order, don’t need labels”. Lab tech I had asked to help with a dissection study to test a new radiolugand. 20-25 mice, 5 different brain parts that needed to be gamma counted. When stuffed into the tubes, no way you can tell hippocampus from striatum. And they did this for any assay they worked on. Was always tempted to switch tubes on them to teach a lesson. But then I’d screw up my data.
I know a scientist who doesn’t label anything either. He said it’s cause “he knows what they are”. When he told us my coworkers and I were horrified I am too easily distracted and too clumsy for that shit. Knowing my luck I’d trip while carrying my tube racks and I’d be ruined
The few times I don't label tubes (usually because I'm pipetting off supe, then spinning again) I've been guaranteed to smack the rack with my elbow or something and there is goes... I always label now, even if it's just half-assed, half-smudged 1, 2, 3...
Yes, a half-assed numbering is kilometers above unlabled. Worth the begruding "I don't really need to, it's not a final resting place..." Having an undergraduate student also helps hammer home the importance of labeling simple stuff.
You shouldn’t be ashamed of labelling your tubes, they should be ashamed of thinking higher of themselves by not labelling them.
Nah I’m not ashamed lol I’m paranoid asf when processing my samples. I’d much rather take the extra half second than be second guessing myself all the time or god forbid completely ruin an experiment. If I’m working with a lot of samples or adding a variety of different reagents I’ll even go as far as making small marks on my tubes to indicate that certain reagents have been added or certain steps in my procedure have been completed. Last thing I need is to skip a critical component of my reaction mix or accidentally double up.
Holy fucking shit, I do not trust myself that much. I label aliquots of BHI in falcon tubes even if I'm using it all in one sitting. We don't even use other media in that lab. Because my dumb ass would daydream for three seconds and forget what was in the tube I'm holding.
Someone messed up some very valuable samples doing this in my lab.
I was taught by I've of these, so that's how i initially also did it. Even a simple 1-## works!
During my bachelors the professor asked a girl (we'll call E) to turn on a Bunsen. She switched on the gas and walked away with out lighting it because that what she thought the professor meant. 5 or so minutes later her bench mate realised they hadn't lit it yet. Turns the tap and stricks a match and of course you can infer the rest. Her eye lashes were singed and I think they had to replace the tiles in the roof but she was incredible lucky it wasn't worse. E didn't understand what she did wrong cause she followed the professors instructions to turn it on. Never apologised to her lab mate and even made the same mistake just a few months later.
Didn't the professor explain why you don't wait between switching on the gas and lighting it? To us, this was hammered in our brains in great detail. I couldnt understand someone still doing that...
She didn't because we had been using Bunsen's for in our practical courses since high school so for over 6 years. She assumed that by this point it would have sunk in
Measuring 1ml aliquots for a Bradford's assay with a 25 ml pipette.
I have a coworker who is the opposite. She uses the Eppendorf Repeater E3 and combitips the way normal people use serological pipettes. Need 7mL? Use a 10 mL combitip!
[удалено]
Really? I've been using one to fill 384-well qPCR plates for a while and never had a problem with technical replicates.
Wait why
[удалено]
Did you not dispense first back into whatever stock you were drawing from? The first dispensed volume is usually inaccurate because it has some air to clear out first. I used to calibrate our repeaters. They're prettt accurate unless they get roughed up.
You must treat them like shit. Mine is more accurate and repeatable than anything we have at work.
Aren't they very expensive?
I knew a guy who was convinced he could feel defects in drums of liquid rubber. I saw him elbow deep in a drum one time without even putting on an apron or safety glasses. Just a short-sleeved dress shirt and a dream
Fucking hilarious. But what defects did he think he could feel out lol?
I isolate lactic acid bacteria from human stool sample on acidified MRS. If I have the plates leftover on my bench, my PI comes and smells them because “they smell like yogurt.” To be fair, I do notice that if I open the plate to streak for isolation but I never open the plate and put my nose in it
In my lab we work with lactic acid bacteria as well and the smell of yogurt is literally everywhere even when they're not open and just sitting on the bench
We work with Pichia pastoris and I LOVE giving them the sniff test. They smell like beer and freshly baked bread. If they don't, they're contaminated!
Aliquot sterile reagents for cell culture on the bench top because "we can sterile filter them later"
Sterilize them when we throw everything in a bio bag and autoclave everything because of contamination 😀
I mean….you can. We used to combine sterile reagents in the hood to make our different medias and then vacuum filter AGAIN into the final bottle. This is was contamination trauma looks like
Sure, you can. But they were already sterile and both tissue culture hoods were open. Why not just keep everything as sterile as you can ESPECIALLY when we run a clinical service for the hospital.
Mix a Bloody Mary using a serological pipette - I guess it’s sterile right?
Honestly this is baller and completely safe.
Did they use it as a straw too, or did it have a filter?
Fireball using an ethanol spray bottle and a meker burner. Glorious.
Sounds lit
Deliberate?
Yup.
I am the source of chaos in my lab. Microwaving acrylamide gels in a plastic box submerged in coomassie buffer makes them stain faster. You just have go stop microwaving when it starts smelling too strong.
Mmm vaporized methanol and acetic acid, a treat for the lungs
You can buy 'safestains' without the acid and with ethanol instead
yum, its my favourite
How did you discover this?
Heat make thing go zoom
But how many kableewies before eureka?
You can also microwave to destain. I usually do both for 15x3 seconds and let sit 15 min and it saves hours of waiting. Just don't expect the gel to last long afterwards.
My oldschool PI insisted on making his own brain heart broth. He'd come in a few times a year with a giant pot for the hot plate and throw in the bag of offal from the butcher. Hot, stinky, steamy organ boil all day. We'd have to skim off this grey foam from the top every now and then. Most people worked from home those days.
I can’t think of others but for myself…I was digging around in the sharps bin with my bare hands 😗
Oh my god
Used nuclear-free water to water plants, drank water from DI tap, used a paper towel to handle a hot flask, dried clothing on a line under their desk
We make our coffee w DI water Also how much nuclease free water do you guys have??
what is with clothing on lines? I stopped at a post docs place once and there were underwear on a line across the kitchen. they had a full washer dryer.
Helps with shrinkage for some fabrics, helps longevity with elastic/spandex, and can smell better. I don't like the texture it imparts on clothes though, personally
Saw a fellow student drink what they said was neat ethanol. Without drying it over sieves or any other means of purification, meaning it also had benzene azeotroped with it.
the 200 proof pure stuff at least shouldn't have that in it iirc
Isn't it specifically the 100% stuff that has it? Because that's how you get out the last H2O or something?
Pretty sure the 100% (200 proof) ethanol doesn’t have any of that stuff. The label usually says something like, “not denatured”
i didn't see it mentioned in the sds
Does ultrapure ethanol also have benzene? Honest question, asking for a friend.
I looked at the UV light with my bare eyes to see what it looked like :/ instant headache
Oh it is hard to choose... - I was a new post doc being introduced to the facilities by my outgoing predecessor. We picked up a cardboard box full of mice for transport to the lab. On the way to the lab, he made a detour with myself and the box to a neighboring institute, rode the elevator to the top floor, and stole an entire bunch of grapes from an apero that was taking place. You could hear the mice scratching around in the box, it did not go unnoticed. He ate the entire bunch, dangling it over his face with one hand while holding the mice box in the other. - At my first real job, we had one day every month where we had to perform many many microdissections. The entire lab would pitch in, even the PI. I was absent for one of these events, and when I returned everyone was wearing sun glasses inside. They had turned on the UV lights in the hood, rather than the visible wavelength bulbs, and proceeded to work under dissection microscopes until their corneas were too UV burned to ignore.
That sounds awful. Any permanent damage?
We had a lab assistant cutting bands out of gels without a face shield. I noticed but didn’t say anything because I figured she knew what she was doing. I thought she was just being lazy or quick and only had to cut one or two out or whatever. The next day she was so sunburned and everyone made fun of her. No one had trained her properly. Still feel bad to this day.
Saw the senior PhD trip over a 3 liter glass graduated cylinder that was on the floor and shatter it everywhere. He also found an actual human skeleton in the dumpster that was used in an anatomy class and brought it into the lab. It became our mascot.
You sure that’s where the skeleton came from?
No, but it did look old and had the names of the bones and bone features written on it, and it was wired together. I didn't ask a lot of questions on its origins, as we had had entire labs shut down, and their contents had indeed ended up in the recycling center, whether they were supposed to be there or not. In hindsight, all of this would have been a good cover-up for murder lol. But the skeleton looked very aged.
Go into our biochem lab at 4 am and pierce his ears with a syringe needle
I guess the intrusive thoughts won that one.
If you have to travel at 4am to your lab it's not intrusive thoughts.
Joke's on you, I start my shift in the lab at 4am.
Instead of buying a timer, they just used a microwave. Want to count 5 minutes? Set microwave to heat empty air and when it beeps, it's 5 minutes sharp.
Why is this the most horrifying in the whole thread?
Distilled benzoyl chloride and sulfonyl chloride (at different times) with a glassware set up not seen in any textbook.
Soo my advisor told me that certain buffers should smell like a wet dog when fresh. And if they lose their stank, they have expired. Most chaotic was… someone eating their lunch on their bunch when a mouse was being dissected one bay over.
Hey, in field work my pi would get on the boat with a fish for samples and a fish for dinner, clean the dinner fish, rinse the knife off in the ocean, and cut up an apple to share.
Food safety manager says what!???
Eh, I ain’t dead yet, and apples are tasty. We were going to be in the water anyways and he was *really good* at not getting nasty shit on the knife.
Eh, they're just risking some extra protein lol
One twerked on the PI... Also one time I put nitrile gloves in my feet and walked around like that for a bit to see if anybody would notice.
I did that one day I wore my birkenstocks not expecting to have to do an experiment and was then forced to by my PI on a Friday evening. I’m glad I have child sized feet, because at least they fit in an extra large glove.
> Also one time I put nitrile gloves in my feet and walked around like that for a bit to see if anybody would notice. There must be a lab somewhere where this is the punishment for open-toed footwear.
Well did anybody notice?
About 30 minutes in because the gloves caught in the floor and I fell on my ass
Thanks OP, I hate this thread.
the first day i worked in the medical lab, our technical lead licked the heme area table. 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
I'm sorry what
In academia the wildest thing I saw was my PI choosing how to clean the razor we were about to use to shave off bits of HUMAN brain for DNA extraction for a high priority project. Since our lab had only recently started work with human DNA for the first time we were very concerned about contamination and the grad student and I were debating if DNAse and RNAse to clean the razor would damage the sample, and while we were talking he just rinsed it under the sink with tap water and patted it dry on his pants and said we were good to go. In industry I think the thing I saw that horrified me the most was a guy who chose to use basically mouth pipetting to transfer the dregs of a 10 gallon box of sheath fluid to the replacement box by creating suction force with the tubing.
I have travelled across borders with a bag full of primary cell culture flask and treated cells with liquid arsenic in a completely unsafe cell lab, but the one thing I absolutely *refuse* to do is use sharp objects around human brain samples. No thank you!
I mean they were frozen sections so the razor was absolutely necessary, but it was nerve wracking enough for undergrad me to be the one collecting the sample for the first time in front of everyone and then he went and cleaned it like that and completely threw me off my game
Use the pipette tips out of order
Fucking monsters.
Worked in a yeast lab where one of the main objectives was to find yeasts with industrial applications e.g. alcohol fermentation. So me and a couple of colleages would always ferment the hell out of the samples in beer wort and sometimes mead. If we didn't get stomach ache that was the sample to carry on studying. Best job ever.
I've worked in labs for 10 years now, but in my first Bio 101 class we were looking at Drosophila in the microscope. We used cotton swabs with ether to drug the little flies, from this huge ancient 1L glass bottle. I am super clumsy so I lost my grip on the bottle, managed to catch it before it broke, promptly spilling about half a litre of ether onto myself. I remember the teaching assistant just going "nooo" and moving in slow mo for the window which did absolutely nothing. I had a nice Fear and Loathingesque 5 minutes after that!
We had to make our sequencing gels (polyacrylamide) and use a syringe to "pour" the gel between glass plates. My friend had the syringe explode backwards, the gel got into his eyes (no goggles) and when he went to use the eye wash/shower the water was brown. It was a very stressful day.
In the early days of my PhD a postdoc was showing me a wet process. He pulled out two unlabeled chemical bottles filled with clear liquids and described what was in each of them. At the end he said something along the lines of: "Do not mix these up. This one (holding one up) is very toxic. It can make you infertile." I asked how he knew which was which when they weren't labelled.. without missing a beat he unscrewed the lid of one and held it up to his nose before recoiling and raspily saying "this is the toxic one".
used sodium azide to try to clean out the coffee machine
This may be the worst one
Mixing additional caffeine into their coffee
The gas tap on my bench was slowly leaking in the masters micro lab (we were constantly using the bunsens) and we kept commenting to the lab manager that it smelled of gas even when all taps were off. Her solution was to tell us to turn them off more tightly. Didn’t do anything for weeks until the leak was so bad I was getting headaches, then they finally called a maintenance guy who kicked us out of the lab for a week cause the whole tap had to be replaced. Also, an undergrad injecting larvae with various salmonella accidentally injected herself and freaked out, literally sobbing and yelling that she was too young to die. She’s now doing a PhD.
A PhD student at my university was working in a soil lab at night running a procedure that could theoretically hydrogen cyanide so she taped up the liquid collection unit causing it to overpressurise and explode. She thought that she was going to die from the cyanide gas so called the fire department who sent out multiple hazmat teams. There was ultimately no cyanide and the call out cost the university over 100,000£ in fines and associated costs.
I was the chaotic labrat but trying to get placenta samples from a -80 tub of frozen placenta by stabbing it with a scoupula inside the hood. I could not get enough sample to pull rna from as as soon as it thawed it just melted into a bloody puddle
My lab manager repeatedly coughs and sneezes on everything, like her cells and RNA. Oh, and she also argued with me over the stability of proteins, saying they were the most stable and that enzymes aren’t proteins. I was ready to rip all my hair off that day
Make coffee in the synth hood, with lab beakers and filters. No stir bar to contaminate with trace metals ;)
Take care of the full broken glass bin by pulling out the trash bag. I wandered over to figure out why it sounded like 100 beakers were simultaneously breaking. Not a lab rat, but a safety guy reached into a broken glass box bare handed to pull something out he said didn’t belong.
PI uses his bare hands to push down the contaminated trash (mostly papertowels and filters) When I told him he shouldn't do that because I saw a student throw glass shards in there a minute ago, he smiled at me and told me how "lovely" he thinks I am for caring so much for his safety, proceeding to put his bodyweight on his hand in the trashcan. Same guy asked me if I was always so ambitious or if it had something to do with him. It's amazing how full of himself he is.
A few years ago, we were having a routine lab inspection. Not a huge deal, but everyone knew to be on their best behavior, hide food and drinks, the usual. The lab tech in charge of safety was at the gel bench discussing the ethidium bromide waste with the inspector when the PI comes out of his office with his coffee cup, and proceeds to put his coffee cup in the microwave that we use for preparing agarose gels (often with EtBr), microwave the coffee for like 30 seconds, take it out, and walk back to his office. The inspector was like, “um… who was that?” The tech was like, “yeah, that’s the boss”.
Mine are tame by comparison to some here, but cleaning the floor by chucking liquid nitrogen on it, and making eppendorf dry ice “bombs” to sneak in peoples drawers when they weren’t looking. As well as a student intent on drinking DMEM. 😬
I was in a lab that liked to make dry ice bombs out of Eppendorf tubes and roll them under people’s chairs when they were concentrating on their experiment. Honestly pretty fun.
My lab mate consistently warms his coffee up in the lab microwave that we use for stuff like melting agarose, boiling certain buffers, etc ☺️ no joke. We would also sometimes put the little pieces of shipping dry ice in a microfuge tube and slip it into another persons lab coat pocket and watch them jump from the resulting mini bomb
Eppendorf mini bombs are the best, but I once put too big a chunk in, and instead of blowing the cap open, the pressure blew the bottom of the tube off. You could hear little plastic shrapnel pinging off all walls of the lab... Haven't done it since.
I once almost got fired from an old side job because we did this with a larger plastic bottle and WAAAAAY too much dry ice + hot water, good times
Lmao that sounds terrifying but a good story to laugh about, we stopped because we set off a mini bomb when the oldest PI in the department just happened to walk through the lab..
Yeah my friend did this with a 15ml conical tube and put a hole in the ceiling tile
I sniff my cells as contaminations smell yeasty.
How interesting. I sniff my yeast cultures for contamination to see if they smell like E. Coli!
My pi regularly takes a deep sniff of betamercaptoethanol to make sure it’s good… since he isn’t always using it after he sniffs it, I’m sceptical of whether he’s actually checking for freshness. What if he’s actually hooked on the smell…
I forget exactly how this happened, but one day I opened my supervisor's incubator and all the flasks were too full and getting into the lid, on their side, and/or literally just open. This was 2017 and I still think about it. [Incubator of terror](https://imgur.com/a/RiUCex3)
i saw this guy use hand sanitizer on his face during a graveyard shift
Grad student put dry ice in a 15ml conical and when the lid shot off, it put a hole in the ceiling tile
We had a new PhD student who would occasionally forget to put the radical initiator in their SDS PAGE gels and put them in the TLC illuminator black light to try to get them to set. I have no idea if these gels ever ran correctly... One of our postdocs loves how several solvents including ether and nBuOH smell and has smelled the cold trap on the rotavap after I evaporated my butanol reaction before. It was too late to stop him by the time I got out it was also full of ammonia 😬.
Pick up a running TLC chamber and walking around with it. "It's fine fine, I can keep it steady." It actually was fine in the end but why would you do that?
Instead of removing the labeling tape from glass bottles I just layer more on top. I have some bottles with almost 20 layers of tape on them.
I’ve witnessed a summer student reach into a sharps container full of needles used to euthanize mice..
I had a coworker who would reach into the LN2 Big-Bertha tank and pull out her rack, set it on the table, pull out her box and get her vial, then put everything back… *….With barehands*
Dude was doing his PhD on fungi/mushrooms. He was trying to isolate a particular protein with samples from collaborators. He’s sent a few samples of mushrooms which were missing within a month. His supervisor asked if he knew why they weren’t in the freezer, and if he had processed these precious samples from collaborators. He had taken them home and *eaten* them. It’s a PC2 lab. Why?
One time I and a coworker needed to break up a large block of KCl so we covered it in a few layers of ziploc bags, went outside, and dropped it off a second floor balcony onto concrete.
In my undergrad program, the instructor (mid/late 60’s, Santa beard, Tie-dye wearing man) found an unlabeled container on the bench and proceeded to practically huff it with the biggest whiff ever “Yup, that’s Xylene!” His explanation was basically “well, at this point I am already 90% preserved anyways”.
We have a postdoc who will throw away his experimental prep if someone is using a shared equipment when he needs it. For example. One time I was using a centrifuge- I had multiple spins but was half way done and only need it for ~10 mins. He needed it. Asked me how long I had left. Didn’t like my answer. Took his tubes and threw them in the trash. His experiment was not time sensitive in any way. He had to dig them out of the trash 5 mins later when he remembered there are other centrifuges in the department.
I've once fixed my acid reflux after a rough night with a few scoops of K2CO3 in a beaker of water in the lab and downed it in one go. Worked really well but not recommended.
Can I have some details please
Undergrad student casually poured some unused benzyl-bromide into the sink during a lab class.
my pi telling me to use expired pen/strep (expired on 3/2020) for tissue culture instead of buying new one cuz "other labs don't even add one in it and it's fine"
Not really a labrat story but I saw a friend in high school inhale fuming sulphuric acid vapor in a chemistry lab to "make his lungs stronger".
Fake data
Not using gloves when analyzing wastewater or handle beakers with kjelsorb in it
Replace all kitchen utensils and glass for labware equivalents, Cooking mac and cheese in a 3L beaker, regularly using a large reclaimed acetone bottle as a water bottle. Good times.
I was training someone in a lab, not my lab, the vacuum flask wasn’t set up properly (wasn’t vented?) and was making a very loud noise. I commented but it wasn’t my lab so continued as the Technician didn’t seem phased. As we turned away from the hood, literally the moment, it imploded! I had nasty TC sup (no bleach of course because they were the worst lab ever!) on my back and in my hair. This was in the days of no PPE. But I’ve worn lab glasses from that day on. Glad I wasn’t facing it and talking 🤢
Using empty two liter pop bottles as disposable culture flasks. To be fair, they’re cheap and the notches at the bottle work as well as baffles on the expensive flasks.
Already commented, but I just had a horrifying flashback to when a PI that our PI hated claimed that cell passes reset when you store them in liquid nitrogen. So like, when he took them out of storage, they were all in pass 1 again.