(13)

    Late one night I was plating out some bacterial cells. For good sterile technique, I poured some ethanol in a dish to flame the spreader. Well, I accidentally touched the rim of the 100% ethanol bottle with my bare hands and I became worried that I might have contaminated it. I thought I better flame the rim it to be sure... When the ethanol vapor ignited inside the plastic bottle, the bottle became so instantaneously hot that I dropped it. Flaming ethanol spread across bench and floor....

(20)

    while labeling chemicals, i didn't notice that the label printer was printing the same label for every bottle. Almost four hundred chemicals were labeled as dihydrogen monoxide.

(10)

    A senior lab supervisor labeled the foil lid for her sample micro titer plates but didn't label the plate underneath. She gave the samples for someone else to finish when she went on vacation and the technician disposed of the lid without noting the information written on it. No one could tell what was in the plate anymore.

(6)

    Recently I was staining some cross sections of some rodent brains for a neural nitric oxide study. It required the use of several expensive antibodies (a few thousand dollars). After I finished the stains came out great. I left the box of antibodies on a desk for over a week. The entire box is unusable now.... I am just an undergrad, so I have been disciplined and demoted.... Awesome!!!

(16)

    A technician in our lab manually pipetted into a 384-well plate in the wrong well, in an effort to correct a robotic error. The printing plate and thus the printed arrays were incorrect and unable to be sold, costing the company an account. The technician was moved into a job with much less responsibility.

(14)

    A technician in our lab pipetted the wrong control probe to one of the microarray printing plates because of a mistaken assumption. The arrays were printed and failed QC, costing the company thousands of dollars.

(3)

    [meth+heroin]lab = bearable

(2)

    I was looking for a drosophila strain that was in an incubator. I opened the door the incubator, and a mercury thermometer fell to the floor and broke. I tried not to inhale the toxic fumes, but freaked out and did not want to admit my mistake. I told a nearby lab's professor that there was a strange smell coming from the incubator, investigated it with her, and hoped that she would see the broken thermometer. She now has brain cancer. Just kidding about the cancer thing, but I still feel bad.

(6)

    One long and tiring day, I was pipetting samples as usual in the RNA lab for hour upon hour, trying to determine gene expression values for clients, when I suddenly realized that I no longer knew into which well I had just pipetted the rare and valuable sample. To my horror, this meant that if I had not placed the sample correctly, it would have contaminated another rare and valuable sample, meaning two mistakes were made instead of one. Possibly. There was no way to tell. I elected to tell my boss, who managed to forgive the error and not fire me.

(4)

    The students in our lab were not allowed to pour the BSA media from the tissue culture class supply vial. One day when the professor was not around, I took some, under sterile conditions, and replaced the vial.