• Question: what is the worst grade/explosion etc you have made in the lab?

    Asked by katrina1998 to Anzy, Aoife, Dave, Matt, Tomasz on 15 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Matthew Tomlinson

      Matthew Tomlinson answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      Not me personally, but I was once demonstrating a lab class at uni where one of the students set her hair on fire with a bunsen burner! In another incident a PhD student was trying to cut a piece of heart into really thin pieces using something called a microtome which has a very very sharp blade, anyway his finger slipped and went straight into the blade, going to the bone, I think he needed 4 or 5 stitches to heal the cut. Labs can be really dangerous places, but we do our best to make them as safe as possible.

    • Photo: Aoife O'Shaughnessy-Kirwan

      Aoife O'Shaughnessy-Kirwan answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      I haven’t done anything myself but a guy in another part of the building put some sodium down the sink and it caused a bit of an explosion! The fire brigade came though and we got the rest of the day off so we went for coffee and cake, so it wasn’t all bad!

    • Photo: David Christensen

      David Christensen answered on 18 Nov 2013:

      I haven’t really had any accidents in my lab or heard of people having accidents in the labs around mine. The worst I’ve had was when I was feeling sick recently, but went into work anyway. While I was doing some work I suddenly knew I had to throw up so ran over to a sink and managed to bang my head on a tap while I was vomiting. When I went to tell my boss I’d been sick and was going to go home, she pointed out that my head was bleeding, which I hadn’t actually noticed. Not a good day :/

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