Scientists Reveal 37 Of The Most Terrifying Things That Went Wrong In Their Labs

Guy left a puddle in a liquid hydrogen container boiling off overnight, came back next day and switched on light. People 7 floors above thought there was a terrorist attack.

Insanely smart PhD student fired a vacuum gun the wrong way. 5kg maraging steel projectile embedded itself in wall.

EDIT: It is fairly easy to guess the establishment. Please refrain from posting the name here.

It was the second week of my PhD, so my supervisor was still hovering around, making sure I wasn't disastrous in the lab. I was making viral stocks, so I was growing up about 10 flasks of virus-saturated RK-13 cells. I'd taken a load out of the incubator and put them in the hood, when suddenly my supervisor says "why is there media all over the floor?"

I check all the flasks lay down in the hood - no leaky lids, no puddles in the hood, but one flask has a huge crack on the front.


That's when I feel a bit damp.


I look down, there's media ALL down the side of my lab coat. S**t. my second bloody week and I've potentially infected myself.

Luckily it hadn't soaked all the way through as most of it was on my lab coat pockets so double layer, and my normal clothes weren't contaminated. Also luckily, I work with Vaccinia virus, and, as one of my previous supervisors once put it "If you're going to accidentally infect yourself with anything while you're here, the smallpox vaccine prooooobably isn't the worst thing in the world to do it with".
So it wasn't that bad in the end, but I was mortified at the time, and I spent 3 weeks examining myself for pox pustules.

1. Someone cleaned out a lab, found a jar filled with oil, in the oil was a big lump. The jar had no label.

They took this and put it in the queue for the autoclave. Anyone with some chemistry knowledge is probably cringing right now.

So yeah, the oil was there because the lump was reactive metal, best guess sodium. The autoclave heated the whole thing up to 121°C, and when the operator opened it, it exploded in their face. They suffered terrible, terrible injuries.

It is a terrible story, and reinforces what you learn in the basic safety classes. Labels, labels, labels. Treat everything like it's dangerous until you know better.

2. Recently it was someone making PFA and they let the solution boil, we had to evacuate the floor. (PFA is paraformaldehyde, when it boils it acts like a very, very nasty tear gas that also happens to probably be carcinogenic).

3. And actually really recently, someone went to fill up a tank of liquid nitrogen, started pouring it into a tank, and then went for lunch and forgot about it. Flooded the basement with liquid nitrogen. They have to do a lot of reconstruction down there.

4. New student sprayed a bottle of phenol all over herself, her postdoc handler was not good at chemistry and just had her dab it off, I made her take her jeans off and there were big burns on her legs, so we washed it with PEG. PEG is magical stuff, I keep a bottle near me at all times.

5. A student taking a biopsy from a mouse for the first time, held it gentle, tried to massage the biopsy punch into the anaesthetised animals back, somehow misjudged the pressure and drove it through the animal, which sprayed her with urine and blood. I had to grab it and snap the neck before it even came close to waking up.

6. A student in the building was playing with Ln2, pouring it into his hand and showing off to his friends. He reasoned that if it could be safely handled on the hand, why not in the mouth? He drank some... So we are pretty lucky to have our lab around 30 metres away from the hospital.

7. I have just heard about this one, but from a good source. They have a 2-photon microscope for live animal work, it works by shooting two lasers into an animal or whatever, and they come from different directions, so at the point they meet there is excitation of the tissue and you can see on the screen what is in there. It means you can look at body parts internally on living organisms. The problem is heat, there is a lot of it. And apparently someone had been working on a mouse and bumped the power up quite high, and didn't realise that he had k**d his mouse until the smell of cooking meat hit his nose.

A Masters student in our lab needed some 100% ethanol which is stored in 5 L glass bottles. He wanted it to be sterile so he took the near full bottle over to the bunsen burner area to open it by a flame. Luckily, our lab tech stopped him before he blew up the lab.

EDIT: Just to explain a little more.

Yes, I think it was actually a 4L glass bottle of ethanol, I would have to check tomorrow in the lab. We buy high grade >99.8% ethanol as we do lots of sensitive molecular biology work.

The guy was doing a 1 year Masters, where he rotated around 3 different labs before starting a 3 year PhD. These were specially funded by the Wellcome Trust and anyone on these courses were considered to be the brightest of students...

I think he was adding the ethanol to some sterile media to grow cultures in and even though for most purposes 100% ethanol is sterile, he wanted to use aseptic techniques and a bunsen burner.

I was at the other end of the lab, when I hear shouting, the lab tech is like "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! That's ethanol!" and the guy just stands there and says "but it needs to be sterile...".

During high school. We had a particularly intelligent guy in our lab that decided to light a beaker full of some sort of alcohol on fire. The genius decided that the best way of doing this would be to hold the beaker in one hand and then drop a match into the beaker. Surprise surprise alcohol burns. The guys was amused, "cool dude it burns haha". Then he learned that fire is also hot and that a flaming beaker also gets hot. "Oh s**t man its hot, d**n" then the guy decided the best course of action to avoid burning his hand was to throw the beaker on the ground. The beaker exploded in a massive fireball and about half of the lab was on fire. People on the side of the lab that is now engulfed in flame are screaming as everyone on the other side is just staring in awe. Then from the front of the room desks being thrown out of the way and a rallying cry of "Jesus F**k!!!!!!" is heard as our teacher rushes into action and manages to put out the inferno before any real damage is done.
During another unrelated instance we had a kid that same year manage to stab some glass tubing into his hand while trying to put it into a stopper. blood came shooting out of the tube and the kid just stood there not knowing what to do. The teacher nonchalantly came over and suggested the kid come with him to nurse. there was a huge puddle of blood on the floor and trail all the way down the hallway.
Then during college someone managed to tip over an entire cart of chemicals while trying to get it out of an elevator and they had to call in the hazmat team and the fire department. The entire building was evacuated.
TL;DR -- kid starts lab on fire, different kid stabs himself, and cart of chemicals gets dumped.

My first science type job when I was a sophmore in college. I was sort of the undergrad chemistry TA for the small community college I went to. There was only one chemistry professor and he had just replaced the old professor a month before I started. The old chem professor left the chemical storage area in a horrible state of neglect and danger and I was tasked with helping clean it up. Included in the mess was some random piece of glassware from decades ago that had at least 2 pounds of mercury in it, an old broken mercury barometer (I don't know how nobody noticed a pool of mercury on the floor, don't know how long it was there - quite a health hazard) and a shoebox full of vials labelled "A", "B", and "C" containing either white or bluish powder. I don't know what he was thinking, but the new professor instructed me to empty all of vials into an empty glass container to have picked up when the chemical waste guys come. At the time I wasn't the safety oriented scientist I am now, so I didn't question it and started working. After 5 or 6 vials I noticed some sort of reaction taking place so I call out the professor's name and he walks in just as the mixture in the glass container starts to smoke. He grabs it and throws it in the fume hood and slams the door shut just as it bursts into flames and lets out plumes of dark brown smoke. I have been very careful with all of my work in labs since then.

Late one night when I was in gradschool, my friend from highschool is visiting me. Its about 10:30PM and I wanted to drop by lab to pick up my laptop so we could use it while kicking back a few drinks. I also wanted to show him the lab since we had some really awesome equipment that I knew he would appreciate.

On the way (on the first floor; my lab is on the second) in I see the department head and another professor on the first floor. Its not unusual to see professors around that late but the department head is usually out much earlier. As I get closer I wave hello but he stops, looks at me with a stern face and shouts down the hall, "Diracdeltafunct there is a problem in your lab."

Thats the moment I look down and notice he is wearing waders and hes standing in several inches of water. Instantly my face goes white as I remember I had just changed water lines on a diffusion pump earlier that afternoon and thought they failed to hold (they dump a total for 4gallons/min through all the pumps).

I rush up stairs to find everything submerged under 6-8 inches of water including a $100K laser power supply and many high voltage boxes. As it turns out it wasn't my fault and a water line on the top floor broke and dumped thousands of gallons down through the building. In total it flooded our lab frying all the power supplies, missed dumping on an $80k amplifier by ~1foot, filled several laser tables with water (ruining them with rust), and completely flooded a clean room below us.

It could have been worse but it set back research for us by months and others by years (and probably over half a million in damages). Thank god for insurance.

Boil copious amounts of acid in our NOT corrosion-resistant fume hood. People call it the crying fume hood because the walls inside are leaking acid and the bottom of it has this weird viscous liquid that never evaporates.

I tend to keep that fume hood closed.

One day a colleague of mine was currying a higher-order function. His hand jerked, and lambda expressions spilled all over the lab. He would've had third-degree formal burns if he wasn't wearing a lab coat.

Computer Science is hard s**t.

I had a friend who washed a large chunk of pure potassium down the sink. That went bad quickly. For those who don’t know potassium catches fire in water.

I had a really thick suspension of a nasty mixture of bacteria (non-pathogenic but still gloopy and grim) in a syringe. The needle got blocked, and like an idiot I tried to push harder on the plunger and force it through. It exploded. Luckily I was working in a cabinet so my face was ok but everything in the cabinet got coated in this nasty mix of bacteria. It took me an hour and a half to clean everything, and even longer to sterilise the place. Nobody got hurt so it wasn't too bad in that respect but it made a mess, contaminated (potentially, so I had to assume it did) an ongoing experiment which set me back a few days, and was generally pretty nasty stuff to have sprayed all over you.

Edit for more: I learnt the hard way not to pick up bottles of crystal violet by the lid. My labcoat is very colourful! (and so were my hands for a while).

Radio astronomer here! I don't really have a lab, because instead we have the observatory take data and put it on a supercomputer after a preprocessing stage, and we then put it on our lab's supercomputers and analyze it. But if you want to know the worst things that happened in my experiments...

- The supercomputer abruptly dying, or at least nodes on one of them dying. This happens more often than you'd think, and why you *always back up your data*, especially when you remember our local machine relies on the good graces of university IT systems.

- Parts of the radio telescope were getting destroyed in the field because of all the rain and damp. This radio telescope is based in the Netherlands, where clearly it never rains, right?!

- We do a piggyback instrument sometimes for my thesis work that operates independently and remotely, but requires someone to be at the observatory to be there to flip the switch, so to speak. Had a time sensitive observation to make with a piggyback instrument, so you check the schedule and make sure the observatory staff will be in the middle of an observation then- great! But when it comes time to make the observation the main observatory isn't on, and no one's picking up the blasted phone or responding to email. (Later they claimed they were, but I suspect it was a really long lunch break.) Observation is deferred a month.

- I'm still a bit pissed off about this as it happened two weeks ago, but the observatory lost a crucial bit of my data for my thesis for no real reason except they spent too long waiting to do the preprocessing. It was commissioning-related data, so after a month of no one accessing the data where it was it was automatically deleted. Which made the rest of my two months of work suddenly pretty worthless, which was really frustrating! :(

To be clear, building a good modern radio telescope is hard and it's a miracle we ever get any of these things to work well enough to get science out of them. But d**n, I'm pretty sure a PhD is more an exercise in frustration than anything else.

I worked in flood defence as a civil engineering technician for a while (drawing up dams, correcting things as engineers altered specs) and while it was an office not a lab, our work directly affects the general public, we maintain and build nearly all of the UK's sluices, flood gates, dams and weirs, rurally and urban.

Anyway, one time there was this guy on his first project that he was managing (a prestigious but nervewracking experience for any civil engineer) and as usual site surveying is done, and they concluded that the bottom of the river at that point was concrete from a previous weir. This is obviously a really important part as this is where the new dam's nape and reinforced concrete will be seated.

Turns out it wasn't concrete, ~~it was a rock lobster~~ it was decades-old twigs and mud compacted by the river and the installment over time to a consistency of concrete. For all intents and purposes, that bar was concrete by our readings.

So the dam finally gets built and the guy is ready to go over his work and finalise and earn the company a buttload of money. Then, it dislodges from the crumbling ancient mudshit at the bottom and washes downstream, leaving debris and floodwater for miles.

Apparently he needed about 6 months of counseling before he could even return to work. Infrastructure has its risks.

Just a couple of weeks ago we all got sent home early because of a 'Nitrogen leak'

Incidentally it was the day after that new COD game came out.

I'm on to you, men!!!

Our chemistry lab has been on fire twice in the last six months.

Great research output though.

Just a little resonance cascade, I think we got away with it though.

One time a fly got in, nearly contaminiated my product. My lab assistant had the brazen audacity to suggest that our customers wouldn't notice since they're all a bunch of [illegal substances users].