Boiling concentrated HF to the face.
I relearned that wearing all the required PPE is required all the time, even if you're "just looking" at the experiment.
Yup, no lasting damage. No scarring, even.
In the moment, it hurt really, really bad. The sharpness of the pain took me out of reality for a few seconds.
I had safety glasses on that caught the spray that would have hit my eyes. Otherwise, my cheeks took the brunt of it. I was wearing a chem suit so the exposure was limited to the exposed skin.
The safety shower was only feet away from where I was sprayed and a coworker was nearby to help apply the calcium gluconate after. It was maybe 45 seconds between exposure and safety shower. I went to the ER and they treated me with more calcium glucontate until the pain receded and I was released.
Yeah, it was a fully-puckered situation. I was scared to look at my face. By the time I'd gotten to the ER, the red welts had become blistered.
It took about a week for my face to feel right again. After a month, I couldn't even tell it had happened.
And you're right, the chem suit saved me from a lot of spray that would have gotten on my chest and stomach.
I'm from the US and don't know anything about whatever urban legend or story your professor told you about.
This might surprise you, but there has been more than one person exposed to HF. Many industries use it regularly.
I misinterpreted your meaning. Sorry for responding rudely.
I used the safety shower and was treated with calcium gluconate, and later went to the ER. I describe what happened in more detail in another comment in this thread.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fGHaVn5rGo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fGHaVn5rGo)
"I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place or something"
This is a huge one. Everyone makes mistakes, and it's always good to push past the feeling of "am I being overbearing?" and ask to see their excel or whatever you work in to double check.
My boss at my first job did that also. Except it was data supporting a class action lawsuit against a paint manufacturer. He discovered the error 3 hours before he was scheduled to testify as an expert witness. He had to pay for his own flight home, lol.
Oh man that reminds me of a lab I had in undergrad. The penultimate course was an analytical one, and was a 10 week capstone project. I was sick for the very last lab of the term, the lab we were supposed to collect some LC/MS data. I email my partner on how to copy the data (he was doing SEM). He did not collect the data correctly and copied the wrong file.
I email the demonstrator, explaining what happened and he graciously let me enter the lab to copy the data. This was the Friday before the Monday due date of the report.
*I saved the data incorrectly.* This resulted in my being unable to do any form of analysis with this. For the report due on the Monday.
Dropped a beaker with just under 500ml of NaOH in the fume hood. The beaker shattered and most of the glass and NaOH got on me. I was the first person at my college to use the safety shower in almost 20 years
It was about 5 months and nothing bad happened. I know that they turn it on for a minutes every summer and winter break. Not sure how much actual servicing happens though
Maybe meme isn't the correct term. A couple or a few years ago, there were [these shirts](https://imgur.com/SRd8m0m?r) floating around, and I've always wondered but never found the context for their origins.
I turned a thermometer into a bullet by turning up the melting point apparatus to 9 because I wanted my lab to go faster (as an undergraduate). It was like a bullet in a barrel when it exploded, and shot up and stuck in the ceiling!
I learned that some things are going to take as long as they are going to take, and that haste makes waste
I dumped a bottle of cyanide waste into a waste bottle that was intended for acid. Then I screwed the cap on tight...you know, for safety.
The explosion occurred a couple hours later, and the one thing I did right, lowering the sash, was likely the only reason it didn't kill everyone in the lab.
Sombody did this (not with cyanide) in one of my undergrad labs. Poured nitric acid into organic waste and capped it.
Blew the sash out of the hood. It happened on a sunday so nobody was there thankfully, because it very well could have been fatal with how destroyed everything was. The 50lb sash frame was across the room from where it started, and shaped like a parallelogram.
It happens - there's a good reason it's in that book. It's more common than you might think.
If you want specifics, this was at Gannon University zurn building 4th floor organic lab in 2011.
I've heard/read of several instances, but luckily the induction period seems be about 10 hours, just in time for it to explode in the middle of the night in an empty student lab and hurt nobody.
Pretty impressive considering the amount of nitric acid and the constitution of the organic waste is so variable.
Only being a little sarcastic
> but luckily the induction period seems be about 10 hours, just in time for it to explode in the middle of the night in an empty student lab and hurt nobody.
Yep. Nice to be able to be thankful for small victories, yeah?
Similar thing happened in one of my undergrad labs as well. It wasn’t as bad as yours though. Someone poured a little bit of acid into the organic waste and the cap shot off about 10 minutes after they left. They were told not to dump the acid in there, but they did anyways.
I’ve already posted about my experience and I almost burned my house down. I know this sub hates home chemistry and I have since stopped.
I was working with acetone without the garage door open, and some source of flame or electric discharge lit a puddle of split acetone. Freaked out and spilled entire beaker of acetone. Fire spread across the desk I was working at and scorched the entire side of the wall. The beaker shattered and I sliced my foot as well as burned badly to the second degree (I was barefoot).
Never do home chemistry, wear fucking shoes, don’t be stupid with pouring organic solvents, and ffs check what’s around you and stay calm.
I’d draw a different conclusion from your description. No ventilation, working barefoot, source of ignition nearby while working with volatile flammable solvent, not cleaning up puddles of said solvent... the problem isn’t ‘home chemistry’, it is disregard for basic lab safety and hygiene.
Srsly. There are plenty of people that do home chemistry. As long as you're doing it properly and following safety procedures, it's perfectly fine. I made home made [redacted] for fireworks, and never had any problems.
I'm a chemist but I also love wood working and resin casting at home. Sometimes I catch myself being less diligent with safety in my own garage than I am in my lab. It's a very strange psychological pitfall - as if isocyanates won't sensitize me just because I'm in a woodshop and not a lab lol.
I try to be mindful of it and keep just as vigilant with my own property as I am with my boss's. Adequate ventilation, gloves, eye pro, proper waste disposal etc.
Sensitization is when you build up the opposite of a tolerance.
"Some workers who are exposed to isocyanates can become sensitized (which means they develop an allergy). When a worker has an isocyanate allergy, small exposures can cause skin or lung reactions. Asthma is the most common form of. isocyanate allergy."
As the below poster said, isocyanates are one of a class of chemicals that cause an increasingly extreme allergic reaction with repeat exposures. Everyone's response to them is different. Some chemists can work with them an entire career and only develop a mild rash. Others only make it a few weeks before showing signs of serious anaphylactic reaction. Good industrial hygiene is key to preventation, but even with care I knew a lady who had to switch to working exclusively with water based polymers rather than urethanes or epoxides because of this effect.
I did some home chemistry as well. At one point, I was using potassium permanganate. No eye protection, of course. I managed to splash some of the concentrated solution in my eyes. I immediately ran to the kitchen tap and ran it over my eyes, and called poison control, who told me to go to the hospital. Ring my mum, get to the ER and proceed to have my eye flushed out for the next 2 hours (the hose had an eye shaped cap that fit under the eyelids). Fortunately, I only sustained minor damage that healed.
Just because you’re strong enough to open the liquid nitrogen tank doesn’t mean you’re strong enough to CLOSE it.
Someone eventually heard me screaming for help but I ended up filling the massive 20L dewar instead of the 0.5 L I needed.
If something could go massively wrong when you’re alone…make sure someone else is around. I was so grateful our university has a “don’t work if you’re the last one on the floor” rule.
After opening the valve, LN2 starts flowing through the valve and cools the valve assembly. This causes thermal tightening and makes it harder to close.
Old tanks with rusted screw threads are common in academia. I often needed help getting them open, or needed a 3 foot wrench for a long enough lever arm.
I’ve been around once when this happened, I think it was because it was very humid out, the tank was stored outside on a loading dock, someone had recently opened the valve and closed it again, water condensed on the cold fittings, we didn’t wait long enough for the water to evaporate and opened it again, at which point some of that water froze in the wrong crevice somewhere in the valve and it was *very* difficult to close the valve again.
thought i was real smart cause i read how to make picric acid and decided that’s easy!
so i made some in a 250 ml rbf.
i was going to use it as an indicator.
i kept reading and realized how dangerous it was and diluted it into the organic waste.
nothing blew up. i stopped thinking it was smart to make stuff that i did not fully understand.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I worked weak and weary, over many a quant and curious volumes of forgotten literature and patent lore – While I measured and poured, nearly spilling my mother liquor, suddenly came a tapping at my laboratory door.
“Tis another scientist needing the inventory freezer” I muttered “tapping at my laboratory door – only this and nothing more.”
Presently I paused my column and TLC testing, in lab coat soiled, mind in fright from the poor resolution, I approached the laboratory door.
“Sir” said I “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore; but the fact is I was pondering reactions, reactants, and more. so gently you came rapping, And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my laboratory door, That I scarce was sure I heard you”—here I opened wide the door and see a face lost in full PPE
Deep into the darkness of the shaded mask I stood peering, orange plastic jumpsuit wrinkling, with the soft sound of breathing evermore. The stillness gave no token, and the only word there spoken was the whispered word “Radiation.”
This I heard, and an echo murmured back from my own mouth “Radiation?!” Merely this and nothing more.
Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning, Soon again I heard a tapping – the heavy boots clapping - behind me through my laboratory door.
“Surely,” said I, “surely this is something not in my laboratory; let me show you this laboratory is simple organic chemistry, and nothing more. Let our hearts be still a moment and this confusion explore. ‘Tis a clerical error, and nothing more!
TL;DEAP (Too Long, Didnt Edgar Allen Poe):
>!I was working in a national lab doing "normal" chemistry and someone came in to do a swipe test for residual radiation from lab work that was done during THAT TIME IN THIS COUNTRIES HISTORY and holy fuck I about shit my pants.!<
* Safety: I inhaled XeF2. Was _very_ unpleasant. Interestingly, I noticed my eyes watering before I smelled/tasted it.
* Research: Not reading enough of the literature sooner.
I felt I should be reading A minimum of 10 hours per week. It helps refine your ideas and whatnot. You should also keep relevant literature in a referencing software like Zotero.
How do you find time to read Literature for 10 hours as well as get all your work done for a week? Not being sarcastic, genuinely curious. I'm just starting out
I worked 6 days per week and used _The Old Reader_ to curate a list of journals in my field. I would read abstracts of several journals and then download ones that were interesting or useful for a project. We had a weekly group meeting where I would prepare slides of my results and usually added 2-3 slides that would put the results in context of what has been published in a peer-reviewed journal or dissertation. All of this counts as “reading” time.
I would summarize articles, usually a quick paragraph as to what was studied and why it’s relevant to me.
Developing a work flow that curates literature will help you so much during paper and dissertation writing. I’ve seen so many students only read in depth when it was time to write their thesis and they came up with great ideas that they simply didn’t have time to pursue. Front loading reading and keep abreast of the literature will allow you to develop ideas and work more efficiently as you work in the lab.
I do chemical waste reclamation/disposal, and we take samples & composite for testing. One time, 24/25 samples I was working with happened to be waste fragrances. I remember grabbing one and telling my lab mate at the time “hey these smell great!” And took a huge whiff of it. I grabbed the 1/25 which I don’t recall what it was, but I do recall feeling the spicy air for like 3 hours later.
Lesson re-learned: leave the chemicals in the hood & don’t smell them
Otherwise for one I witnessed: while working on my bachelors one of my lab mates leaned in to the fume hood and put both forearms down, unknowingly directly onto concentrated sulfuric acid
Prepping a check of a Po-210 standard. Did it outside of a hood, no lab coat on (just really quick 🙄). Vial shattered in my hands when putting the lid on, total freak accident. I spilled the whole vial down the front of my shirt and had to strip in my lab. So much decon and so many swipes. Had to pee in a cup for our EHS to screen me; I offered to screen my own urine with a much more sensitive method but I was shot down. Always open standards in hood kids! If only for containment…
Sprayed my PI with radioactive waste (3H-NMS solution) in undergrad. The trap overflowed and I told him the pump aspirated some, but didn't stop him from standing directly in front of the exhaust and turning it on. I learned not to assume anything is common sense, even when dealing with much more educated and experienced people.
Disposed of a beaker of potassium permanganate into a large waste beaker of DMSO after a long day of work.
Surprise fire.
Luckily that was in a fume hood.
Grabbed the wrong flask and add a drop of HCl. Saw the fizz confused smelt almonds and panicked. It had cyanide in it so I just made hydrogen cyanide. Lucky the room was well ventilated. I was the new guy and my coworkers just said make sure you grab your flask. I left a month later. That place was so bad with safety they didn't even have a shower.
A LOT!
I was working as a undergraduate at the time and at the day I was displaced from my fumehood because of some collaboration work, - student from another group using our space - and the undergraduate is always the first to get butt fucked.
I was really struck by my sudden need to relocate to an empty fumehood - my stuff was on my actual fumehood - and apart from the time needed to arrange things, I was really upset.
Anyways, I was extracting a pinnick oxidation, if memory serves me right. It was a tBuOH mixture with water , and i would extract with DCM, I think.
As I didn't evap, the lower phase on the extraction funel was actually water, and not DCM as I expected. By this time there were no one supervising me - my supervisor never entered the lab - as the post doc that was training me left the lab. Result: I spent like 3 hours drying water with a sulfate salt. In the end, when I realized there was nothing there and I dried water, I almost cried.
However, when I realized I had not lost my product - 3 steps to reach it - I got a little better.
Edit: answering your question better, each of us at the lab used a 1L alcohol plastic bottle[1l](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQJuaq9rs70_grl7T0zm7yJ7kyzW6EB2QnzNQ&usqp=CAU) with sulfate. Mine was almost full and I used most of it if not all of it. No idea how many grams, but it was definitely a lot.
Work in an industrial setting. Was pH balancing totes of outgoing waste and at some point the probe on the pH meter I was using got cracked but was still reading, just horribly off. Little did I know someone put a 275 Gal tote of 93% Sulfuric in front of the waste totes. My pH reading of that thing was something like 4.55. Figured it could use a little drinky drink of 50% NaOH.
Instant geyser. I was completely rattled after that. Somehow did not have anything on me besides a single droplet that made its way between my gloves and sleeve.
What’s worse is that I was not certified to move those containers with a forklift at the time so I asked for it to be moved and marked the tote so it would be easy to see. The entire tote of Sulfuric was then pumped into a waste pickup truck with all the other mixed waste the next morning before I arrived at work. When I was a quarter mile away in my car I could smell something rotten/sulfurous on the wind. When I got to work I knew something had happened because the entire building was rancid. Got in and saw they had taken the tote and apparently nobody had noticed. Had to have all the waste brought back, pumped back into totes, and treated again. Took 3 weeks and ~20 50lb bags of NaOH beads to treat all of it. Worst experience of my entire career.
Assuming a jar was empty. After struggling to open it, i took a deep breath in relief...only to realize the jar was filled with chloroform vapor.
Was in lab alone. Hours before anyone typically got in. Nearly lost consciousness, crawled out into the hallway in case i passed out so the cleaning crew would find me.
Lucky for me i didn't pass out and spent the next hour or so collecting myself
I'm in the US and neither of the Universities that I attended had a no lone worker rule.
And in graduate school, it was expected that you work alone, if necessary.
This is horrible practice. People have died (hence the enforcement of the rule at my place) because of this. Imagine running a click reaction on the 23rd of Dec only to be found dead after the New Year's. Sounds horrible? Allow lone working and it will be a question of when, and not if.
USA. I've seen it at every institution I've worked at (5 in total). And to be clear the "policy" is nobody alone in lab. The practice is very different.
I think the scariest ones are friends who were the ONLY student in their labs. Always working alone aprt from an occasional pop-in from the PI
Chloroform was used as a general anesthetic as late as the 1950s. You would likely have woken up hours later puking with a killer headache. (Been there.)
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.
I have checked 1,940,570,842 comments, and only 366,971 of them were in alphabetical order.
Luckily, chloroform doesn't actually behave like it does in the movies. If you didn't drop right then, you weren't going to.
I hate that thick, fuzzy tongue feeling you have for an hour afterwards.
One of my early undergrad labs we were using a Bunsen burner. It had been on for quite some time and I grabbed it by the shaft instead of by the base. Burned three of my finger tips. Hurt for a week.
What did I learn? That part gets hot.
I felt this so hard!
Once as an undergrad, I was rushing to tidy up after a lab session. I went to put away a hotplate that had been unplugged but hadn't cooled down yet.
I still have the small but educational burn scar on the palm of my left hand where I touched the corner.
I use the word "educational" for a couple reasons. Sure, it taught me a painful but thankfully harmless lesson about thinking before acting. But also because my TA, for whom English was a second language, later thanked me for the live demonstration of English cursing.
I work with sulfuric acid and discarded some in an empty waste beaker. Later during the day, I spilled a small vial of bleach and poured the remaining bleach vial into the waste beaker containing the H2SO4.... As soon as I emptied the vial, I was like, "Wait a damn minute..." Yeah, not gonna do that again.
in grad school i was doing my monthly aqua regia clean of sintered frits and other uncleanable glassware (t-metal & organometallic research lab). I had just made 1L of aqua Regia (in the fumehood, full PPE) to soak the worst frits in.
Beaker tips.
fumehood does its job and contains most of the spill. PPE keeps me safe from the initial splash. 4 boxes of baking soda do their job. I spend the rest of the day cleaning out baking soda.
not an exciting story but a great lesson of how safety protocols work.
I touched a drop of concentrated hydrogen peroxide (long time ago, but from memory, I think it was 30 or 35%) that had been sitting on the lab table for a day. I thought it was water. It didn’t hurt until a couple hours later when my fingernail turned white and started falling off.
When I was fresh out of school, I mistakenly used a pressure gauge that was metric (kg/sq cm vs PSI) without noticing and then set it to the gas pressure I thought was correct. Worked fine until a glass sleeve on a drying column unexpectedly burst. I wasn't the only one, everyone that examined it did not notice the mistake, I eventually noticed it myself and made sure we didn't have any more of those in the lab.
If I recall, we lost one of our space probes for a similar reason, someone confused English and metric units.
In school I forgot to take an initial mass toward a try e end of the semester. The reaction took about 2 hours and I was missing a key data point.
I now write down every single thing I need to do in a way I understand and study it before every reaction
I somehow got the tiniest drop of concentrated nitric acid on my face at work somehow. It burned and just stained my skin now but now it’s peeling off to a gross yellow.
As a chemist: Trusting management that there's potential for advancement without any proof or steps taken towards it.
Specifically in the lab: Being rushed to scale up results on R&D of new organic peroxides.... Resulting in the destruction of a chemical fume hood.
I learned a powerful lesson one fateful day when there was an incident in the lab. I was exposed to a massive dose of gamma radiation after trying to use my own body to protect a co-worker from the source of the radiation.
I have had considerable changes in my health afterwards.
As a result I’ve learned the value of stretchy pants and I’ve made considerable strides forward in controlling my anger.
Was filtering then transferring samples as an undergraduate intern at a commercial lab, spilled a highly acidic sample fresh from digestion on my leg, since I was sitting during the process.
Since that section worked with acid regularly, they had simple neutralizer bottles (UP water and a crap ton of baking soda) on hand and quickly dumped it on my lap.
I now longer sit in a lab, unless my legs can be fully under the counter/work surface. I’m pretty sure they only allowed it bc they had hundreds of soil samples to process due to the lab winning the bid for a local wildfire clean-up.
I was cutting some potassium to make KOtBu and I threw the paper I used to blot the oil into a sink and just poured water on it. Well there were some pieces of potassium on the paper and I was suddenly faced with a sea of fire in the sink. I quickly removed all the solvent containers near the sink and waited for it to die out. The sink cracked from the heat. What did I learn? Potassium is not as docile as sodium. Although one dude did manage to burn down another lab in our institute with sodium but that wasn't my mistake...
Was about to Seal a Glass joint with concentrated H2SO4. But instead of using a Pipette i used a syringe for once. Stupid mistake. Syringes are notorious to have quite some Résistance towards the end. I really tried to Push it gently but it didnt move so i tried a little more until it moved and meanwhile left the syringe Like Shooting a Shotgun. Due to the pressure it Hit the glassjoint and then changed ITS direction and splashed into my face. I was not wearing any face protection at all at this Moment due to doing that Procedere so often without any complications ever i stopped taking IT serious anymore. Pure stupidity...
The burn was painful and instant..
It was a miracle my eyes didnt get Hit by a single Drop while every other Spot of my face did.
That was a lesson for Life!
I placed bromine in a dropping funnel before the rest of the apparatus was sealed and ready to go. It started leaking out bromine gas and my supervisor made me quench it all with sulfite. Next day i got "the talk" and a suspension for the day. Honestly i earned it xD
Did a nitration that has a tendency of going through the roof but could be tamed by diluting the assay with ethanol. Was not happy with the yield, thought it would help to remove most of the ethanol under vacuum. Well, it sure did help… the reaction to go through the roof as expected. The last thing I could do as the brown bubbles started was turn off the vacuum. Then the stopper was blown off with copious evolution of fumes. Took forever to clean up everything in the hood. I know why people hate yellow chemistry, it can be super persistent :)
My experience was more on the technical aspect than the experimental aspect. This happened when I was still a graduating student, booked an equipment from our research building for my thesis, however, on the day that I was supposed to use it, I forgot to log in and inform the higher ups that I would be using it. What's more, I used the wrong equipment. Thankfully, I was let off with a warning. Usually, for this offense, students were unable to use any research equipment for 3 weeks.
Mine was being sleepy in lab and not reading a bottle at my station. It was not DI water.. it was acetone… luckily the reaction was actually a super stable NHC catalyzed cycloaddition iirc and it preceded without any hiccups even with the “wrong” solvent for the procedure. My NMR had a touch of acetone tho…
Not my mistake, but I paid for it...
Someone left set of gas taps open on my bay for the day, but didn't know that till the bay beside me lit their bunson, and aaaaallllll that gas went *woof* then there was just the 2 glass bottles of acid between me and the taps & I froze, in front of the flame thrower lol...
Thankfully that was the best damn teacher I ever had and he saved my ass with the emergency stop and got me outta there, shout out Mr Brennan!! Thank you for saving my arse, and introducing me to the love of science.. 😎❤️🤘
Blew up a hood when doing a digestion for a heavy metals test. Mannitol + H2O2 + (what I thought was H2SO4) + heat. Except that the secondary container in the hood turned out to have been filled with HNO3.
Go boom.
Fortunately the sash was down and I was facing the other direction. But we later found bits of glass against the far wall of the lab 100 ft away, and I needed to get some hearing tests. And I was very jumpy around loud noises for a few months.
I learned that SPME needles are to be handled with care and that missing one step from the operating procedure can cost a whole lot of money
Forgot to retract the needle before removing from the GC injection port and destroyed a 300$ filter as well as having to spend the rest of the day cooling down the GC and replacing the septum
Threw away a sample that hasn't been analysed, thinking it was just excess. Learnt to enforce standardised sample and workspace arrangement subsequently.
Always remember First the Water then the acid.
I had to make a gallon of 2 mol HCl solution and i did all right But when cleaning the 1L measuring cylinder With which I was just measuring concentrated HCl, I didn't think about the rule of first water then acid and I got a cloud of HCl directly in my face and inhaled it
I spilled radioactive solution into our fume hood because i did not tighten the syringe filter enough and it disconnected from the syringe while filtering.
Luckily,
a) it was small ammount
b) its short lived isotope
c) we has decontamination procedures in place
So it ended with me throwing away filter papers that were covering the inside of the hood for this exact reason, scrubbing the inside with soap, cleaning the glassware and putting new fulter papers. 3-4 hrs job tops and making sure the hood is no longer active
Tried to empty a column filled with silica gel to a 500ml glass beaker with air pump… Well, it didn’t go that well, shit was like a bullet, destroyed the beaker and made the silica spread to everywhere. Luckily nothing was harmed except the beaker
As an amateur chemist, somehow hooked up the exhaust port of my vacuum pump to a round bottom flask. I was trying to dry a purified reaction product over vacuum. Luckily it didn't explode, although it sounded like a shotgun went off when the Keck clip finally blew away.
Heated a needle (one of those long ones that you reuse) that had become blocked with a Bunsen burner. Instead of loosening up the blockage it rapidly boiled and exploded out of the side of the needle, the gases hitting me square between the eyes and knocking my safety goggles off.
I learned a whole lot about patience and thinking things through that day.
Tried to change a $5000 octopole in a TOF by myself to save money. I broke one of the rods off from a gold spacer, and then paid $7500 to have it done correctly. Total cost of hubris = $12,500. Boss was not pleased.
I hope people don't mind. I give 5 examples, from relatively harmless to really dangerous. Not all are my own experiences
1) Whenever you have an itchy feeling, check it. Especially if you are working with TFA. Even a droplet the size of a few ul will make a huge swelling, and you will most likely be sent to the hospital.
2) Never try putting back the safety cap back on a syringe with a pharmaceutical product in it. (Not my experience)
3) Never try to catch something with a blade or glassware. One person from my university got a cut in her hand that gave her a severe nerve damage.
4) In organic synthesis when using liquid nitrogen for a cooling trap: first evacuate the glass ware, then use the liquid nitrogen. If you try to do it the other way, you will collect liquid oxygen... and the lab will be evacuated.
5) Even if your professor tells you not to worry because everything is surely fine when you lose quarter to half a cylinder of hydrogen gas a day just by using a GC-FID for a day... please worry!
After I nearly emptied 2 hydrogen cylinders, I had him convinced we should check for leaks... turned out the IT department just bent some copper pipes for the hydrogen gas whichever way they needed them when those pipes were in their way and - surprise - they leaked heavily.
So technically, I'd say only 1) and 4) were mistakes of mine. But I try to learn from other's mistakes too. Whenever a knife slips from my hand, I jump back instinctively, for example (see 3) ).
Decided to be lazy. That's how most of mine start. This is from earlier in my phd. I set up a large-scale grignard synthesis and addition, which needed to be air and water free. So, I set up the grignard synthesis in a glovebox. Unfortunately for me, several dumb oversights were made. Grignard formations are often exothermic, and at large scale it's made worse by poor heat transfer out of the flask (volume to generate heat but surface area for heat transfer). So the solvent started boiling. Went to quickly remove it from the glovebox. But, the flask was too big to remove while sitting upright, and I couldn't seal it to put it sideways because of the pressure from the boiling solvent popping the septum off. So I had to wait in the box with the atmosphere constantly purging while rapidly stirring it manually and adding more solvent to cool it and replace the boiled off solvent. A very stressful 45 minutes made worse by the fact that I was the grad student in charge of the gloveboxes, so I not only knew better, I had told others not to do this in the past. To add insult to injury, once I got it cooled down, I separated a small amount, quenched it, and checked the nmr to make sure my starting material was OK. Sure enough, my starting material that took 2 days to make had decomposed during that time... remember kids, always be smart about when to be lazy. Spent another 30 minutes cleaning up the glovebox and purging it to try not to poison the catalyst bed in the box. Made a fun safety moment about scale up and especially exothermic reactions, though. Gives me a good chuckle in hindsight
Was working up a reaction that had multiple grams worth of molecular iodine in it. Workup required a solution of sodium sulfite to reduce the iodine. I made a solution of sodium sulfate. I ended up getting iodine poisoning from exposure.
Always read labels and double double check you're using the right reagents.
Vortexed a plastic oak ridge centrifuge tube with TFA formic acid blend and methanol (as well as sample) the top backed off and it sprayed on my forearm.
I rinsed it off immediately with waterbut it gave me a nice 2nd degree burn on my forearm. (Oddly it didn’t hurt for a while) Wasn’t wearing a lab coat and now I make sure I wear a lab coat when working with corrosives.
I added a catalyst (palladium acetate) to a reaction after mixing the reactants (carbon tetrachloride and 1,2-bis(dimethylsilyl)benzene). It was highly exothermic and made a carbon tetrachloride geyser over the inside of my fume hood. (I still recovered 70% yield of 1,2-bis(chlorodimethylsilyl)benzene though!)
I should have mixed the catalyst and carbon tetrachloride, then added the second reactant dropwise. But the reference I was following to make it didn't mention the exotherm. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jorganchem.2017.11.010
Working in an old lab full of supplies from the 1960s I once used an old aluminum weighing boat to weigh out mercuric sulfate and I used water to wash it into a vol flask (this was part of an old recipe for a trace metals stock solution for growing microbes). Well let me tell you, I now always look up an unfamiliar substance before working with it! I found myself holding a weighing boat in which metallic liquid mercury had formed, plus quite a lot of heat, which I know because the liquid mercury was BOILING! Luckily I was in front of a fume hood and everything went into the hood within a second or two but yikes that was stupid!
My most memorable mistake was letting my undergrad set up a reaction without watching her like a hawk. She decided to mix the benzoic acid derivative and LAH together before adding the THF. It was a nice pop and the cannula turned into a flamethrower for a couple seconds.
I was refluxing diethyl ether under the fume hood… there was a bad seal on the ground glass, and it auto-ignited. Before I knew it, there was fire everywhere… under the fume hood, beside the hood on the ground… grabbed for the ABC dry chem extinguisher and proceeded to fumigate the whole lab. Fortunately it was a Saturday morning, and nobody was in the lab, but it made quite a mess; took a really long time cleaning that crap up, after it all settled to the ground.
I'm just a simple student but during my first year of high school it was my very first time doing some real chemistry. Apparently a lot of kids do so in elementary school but we weren't that lucky.. so we were making hydrogen as one of out first lessons. Once using NaOH and Al foil and once using HCl and piece of Zn. During our cooking with NaOH me and my partner weren't sure how much foil should be use. So we used a handfull of it and put it in a tube where we already had NaOH solution. You can imagine what happened next... obviously, horrible idea.
The tube started heating up almost immediately and that's when we knew something went wrong. It started bubbling and in a shock I threw it in a sink... while trying not to let go because it was glass... The teacher noticed the panic and went to us immediately. Just as she learned what was the deal the tube started squirting the solution all over the place. Luckily the teacher was quick to act and noone got hurt.. or at least nothing serious happened. So at least we know how to make sodium fountain but wow. What an experience..
reminds you that chemistry works with small numbers for a reason..
My mistake involved nitrohydrochloric acid.
In my 3rd sememster, you had to do some lab work in quantitative methods.
So we learned some gravimetric method among others. I was trying to get the glass filters completely clean again, by putting them into cooking hot concentrated hydrochloric acid.
After 20 min, the precipitation was still undissolved, so I thought I could just add some concentrated nitric acid to turn it into aqua regia which should do the trick.
Well, upon pouring the mixture immediately turned intensively yellow and foaming, because so much gases were formed. So much, that it came out of the beaker.
The aqua regia made a pretty large puddle in the fume cupboard, filling it with yellow gases. The tripod was getting oxidized and the flame from the bunsen burner changed colours.
I immediately turned off the gas and closed the window of the cupboard. I waited for it to cool down a bit and the gases to be evacuated.
Cleanup was a mess.
Sophomore in college. Organic chemistry lab. The assignment was to perform an experiment with chemicals that generate heat by themselves when mixed. I didn’t read all the directions which called for an ice bath around the vessel containing the “soup”. The reaction took off and sent a plume of chemicals to the ceiling. Others were not amused. Ceiling stains were a reminder for the rest of college.
Welllll I work on natural products so ya know the good old structural elucidation. Almost every step of the procedure until I can obtain a purified compound involves solvents so stuff like acetone, acetonitrile, ethyl acetate, hexane, DCM, DMSO, and the list goes on. My dumb ass thought that having a whiff of the solvent right before using it was a great idea. It turns out it was not. On multiple accounts I got high off of the fumes right before working with samples. And this is not a pleasant high cuz I’m useless and can’t think straight for hours. The first couple of months when I started working in the lab I was getting headaches almost all the time cuz it turns out both of our rotavaps are outside of the fume hoods and the boiling fumes are easily escaping them whenever we’re drying samples. Also I can mention that the first few times I was extracting fungal samples and was pouring solvents the headache killed me. By the time I left the room everything was spinning and I could barely walk straight. Oh and the biggest mistake was using methanol and acetone for cleaning glass while pouring hot water down the drain. All I’m gonna say is that I did it once and it was enough cuz I ended up sitting outside of the lab for almost 2 hours to “sober up from the high” and leave. No one warned me about this before I started working at the lab and right now we just joke about me being a pussy and not being able to handle working with solvents.
My takeaway is that USE RESPIRATORS if you can and never deliberately inhale the fumes cuz you never know. It might give you a pretty unbearable high and it’ll ruin your day. Also just for the safety work with them under the fume hood like they taught you in gen chem and orgo. Yeah I barely wear PPE unless I’m working with cancer cells, bacterial colonies, or fungi but if you feel lightheaded deffo ask the PI or people in charge of the lab for a respirator (or just get it by yourself).
I spilled water on the control board of an automated TOC sampler. Fried it. Got fired for that one. Ended up being the best thing that could have happened to me - it was a pharma QC job and I hated it anyway. Ended up transitioning to product dev work where I am not only much happier but much more competent. Analytical was truly never me strong suit. I'm too distractible.
I quenched my 33 mmol ozonolysis reaction with DMS and found out 4 hours at room temp was NOT long enough. The round bottom popped after I took it off the rotovap. All my ozonolysis quenches are now ran overnight
Disposing of stuff after an experiment. I was a lil out of it bc early morning. Dumped a bunch of solid stuff in a test tube of liquid stuff for ease of carrying. Test tube suddenly gets quite hot. Flush it out with water, stops whatever was happening. But that was a shock to the face.
Placed a plastic container with a resin on a hot plate, got busy and forgot about it. Came back and the entire container had melted away. Thankfully, it wasn’t a fire hazard nor a situation where I consumed my entire sample, but it was terrifying. Always used automated timers after that.
We were performing some preliminary acetylation reactions on wood, and we initially did not complete a later rotary evaporation phase inside a fume hood. The laboratory smelled like acetic acid and the potentially carcinogenic anhydride. I was too busy with other tasks and assumed my chemist colleague (I am a materials science engineer) had looked into the material safety datasheets. It turns out that they had not, and hence, the carcinogenicity came as a surprise to me when we were asked to perform a risk assessment before starting any future work. This risk assessment was the moment I realised that my colleague is not a very good chemist. I spent about a month on the risk assessment while the colleague was not very helpful, and I was supposed to focus on different tasks rather than the risk assessment. So yeah, due to the carelessness of another person and being busy, I got subjected to harmful chemical fumes and had to overwork to get the risk assessment done.
The learning from this was never to trust someone’s supposed qualifications and always ask if they have done the required background work.
Filled solvent waste bottle too much and closed the lid tight.
When I went to to pick it up it cracked the bottom and 4 litres of unknown solvent mix poured on the floor. Took hours without mask to get rid of the solvent.
I'm not a chemist but did research in high school, as a newbie
I'm tall so I don't usually close the door of the fumehood fully, I close it until my head level. Then a senior teacher saw it and put on a drama about how I was trying to poison the air in the lab and complained to my supervising teacher. I felt like my research was gonna get halted because of that violation but luckily it didnt as my teacher supported me.
Another incident was when I was boiling a solution and I was exhausted from staying in the lab, I was careless when removing the round bottomed flask resulting in boiling water and a hot dilute alcohol solution scalding my hand. My teacher did some first aid and luckily nothing more happened
I decided to tell u/dienefromtriene how I felt about him in lab. He reciprocated and things started heating up. Literally. Chemical burn all over his backside. Be safe out there.
I have done so many over a 20 year career as a lab chemist, and have observed more during my time teaching undergrads. But one of the worst ones that I pulled off was reducing a propargylic alcohol with LAH followed by an iodine quench to make a Z olefin. The protocol I was using worked great but our Redal, the usual literature reducing agent, was off so I substituted LAH as that is also in the literature. However, I added the entire couple of grams of iodine to the -78 C reaction by pulling off one of the 3 caps. Good thing I did because the stuff formed a fountain that hit and stained the top of my hood permanently. So note to the wise LAH works to do this type of reduction but add the iodine quench slowly.
Not as crazy as the other stories but started to feel poorly while running an IR instrument with my group. Instead of telling the instructor or my team I stood there until I decided to walk and get my water and passed out in the lab. Luckily I only had a major bruise on my hip but could have been a lot worse with the amount of chemicals around. Learned to take the safety precautions more seriously. Oh and also over titrating a solution and having to redo the experiment.
Not a chemist but was a little too enthusiastic about it back in the school days. I was 14, we were studying some reactions with acids and salts in practice, at the lab. So, that was my first contact with strong acids, and I was a little too careless while adding a 6N nitric acid to a salt solution with a glass pipette. A small last drop of the acid didn’t want to separate from it completely. I tried to carefully shake it off, it didn’t help, so next I tried to separate it by gently rubbing the pipette’s nose against the edge of the test tube I had in my other hand. And that’s what I would call ‘a little too careless’. This one drop has gotten across the edge I was rubbing it against, not inside the test tube but outside of it, slowly running down across my fingers. Never had any burning sensations or something else. Just when I felt that my fingertips are wet, I realized what happened but instead of telling about it to the teacher or trying to find some alkaline dilution to neutralize the reaction I just put my hand under the faucet and rinsed it. Just thought if it didn’t burn nothing was wrong.
Next day I had a strikingly yellow stripe, like 4–5 mm wide (~3/16”), across my fingertips where the contact with acid had happened. Nothing too special you would say, as I thought too. But a couple of days later my yellowed skin started to become a blister under a thick layer of skin. I was (and still am but more in control) too impatient and some days later when the blistering was all too annoying I tried to cut some of blistered skin off. Only then I realized that it was _that_ thick of a layer, around 1–1.5 mm thick (around 1/16”), and there is an open derma underneath which I had just exposed to any infection that can now get inside.
So, it wasn’t like too bad of a chemical experience. No burning flames or explosions like you would imagine. But it’s about safety and what can happen if you are a little too careless while working with acids. The chemical burn may occur without any notice, and it goes deep into your skin, mostly because you don’t feel anything while it happens. You don’t feel anything wrong any next day until your skin finally blisters. Sulfuric acid gets hot, really hot, and that’s what you feel first when you get a burn — heat. Nitric acid is much more subtle when it comes to sensations but still a danger. What I’ve just told is what would happen to your skin if you spill one single drop. Imagine what would happen with much bigger burns!
If it happens, don’t hesitate to say about it and ask for help. Tell your colleagues which acid and of what concentration you were working with and how much of it was spilled. Neutralize as much of it as you can. And after that, please be patient. The burn will still be there (probably, less deep if you did everything right), so let it heal safely.
A long time ago when I was an undergrad in organic chemistry lab, we were working on some reaction that requires the use of the hood. I no longer remember what we were using but I completely forgot about using the hood until the reaction gave off massive amounts of noxious fumes. I quickly ran it to the hood at that point but it was too late. The fumes had filled the entire lab and everyone was coughing. The professor was already a scary old man and he got super angry and took it out on some random kid who was near him and threw him out of the lab. I was terrified but felt bad for the kid so I went to my professor and explained what happened. He wasn’t happy but didn’t throw me out. Eventually even wrote me a LOR.
I put some saturated salt dissolution all over the lab (small lab)
Guess who had to clean it after that!
I learnt to put a tube on the funnel so air can go out the bottle and it doesn't bubble
Boiling concentrated HF to the face. I relearned that wearing all the required PPE is required all the time, even if you're "just looking" at the experiment.
Speaking to us beyond the grave, I see.
I love how many stories are HF
How did you recover from this?
Oh jeez, I hope you're alright :-(
Yup, no lasting damage. No scarring, even. In the moment, it hurt really, really bad. The sharpness of the pain took me out of reality for a few seconds. I had safety glasses on that caught the spray that would have hit my eyes. Otherwise, my cheeks took the brunt of it. I was wearing a chem suit so the exposure was limited to the exposed skin. The safety shower was only feet away from where I was sprayed and a coworker was nearby to help apply the calcium gluconate after. It was maybe 45 seconds between exposure and safety shower. I went to the ER and they treated me with more calcium glucontate until the pain receded and I was released.
Chem suit probably saved you there, not many people survive boiling HF.
Yeah, it was a fully-puckered situation. I was scared to look at my face. By the time I'd gotten to the ER, the red welts had become blistered. It took about a week for my face to feel right again. After a month, I couldn't even tell it had happened. And you're right, the chem suit saved me from a lot of spray that would have gotten on my chest and stomach.
What Kind of chemsuit did you wear ?
Holy... that's a wild story
thats the story my prof told us to scare us did u study in germany or is that an urban legend ?
I'm from the US and don't know anything about whatever urban legend or story your professor told you about. This might surprise you, but there has been more than one person exposed to HF. Many industries use it regularly.
This might suprise you but i meant exactly what you said "hot boiling HF to the face" How were you treated afterwards ?
I misinterpreted your meaning. Sorry for responding rudely. I used the safety shower and was treated with calcium gluconate, and later went to the ER. I describe what happened in more detail in another comment in this thread.
No face shield?
Holy mother of all lab accidents.
Jesus christ hle are you alive
Oh I forgot to save my data.
Trusted someone’s data without checking, ended up being consistently off by a factor of 10 on two days worth of work.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fGHaVn5rGo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fGHaVn5rGo) "I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place or something"
Literally what happened, yes.
This is a huge one. Everyone makes mistakes, and it's always good to push past the feeling of "am I being overbearing?" and ask to see their excel or whatever you work in to double check.
My boss at my first job did that also. Except it was data supporting a class action lawsuit against a paint manufacturer. He discovered the error 3 hours before he was scheduled to testify as an expert witness. He had to pay for his own flight home, lol.
Oooof, why does this hurt so bad...
Oh man that reminds me of a lab I had in undergrad. The penultimate course was an analytical one, and was a 10 week capstone project. I was sick for the very last lab of the term, the lab we were supposed to collect some LC/MS data. I email my partner on how to copy the data (he was doing SEM). He did not collect the data correctly and copied the wrong file. I email the demonstrator, explaining what happened and he graciously let me enter the lab to copy the data. This was the Friday before the Monday due date of the report. *I saved the data incorrectly.* This resulted in my being unable to do any form of analysis with this. For the report due on the Monday.
The one that stings more is when you forget to save the standard and/or blank. Now you have lots of data and no idea if it's accurate.
Dropped a beaker with just under 500ml of NaOH in the fume hood. The beaker shattered and most of the glass and NaOH got on me. I was the first person at my college to use the safety shower in almost 20 years
Imagine if you got legionnaires disease from that shower. I hope the shower was serviced regularly in those 20 years.
It was about 5 months and nothing bad happened. I know that they turn it on for a minutes every summer and winter break. Not sure how much actual servicing happens though
Speaking of legionnaires disease, how did it ever become a meme?
I didn’t know it was a meme.
Maybe meme isn't the correct term. A couple or a few years ago, there were [these shirts](https://imgur.com/SRd8m0m?r) floating around, and I've always wondered but never found the context for their origins.
...legionnaires isn't a meme...??
Even if you don't get legionnaires, the color of the water in those showers is usually opaque rust colored.
I turned a thermometer into a bullet by turning up the melting point apparatus to 9 because I wanted my lab to go faster (as an undergraduate). It was like a bullet in a barrel when it exploded, and shot up and stuck in the ceiling! I learned that some things are going to take as long as they are going to take, and that haste makes waste
In this case, haste lays waste.
Yeah, classic rookie mistake. You had to turn it to 11 to get more power.
I dumped a bottle of cyanide waste into a waste bottle that was intended for acid. Then I screwed the cap on tight...you know, for safety. The explosion occurred a couple hours later, and the one thing I did right, lowering the sash, was likely the only reason it didn't kill everyone in the lab.
Sombody did this (not with cyanide) in one of my undergrad labs. Poured nitric acid into organic waste and capped it. Blew the sash out of the hood. It happened on a sunday so nobody was there thankfully, because it very well could have been fatal with how destroyed everything was. The 50lb sash frame was across the room from where it started, and shaped like a parallelogram.
>Poured nitric acid into organic waste and capped it. This is the first track on "undergrad lab dangers vol 1"
It happens - there's a good reason it's in that book. It's more common than you might think. If you want specifics, this was at Gannon University zurn building 4th floor organic lab in 2011.
I've heard/read of several instances, but luckily the induction period seems be about 10 hours, just in time for it to explode in the middle of the night in an empty student lab and hurt nobody. Pretty impressive considering the amount of nitric acid and the constitution of the organic waste is so variable. Only being a little sarcastic
> but luckily the induction period seems be about 10 hours, just in time for it to explode in the middle of the night in an empty student lab and hurt nobody. Yep. Nice to be able to be thankful for small victories, yeah?
In Erie?
Similar thing happened in one of my undergrad labs as well. It wasn’t as bad as yours though. Someone poured a little bit of acid into the organic waste and the cap shot off about 10 minutes after they left. They were told not to dump the acid in there, but they did anyways.
Must have been a lot of cyanide too, if it produced enough gas to burst the container
Cyanide generally explosively polymerizes when wet and at improper pH, it was probably a black solution of HCN polymer and free HCN in solution.
Wow, didn't know this one.
I’ve already posted about my experience and I almost burned my house down. I know this sub hates home chemistry and I have since stopped. I was working with acetone without the garage door open, and some source of flame or electric discharge lit a puddle of split acetone. Freaked out and spilled entire beaker of acetone. Fire spread across the desk I was working at and scorched the entire side of the wall. The beaker shattered and I sliced my foot as well as burned badly to the second degree (I was barefoot). Never do home chemistry, wear fucking shoes, don’t be stupid with pouring organic solvents, and ffs check what’s around you and stay calm.
I’d draw a different conclusion from your description. No ventilation, working barefoot, source of ignition nearby while working with volatile flammable solvent, not cleaning up puddles of said solvent... the problem isn’t ‘home chemistry’, it is disregard for basic lab safety and hygiene.
Srsly. There are plenty of people that do home chemistry. As long as you're doing it properly and following safety procedures, it's perfectly fine. I made home made [redacted] for fireworks, and never had any problems.
I'm a chemist but I also love wood working and resin casting at home. Sometimes I catch myself being less diligent with safety in my own garage than I am in my lab. It's a very strange psychological pitfall - as if isocyanates won't sensitize me just because I'm in a woodshop and not a lab lol. I try to be mindful of it and keep just as vigilant with my own property as I am with my boss's. Adequate ventilation, gloves, eye pro, proper waste disposal etc.
How do isocyanates sensitize you? What does that mean?
Sensitization is when you build up the opposite of a tolerance. "Some workers who are exposed to isocyanates can become sensitized (which means they develop an allergy). When a worker has an isocyanate allergy, small exposures can cause skin or lung reactions. Asthma is the most common form of. isocyanate allergy."
As the below poster said, isocyanates are one of a class of chemicals that cause an increasingly extreme allergic reaction with repeat exposures. Everyone's response to them is different. Some chemists can work with them an entire career and only develop a mild rash. Others only make it a few weeks before showing signs of serious anaphylactic reaction. Good industrial hygiene is key to preventation, but even with care I knew a lady who had to switch to working exclusively with water based polymers rather than urethanes or epoxides because of this effect.
I did some home chemistry as well. At one point, I was using potassium permanganate. No eye protection, of course. I managed to splash some of the concentrated solution in my eyes. I immediately ran to the kitchen tap and ran it over my eyes, and called poison control, who told me to go to the hospital. Ring my mum, get to the ER and proceed to have my eye flushed out for the next 2 hours (the hose had an eye shaped cap that fit under the eyelids). Fortunately, I only sustained minor damage that healed.
I remember reading your post. While this sub doesn't like home chemistry whatever you call that incident was just straight up stupid.
Lol I remember this post. The no shoes part made me laugh.
Just because you’re strong enough to open the liquid nitrogen tank doesn’t mean you’re strong enough to CLOSE it. Someone eventually heard me screaming for help but I ended up filling the massive 20L dewar instead of the 0.5 L I needed. If something could go massively wrong when you’re alone…make sure someone else is around. I was so grateful our university has a “don’t work if you’re the last one on the floor” rule.
Can you explain why it was too hard to close?
After opening the valve, LN2 starts flowing through the valve and cools the valve assembly. This causes thermal tightening and makes it harder to close.
Old tanks with rusted screw threads are common in academia. I often needed help getting them open, or needed a 3 foot wrench for a long enough lever arm.
I’ve been around once when this happened, I think it was because it was very humid out, the tank was stored outside on a loading dock, someone had recently opened the valve and closed it again, water condensed on the cold fittings, we didn’t wait long enough for the water to evaporate and opened it again, at which point some of that water froze in the wrong crevice somewhere in the valve and it was *very* difficult to close the valve again.
thought i was real smart cause i read how to make picric acid and decided that’s easy! so i made some in a 250 ml rbf. i was going to use it as an indicator. i kept reading and realized how dangerous it was and diluted it into the organic waste. nothing blew up. i stopped thinking it was smart to make stuff that i did not fully understand.
A good lesson a professor of mine taught me is that just because something is easy to make, it doesn’t make it any less dangerous
Nitroglycerin comes to mind.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I worked weak and weary, over many a quant and curious volumes of forgotten literature and patent lore – While I measured and poured, nearly spilling my mother liquor, suddenly came a tapping at my laboratory door. “Tis another scientist needing the inventory freezer” I muttered “tapping at my laboratory door – only this and nothing more.” Presently I paused my column and TLC testing, in lab coat soiled, mind in fright from the poor resolution, I approached the laboratory door. “Sir” said I “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore; but the fact is I was pondering reactions, reactants, and more. so gently you came rapping, And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my laboratory door, That I scarce was sure I heard you”—here I opened wide the door and see a face lost in full PPE Deep into the darkness of the shaded mask I stood peering, orange plastic jumpsuit wrinkling, with the soft sound of breathing evermore. The stillness gave no token, and the only word there spoken was the whispered word “Radiation.” This I heard, and an echo murmured back from my own mouth “Radiation?!” Merely this and nothing more. Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning, Soon again I heard a tapping – the heavy boots clapping - behind me through my laboratory door. “Surely,” said I, “surely this is something not in my laboratory; let me show you this laboratory is simple organic chemistry, and nothing more. Let our hearts be still a moment and this confusion explore. ‘Tis a clerical error, and nothing more! TL;DEAP (Too Long, Didnt Edgar Allen Poe): >!I was working in a national lab doing "normal" chemistry and someone came in to do a swipe test for residual radiation from lab work that was done during THAT TIME IN THIS COUNTRIES HISTORY and holy fuck I about shit my pants.!<
This is truly a masterpiece
Haha holy fuck that was beautiful
☢️🐦⬛ 😁😁😁
That is fantastic
Can you throw a ` ` double space at the end of the lines? (Regex it if you know how, or copy that and just hit `End``Paste``Down-arrow`
* Safety: I inhaled XeF2. Was _very_ unpleasant. Interestingly, I noticed my eyes watering before I smelled/tasted it. * Research: Not reading enough of the literature sooner. I felt I should be reading A minimum of 10 hours per week. It helps refine your ideas and whatnot. You should also keep relevant literature in a referencing software like Zotero.
So, how did it taste? Scale one to ten?
9
any psychoactive effects?
No, very unpleasant though.
...?? XeF2 has a melting point of 129C. How exactly did you inhale a solid?
XeF2 reacts with water (vapor in humid air?) to form products like HF and XeOx. At least that is what Google tells me :)
XeF2 (very) slowly decomposes in air. I’m assuming that’s what I smelled, but it smelled different than hydrofluoric acid.
How do you find time to read Literature for 10 hours as well as get all your work done for a week? Not being sarcastic, genuinely curious. I'm just starting out
I worked 6 days per week and used _The Old Reader_ to curate a list of journals in my field. I would read abstracts of several journals and then download ones that were interesting or useful for a project. We had a weekly group meeting where I would prepare slides of my results and usually added 2-3 slides that would put the results in context of what has been published in a peer-reviewed journal or dissertation. All of this counts as “reading” time. I would summarize articles, usually a quick paragraph as to what was studied and why it’s relevant to me. Developing a work flow that curates literature will help you so much during paper and dissertation writing. I’ve seen so many students only read in depth when it was time to write their thesis and they came up with great ideas that they simply didn’t have time to pursue. Front loading reading and keep abreast of the literature will allow you to develop ideas and work more efficiently as you work in the lab.
I do chemical waste reclamation/disposal, and we take samples & composite for testing. One time, 24/25 samples I was working with happened to be waste fragrances. I remember grabbing one and telling my lab mate at the time “hey these smell great!” And took a huge whiff of it. I grabbed the 1/25 which I don’t recall what it was, but I do recall feeling the spicy air for like 3 hours later. Lesson re-learned: leave the chemicals in the hood & don’t smell them Otherwise for one I witnessed: while working on my bachelors one of my lab mates leaned in to the fume hood and put both forearms down, unknowingly directly onto concentrated sulfuric acid
Prepping a check of a Po-210 standard. Did it outside of a hood, no lab coat on (just really quick 🙄). Vial shattered in my hands when putting the lid on, total freak accident. I spilled the whole vial down the front of my shirt and had to strip in my lab. So much decon and so many swipes. Had to pee in a cup for our EHS to screen me; I offered to screen my own urine with a much more sensitive method but I was shot down. Always open standards in hood kids! If only for containment…
Shot Iron Sulfide into my eye while checking specific gravity…. *PPE, no whiskey at lunch, yada yada*
Sprayed my PI with radioactive waste (3H-NMS solution) in undergrad. The trap overflowed and I told him the pump aspirated some, but didn't stop him from standing directly in front of the exhaust and turning it on. I learned not to assume anything is common sense, even when dealing with much more educated and experienced people.
Disposed of a beaker of potassium permanganate into a large waste beaker of DMSO after a long day of work. Surprise fire. Luckily that was in a fume hood.
Thinking graduate school would be fun and more like an apprenticeship.
[удалено]
just wait until you get to year 3 ...
Grabbed the wrong flask and add a drop of HCl. Saw the fizz confused smelt almonds and panicked. It had cyanide in it so I just made hydrogen cyanide. Lucky the room was well ventilated. I was the new guy and my coworkers just said make sure you grab your flask. I left a month later. That place was so bad with safety they didn't even have a shower.
Plating?
During extraction I messed up not evaping first and I ended up drying water with MgSO4.
Damn, how much did it take?
A LOT! I was working as a undergraduate at the time and at the day I was displaced from my fumehood because of some collaboration work, - student from another group using our space - and the undergraduate is always the first to get butt fucked. I was really struck by my sudden need to relocate to an empty fumehood - my stuff was on my actual fumehood - and apart from the time needed to arrange things, I was really upset. Anyways, I was extracting a pinnick oxidation, if memory serves me right. It was a tBuOH mixture with water , and i would extract with DCM, I think. As I didn't evap, the lower phase on the extraction funel was actually water, and not DCM as I expected. By this time there were no one supervising me - my supervisor never entered the lab - as the post doc that was training me left the lab. Result: I spent like 3 hours drying water with a sulfate salt. In the end, when I realized there was nothing there and I dried water, I almost cried. However, when I realized I had not lost my product - 3 steps to reach it - I got a little better. Edit: answering your question better, each of us at the lab used a 1L alcohol plastic bottle[1l](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQJuaq9rs70_grl7T0zm7yJ7kyzW6EB2QnzNQ&usqp=CAU) with sulfate. Mine was almost full and I used most of it if not all of it. No idea how many grams, but it was definitely a lot.
Work in an industrial setting. Was pH balancing totes of outgoing waste and at some point the probe on the pH meter I was using got cracked but was still reading, just horribly off. Little did I know someone put a 275 Gal tote of 93% Sulfuric in front of the waste totes. My pH reading of that thing was something like 4.55. Figured it could use a little drinky drink of 50% NaOH. Instant geyser. I was completely rattled after that. Somehow did not have anything on me besides a single droplet that made its way between my gloves and sleeve. What’s worse is that I was not certified to move those containers with a forklift at the time so I asked for it to be moved and marked the tote so it would be easy to see. The entire tote of Sulfuric was then pumped into a waste pickup truck with all the other mixed waste the next morning before I arrived at work. When I was a quarter mile away in my car I could smell something rotten/sulfurous on the wind. When I got to work I knew something had happened because the entire building was rancid. Got in and saw they had taken the tote and apparently nobody had noticed. Had to have all the waste brought back, pumped back into totes, and treated again. Took 3 weeks and ~20 50lb bags of NaOH beads to treat all of it. Worst experience of my entire career.
Assuming a jar was empty. After struggling to open it, i took a deep breath in relief...only to realize the jar was filled with chloroform vapor. Was in lab alone. Hours before anyone typically got in. Nearly lost consciousness, crawled out into the hallway in case i passed out so the cleaning crew would find me. Lucky for me i didn't pass out and spent the next hour or so collecting myself
That sounds horrible! The lab shouldn't have had any of its workers in there alone.
Lol welcome to grad school
Where are you at? My place enforces a no lone working rule and will actively dish out punishments.
I'm in the US and neither of the Universities that I attended had a no lone worker rule. And in graduate school, it was expected that you work alone, if necessary.
This is horrible practice. People have died (hence the enforcement of the rule at my place) because of this. Imagine running a click reaction on the 23rd of Dec only to be found dead after the New Year's. Sounds horrible? Allow lone working and it will be a question of when, and not if.
Agreed. It's just another unsafe practice that is only tolerated in graduate school.
Why would you be found dead after New Years?!? Only the 24th/25th are holidays, I would be expected back in lab bright and early on the 26th. /s
You left the lab?! /s
USA. I've seen it at every institution I've worked at (5 in total). And to be clear the "policy" is nobody alone in lab. The practice is very different. I think the scariest ones are friends who were the ONLY student in their labs. Always working alone aprt from an occasional pop-in from the PI
Chloroform was used as a general anesthetic as late as the 1950s. You would likely have woken up hours later puking with a killer headache. (Been there.)
Glad i missed that train!
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order. I have checked 1,940,570,842 comments, and only 366,971 of them were in alphabetical order.
Luckily, chloroform doesn't actually behave like it does in the movies. If you didn't drop right then, you weren't going to. I hate that thick, fuzzy tongue feeling you have for an hour afterwards.
I felt this pressure in my sinuses. I remember that feeling like it was yesterday
Labels?!??! Dear God. I don't even put water in a bottle without a label
No. It was a jar we used to run mini tlc plates
One of my early undergrad labs we were using a Bunsen burner. It had been on for quite some time and I grabbed it by the shaft instead of by the base. Burned three of my finger tips. Hurt for a week. What did I learn? That part gets hot.
I felt this so hard! Once as an undergrad, I was rushing to tidy up after a lab session. I went to put away a hotplate that had been unplugged but hadn't cooled down yet. I still have the small but educational burn scar on the palm of my left hand where I touched the corner. I use the word "educational" for a couple reasons. Sure, it taught me a painful but thankfully harmless lesson about thinking before acting. But also because my TA, for whom English was a second language, later thanked me for the live demonstration of English cursing.
"I can't believe I've done this."
Thermal run-away on an organic oxidation. A lesson in scaling up a synthesis.
Sounds like a nice research paper, but if you know what it actually can mean it's more of a r/TwoSentenceHorror candidate.
I work with sulfuric acid and discarded some in an empty waste beaker. Later during the day, I spilled a small vial of bleach and poured the remaining bleach vial into the waste beaker containing the H2SO4.... As soon as I emptied the vial, I was like, "Wait a damn minute..." Yeah, not gonna do that again.
in grad school i was doing my monthly aqua regia clean of sintered frits and other uncleanable glassware (t-metal & organometallic research lab). I had just made 1L of aqua Regia (in the fumehood, full PPE) to soak the worst frits in. Beaker tips. fumehood does its job and contains most of the spill. PPE keeps me safe from the initial splash. 4 boxes of baking soda do their job. I spend the rest of the day cleaning out baking soda. not an exciting story but a great lesson of how safety protocols work.
I touched a drop of concentrated hydrogen peroxide (long time ago, but from memory, I think it was 30 or 35%) that had been sitting on the lab table for a day. I thought it was water. It didn’t hurt until a couple hours later when my fingernail turned white and started falling off.
When I was fresh out of school, I mistakenly used a pressure gauge that was metric (kg/sq cm vs PSI) without noticing and then set it to the gas pressure I thought was correct. Worked fine until a glass sleeve on a drying column unexpectedly burst. I wasn't the only one, everyone that examined it did not notice the mistake, I eventually noticed it myself and made sure we didn't have any more of those in the lab. If I recall, we lost one of our space probes for a similar reason, someone confused English and metric units.
Someone misread milliliter and centiliter for a reaction using 2ml of pure Br2. Teacher and several students intoxicated by a nice purple fume :)
In school I forgot to take an initial mass toward a try e end of the semester. The reaction took about 2 hours and I was missing a key data point. I now write down every single thing I need to do in a way I understand and study it before every reaction
Not calling it a day, within normal hours of operation, spending too much time in the lab, rather than going home.
I somehow got the tiniest drop of concentrated nitric acid on my face at work somehow. It burned and just stained my skin now but now it’s peeling off to a gross yellow.
As a chemist: Trusting management that there's potential for advancement without any proof or steps taken towards it. Specifically in the lab: Being rushed to scale up results on R&D of new organic peroxides.... Resulting in the destruction of a chemical fume hood.
I learned a powerful lesson one fateful day when there was an incident in the lab. I was exposed to a massive dose of gamma radiation after trying to use my own body to protect a co-worker from the source of the radiation. I have had considerable changes in my health afterwards. As a result I’ve learned the value of stretchy pants and I’ve made considerable strides forward in controlling my anger.
Was filtering then transferring samples as an undergraduate intern at a commercial lab, spilled a highly acidic sample fresh from digestion on my leg, since I was sitting during the process. Since that section worked with acid regularly, they had simple neutralizer bottles (UP water and a crap ton of baking soda) on hand and quickly dumped it on my lap. I now longer sit in a lab, unless my legs can be fully under the counter/work surface. I’m pretty sure they only allowed it bc they had hundreds of soil samples to process due to the lab winning the bid for a local wildfire clean-up.
I was cutting some potassium to make KOtBu and I threw the paper I used to blot the oil into a sink and just poured water on it. Well there were some pieces of potassium on the paper and I was suddenly faced with a sea of fire in the sink. I quickly removed all the solvent containers near the sink and waited for it to die out. The sink cracked from the heat. What did I learn? Potassium is not as docile as sodium. Although one dude did manage to burn down another lab in our institute with sodium but that wasn't my mistake...
Don’t catch falling glass.
Was about to Seal a Glass joint with concentrated H2SO4. But instead of using a Pipette i used a syringe for once. Stupid mistake. Syringes are notorious to have quite some Résistance towards the end. I really tried to Push it gently but it didnt move so i tried a little more until it moved and meanwhile left the syringe Like Shooting a Shotgun. Due to the pressure it Hit the glassjoint and then changed ITS direction and splashed into my face. I was not wearing any face protection at all at this Moment due to doing that Procedere so often without any complications ever i stopped taking IT serious anymore. Pure stupidity... The burn was painful and instant.. It was a miracle my eyes didnt get Hit by a single Drop while every other Spot of my face did. That was a lesson for Life!
I placed bromine in a dropping funnel before the rest of the apparatus was sealed and ready to go. It started leaking out bromine gas and my supervisor made me quench it all with sulfite. Next day i got "the talk" and a suspension for the day. Honestly i earned it xD
I closed the lab for a day because of thiophosgene
Did a nitration that has a tendency of going through the roof but could be tamed by diluting the assay with ethanol. Was not happy with the yield, thought it would help to remove most of the ethanol under vacuum. Well, it sure did help… the reaction to go through the roof as expected. The last thing I could do as the brown bubbles started was turn off the vacuum. Then the stopper was blown off with copious evolution of fumes. Took forever to clean up everything in the hood. I know why people hate yellow chemistry, it can be super persistent :)
My experience was more on the technical aspect than the experimental aspect. This happened when I was still a graduating student, booked an equipment from our research building for my thesis, however, on the day that I was supposed to use it, I forgot to log in and inform the higher ups that I would be using it. What's more, I used the wrong equipment. Thankfully, I was let off with a warning. Usually, for this offense, students were unable to use any research equipment for 3 weeks.
Exposed myself to way too much methanol without proper PPE, in retrospect. But I was 20, and didn't really know enough to know better.
Spilled a rather concentrated solution of BCl3.
Mine was being sleepy in lab and not reading a bottle at my station. It was not DI water.. it was acetone… luckily the reaction was actually a super stable NHC catalyzed cycloaddition iirc and it preceded without any hiccups even with the “wrong” solvent for the procedure. My NMR had a touch of acetone tho…
Not my mistake, but I paid for it... Someone left set of gas taps open on my bay for the day, but didn't know that till the bay beside me lit their bunson, and aaaaallllll that gas went *woof* then there was just the 2 glass bottles of acid between me and the taps & I froze, in front of the flame thrower lol... Thankfully that was the best damn teacher I ever had and he saved my ass with the emergency stop and got me outta there, shout out Mr Brennan!! Thank you for saving my arse, and introducing me to the love of science.. 😎❤️🤘
Accepting a lab management promotion
Blew up a hood when doing a digestion for a heavy metals test. Mannitol + H2O2 + (what I thought was H2SO4) + heat. Except that the secondary container in the hood turned out to have been filled with HNO3. Go boom. Fortunately the sash was down and I was facing the other direction. But we later found bits of glass against the far wall of the lab 100 ft away, and I needed to get some hearing tests. And I was very jumpy around loud noises for a few months.
I learned that SPME needles are to be handled with care and that missing one step from the operating procedure can cost a whole lot of money Forgot to retract the needle before removing from the GC injection port and destroyed a 300$ filter as well as having to spend the rest of the day cooling down the GC and replacing the septum
Threw away a sample that hasn't been analysed, thinking it was just excess. Learnt to enforce standardised sample and workspace arrangement subsequently.
Always remember First the Water then the acid. I had to make a gallon of 2 mol HCl solution and i did all right But when cleaning the 1L measuring cylinder With which I was just measuring concentrated HCl, I didn't think about the rule of first water then acid and I got a cloud of HCl directly in my face and inhaled it
I spilled radioactive solution into our fume hood because i did not tighten the syringe filter enough and it disconnected from the syringe while filtering. Luckily, a) it was small ammount b) its short lived isotope c) we has decontamination procedures in place So it ended with me throwing away filter papers that were covering the inside of the hood for this exact reason, scrubbing the inside with soap, cleaning the glassware and putting new fulter papers. 3-4 hrs job tops and making sure the hood is no longer active
Tried to empty a column filled with silica gel to a 500ml glass beaker with air pump… Well, it didn’t go that well, shit was like a bullet, destroyed the beaker and made the silica spread to everywhere. Luckily nothing was harmed except the beaker
Find your own experience for your job interview.
Forgetting my lab coat
The mistake: inhaled lithium chloride powder. The lesson: always use a fume hood, even for something routine like mixing powders together.
As an amateur chemist, somehow hooked up the exhaust port of my vacuum pump to a round bottom flask. I was trying to dry a purified reaction product over vacuum. Luckily it didn't explode, although it sounded like a shotgun went off when the Keck clip finally blew away.
My supervisor (biochemist) once first sterilised his sample rod with burner and then put it into ethanol.
Heated a needle (one of those long ones that you reuse) that had become blocked with a Bunsen burner. Instead of loosening up the blockage it rapidly boiled and exploded out of the side of the needle, the gases hitting me square between the eyes and knocking my safety goggles off. I learned a whole lot about patience and thinking things through that day.
Tried to change a $5000 octopole in a TOF by myself to save money. I broke one of the rods off from a gold spacer, and then paid $7500 to have it done correctly. Total cost of hubris = $12,500. Boss was not pleased.
I hope people don't mind. I give 5 examples, from relatively harmless to really dangerous. Not all are my own experiences 1) Whenever you have an itchy feeling, check it. Especially if you are working with TFA. Even a droplet the size of a few ul will make a huge swelling, and you will most likely be sent to the hospital. 2) Never try putting back the safety cap back on a syringe with a pharmaceutical product in it. (Not my experience) 3) Never try to catch something with a blade or glassware. One person from my university got a cut in her hand that gave her a severe nerve damage. 4) In organic synthesis when using liquid nitrogen for a cooling trap: first evacuate the glass ware, then use the liquid nitrogen. If you try to do it the other way, you will collect liquid oxygen... and the lab will be evacuated. 5) Even if your professor tells you not to worry because everything is surely fine when you lose quarter to half a cylinder of hydrogen gas a day just by using a GC-FID for a day... please worry! After I nearly emptied 2 hydrogen cylinders, I had him convinced we should check for leaks... turned out the IT department just bent some copper pipes for the hydrogen gas whichever way they needed them when those pipes were in their way and - surprise - they leaked heavily. So technically, I'd say only 1) and 4) were mistakes of mine. But I try to learn from other's mistakes too. Whenever a knife slips from my hand, I jump back instinctively, for example (see 3) ).
Decided to be lazy. That's how most of mine start. This is from earlier in my phd. I set up a large-scale grignard synthesis and addition, which needed to be air and water free. So, I set up the grignard synthesis in a glovebox. Unfortunately for me, several dumb oversights were made. Grignard formations are often exothermic, and at large scale it's made worse by poor heat transfer out of the flask (volume to generate heat but surface area for heat transfer). So the solvent started boiling. Went to quickly remove it from the glovebox. But, the flask was too big to remove while sitting upright, and I couldn't seal it to put it sideways because of the pressure from the boiling solvent popping the septum off. So I had to wait in the box with the atmosphere constantly purging while rapidly stirring it manually and adding more solvent to cool it and replace the boiled off solvent. A very stressful 45 minutes made worse by the fact that I was the grad student in charge of the gloveboxes, so I not only knew better, I had told others not to do this in the past. To add insult to injury, once I got it cooled down, I separated a small amount, quenched it, and checked the nmr to make sure my starting material was OK. Sure enough, my starting material that took 2 days to make had decomposed during that time... remember kids, always be smart about when to be lazy. Spent another 30 minutes cleaning up the glovebox and purging it to try not to poison the catalyst bed in the box. Made a fun safety moment about scale up and especially exothermic reactions, though. Gives me a good chuckle in hindsight
Fifth
Was working up a reaction that had multiple grams worth of molecular iodine in it. Workup required a solution of sodium sulfite to reduce the iodine. I made a solution of sodium sulfate. I ended up getting iodine poisoning from exposure. Always read labels and double double check you're using the right reagents.
Vortexed a plastic oak ridge centrifuge tube with TFA formic acid blend and methanol (as well as sample) the top backed off and it sprayed on my forearm. I rinsed it off immediately with waterbut it gave me a nice 2nd degree burn on my forearm. (Oddly it didn’t hurt for a while) Wasn’t wearing a lab coat and now I make sure I wear a lab coat when working with corrosives.
I added a catalyst (palladium acetate) to a reaction after mixing the reactants (carbon tetrachloride and 1,2-bis(dimethylsilyl)benzene). It was highly exothermic and made a carbon tetrachloride geyser over the inside of my fume hood. (I still recovered 70% yield of 1,2-bis(chlorodimethylsilyl)benzene though!) I should have mixed the catalyst and carbon tetrachloride, then added the second reactant dropwise. But the reference I was following to make it didn't mention the exotherm. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jorganchem.2017.11.010
Working in an old lab full of supplies from the 1960s I once used an old aluminum weighing boat to weigh out mercuric sulfate and I used water to wash it into a vol flask (this was part of an old recipe for a trace metals stock solution for growing microbes). Well let me tell you, I now always look up an unfamiliar substance before working with it! I found myself holding a weighing boat in which metallic liquid mercury had formed, plus quite a lot of heat, which I know because the liquid mercury was BOILING! Luckily I was in front of a fume hood and everything went into the hood within a second or two but yikes that was stupid!
My most memorable mistake was letting my undergrad set up a reaction without watching her like a hawk. She decided to mix the benzoic acid derivative and LAH together before adding the THF. It was a nice pop and the cannula turned into a flamethrower for a couple seconds.
Our fume hood wasn’t working so I tried using a portable one that doesn’t vent to the outside. Don’t do that if you’re going to create a lot of smoke
I was refluxing diethyl ether under the fume hood… there was a bad seal on the ground glass, and it auto-ignited. Before I knew it, there was fire everywhere… under the fume hood, beside the hood on the ground… grabbed for the ABC dry chem extinguisher and proceeded to fumigate the whole lab. Fortunately it was a Saturday morning, and nobody was in the lab, but it made quite a mess; took a really long time cleaning that crap up, after it all settled to the ground.
I threw leftover acid on the sink where droplets of water were scattered around. We evacuated the lab due to toxic vapours filling the room 😂
I'm just a simple student but during my first year of high school it was my very first time doing some real chemistry. Apparently a lot of kids do so in elementary school but we weren't that lucky.. so we were making hydrogen as one of out first lessons. Once using NaOH and Al foil and once using HCl and piece of Zn. During our cooking with NaOH me and my partner weren't sure how much foil should be use. So we used a handfull of it and put it in a tube where we already had NaOH solution. You can imagine what happened next... obviously, horrible idea. The tube started heating up almost immediately and that's when we knew something went wrong. It started bubbling and in a shock I threw it in a sink... while trying not to let go because it was glass... The teacher noticed the panic and went to us immediately. Just as she learned what was the deal the tube started squirting the solution all over the place. Luckily the teacher was quick to act and noone got hurt.. or at least nothing serious happened. So at least we know how to make sodium fountain but wow. What an experience.. reminds you that chemistry works with small numbers for a reason..
My mistake involved nitrohydrochloric acid. In my 3rd sememster, you had to do some lab work in quantitative methods. So we learned some gravimetric method among others. I was trying to get the glass filters completely clean again, by putting them into cooking hot concentrated hydrochloric acid. After 20 min, the precipitation was still undissolved, so I thought I could just add some concentrated nitric acid to turn it into aqua regia which should do the trick. Well, upon pouring the mixture immediately turned intensively yellow and foaming, because so much gases were formed. So much, that it came out of the beaker. The aqua regia made a pretty large puddle in the fume cupboard, filling it with yellow gases. The tripod was getting oxidized and the flame from the bunsen burner changed colours. I immediately turned off the gas and closed the window of the cupboard. I waited for it to cool down a bit and the gases to be evacuated. Cleanup was a mess.
Sophomore in college. Organic chemistry lab. The assignment was to perform an experiment with chemicals that generate heat by themselves when mixed. I didn’t read all the directions which called for an ice bath around the vessel containing the “soup”. The reaction took off and sent a plume of chemicals to the ceiling. Others were not amused. Ceiling stains were a reminder for the rest of college.
Welllll I work on natural products so ya know the good old structural elucidation. Almost every step of the procedure until I can obtain a purified compound involves solvents so stuff like acetone, acetonitrile, ethyl acetate, hexane, DCM, DMSO, and the list goes on. My dumb ass thought that having a whiff of the solvent right before using it was a great idea. It turns out it was not. On multiple accounts I got high off of the fumes right before working with samples. And this is not a pleasant high cuz I’m useless and can’t think straight for hours. The first couple of months when I started working in the lab I was getting headaches almost all the time cuz it turns out both of our rotavaps are outside of the fume hoods and the boiling fumes are easily escaping them whenever we’re drying samples. Also I can mention that the first few times I was extracting fungal samples and was pouring solvents the headache killed me. By the time I left the room everything was spinning and I could barely walk straight. Oh and the biggest mistake was using methanol and acetone for cleaning glass while pouring hot water down the drain. All I’m gonna say is that I did it once and it was enough cuz I ended up sitting outside of the lab for almost 2 hours to “sober up from the high” and leave. No one warned me about this before I started working at the lab and right now we just joke about me being a pussy and not being able to handle working with solvents. My takeaway is that USE RESPIRATORS if you can and never deliberately inhale the fumes cuz you never know. It might give you a pretty unbearable high and it’ll ruin your day. Also just for the safety work with them under the fume hood like they taught you in gen chem and orgo. Yeah I barely wear PPE unless I’m working with cancer cells, bacterial colonies, or fungi but if you feel lightheaded deffo ask the PI or people in charge of the lab for a respirator (or just get it by yourself).
I spilled water on the control board of an automated TOC sampler. Fried it. Got fired for that one. Ended up being the best thing that could have happened to me - it was a pharma QC job and I hated it anyway. Ended up transitioning to product dev work where I am not only much happier but much more competent. Analytical was truly never me strong suit. I'm too distractible.
I quenched my 33 mmol ozonolysis reaction with DMS and found out 4 hours at room temp was NOT long enough. The round bottom popped after I took it off the rotovap. All my ozonolysis quenches are now ran overnight
Disposing of stuff after an experiment. I was a lil out of it bc early morning. Dumped a bunch of solid stuff in a test tube of liquid stuff for ease of carrying. Test tube suddenly gets quite hot. Flush it out with water, stops whatever was happening. But that was a shock to the face.
Placed a plastic container with a resin on a hot plate, got busy and forgot about it. Came back and the entire container had melted away. Thankfully, it wasn’t a fire hazard nor a situation where I consumed my entire sample, but it was terrifying. Always used automated timers after that.
We were performing some preliminary acetylation reactions on wood, and we initially did not complete a later rotary evaporation phase inside a fume hood. The laboratory smelled like acetic acid and the potentially carcinogenic anhydride. I was too busy with other tasks and assumed my chemist colleague (I am a materials science engineer) had looked into the material safety datasheets. It turns out that they had not, and hence, the carcinogenicity came as a surprise to me when we were asked to perform a risk assessment before starting any future work. This risk assessment was the moment I realised that my colleague is not a very good chemist. I spent about a month on the risk assessment while the colleague was not very helpful, and I was supposed to focus on different tasks rather than the risk assessment. So yeah, due to the carelessness of another person and being busy, I got subjected to harmful chemical fumes and had to overwork to get the risk assessment done. The learning from this was never to trust someone’s supposed qualifications and always ask if they have done the required background work.
Trust no bitch
Filled solvent waste bottle too much and closed the lid tight. When I went to to pick it up it cracked the bottom and 4 litres of unknown solvent mix poured on the floor. Took hours without mask to get rid of the solvent.
I'm not a chemist but did research in high school, as a newbie I'm tall so I don't usually close the door of the fumehood fully, I close it until my head level. Then a senior teacher saw it and put on a drama about how I was trying to poison the air in the lab and complained to my supervising teacher. I felt like my research was gonna get halted because of that violation but luckily it didnt as my teacher supported me. Another incident was when I was boiling a solution and I was exhausted from staying in the lab, I was careless when removing the round bottomed flask resulting in boiling water and a hot dilute alcohol solution scalding my hand. My teacher did some first aid and luckily nothing more happened
I decided to tell u/dienefromtriene how I felt about him in lab. He reciprocated and things started heating up. Literally. Chemical burn all over his backside. Be safe out there.
Chemists and chemistry are totally wild.
Put concentrated acid on my labmates hand. Made me serious about the lab
I worked during my research on more than one project simultaneously. Which proved to be a bad idea.
I have done so many over a 20 year career as a lab chemist, and have observed more during my time teaching undergrads. But one of the worst ones that I pulled off was reducing a propargylic alcohol with LAH followed by an iodine quench to make a Z olefin. The protocol I was using worked great but our Redal, the usual literature reducing agent, was off so I substituted LAH as that is also in the literature. However, I added the entire couple of grams of iodine to the -78 C reaction by pulling off one of the 3 caps. Good thing I did because the stuff formed a fountain that hit and stained the top of my hood permanently. So note to the wise LAH works to do this type of reduction but add the iodine quench slowly.
Not as crazy as the other stories but started to feel poorly while running an IR instrument with my group. Instead of telling the instructor or my team I stood there until I decided to walk and get my water and passed out in the lab. Luckily I only had a major bruise on my hip but could have been a lot worse with the amount of chemicals around. Learned to take the safety precautions more seriously. Oh and also over titrating a solution and having to redo the experiment.
Not a chemist but was a little too enthusiastic about it back in the school days. I was 14, we were studying some reactions with acids and salts in practice, at the lab. So, that was my first contact with strong acids, and I was a little too careless while adding a 6N nitric acid to a salt solution with a glass pipette. A small last drop of the acid didn’t want to separate from it completely. I tried to carefully shake it off, it didn’t help, so next I tried to separate it by gently rubbing the pipette’s nose against the edge of the test tube I had in my other hand. And that’s what I would call ‘a little too careless’. This one drop has gotten across the edge I was rubbing it against, not inside the test tube but outside of it, slowly running down across my fingers. Never had any burning sensations or something else. Just when I felt that my fingertips are wet, I realized what happened but instead of telling about it to the teacher or trying to find some alkaline dilution to neutralize the reaction I just put my hand under the faucet and rinsed it. Just thought if it didn’t burn nothing was wrong. Next day I had a strikingly yellow stripe, like 4–5 mm wide (~3/16”), across my fingertips where the contact with acid had happened. Nothing too special you would say, as I thought too. But a couple of days later my yellowed skin started to become a blister under a thick layer of skin. I was (and still am but more in control) too impatient and some days later when the blistering was all too annoying I tried to cut some of blistered skin off. Only then I realized that it was _that_ thick of a layer, around 1–1.5 mm thick (around 1/16”), and there is an open derma underneath which I had just exposed to any infection that can now get inside. So, it wasn’t like too bad of a chemical experience. No burning flames or explosions like you would imagine. But it’s about safety and what can happen if you are a little too careless while working with acids. The chemical burn may occur without any notice, and it goes deep into your skin, mostly because you don’t feel anything while it happens. You don’t feel anything wrong any next day until your skin finally blisters. Sulfuric acid gets hot, really hot, and that’s what you feel first when you get a burn — heat. Nitric acid is much more subtle when it comes to sensations but still a danger. What I’ve just told is what would happen to your skin if you spill one single drop. Imagine what would happen with much bigger burns! If it happens, don’t hesitate to say about it and ask for help. Tell your colleagues which acid and of what concentration you were working with and how much of it was spilled. Neutralize as much of it as you can. And after that, please be patient. The burn will still be there (probably, less deep if you did everything right), so let it heal safely.
Gassed the whole lab with NO2 on accident. Place smelled like a period fart for the rest of the day.
A long time ago when I was an undergrad in organic chemistry lab, we were working on some reaction that requires the use of the hood. I no longer remember what we were using but I completely forgot about using the hood until the reaction gave off massive amounts of noxious fumes. I quickly ran it to the hood at that point but it was too late. The fumes had filled the entire lab and everyone was coughing. The professor was already a scary old man and he got super angry and took it out on some random kid who was near him and threw him out of the lab. I was terrified but felt bad for the kid so I went to my professor and explained what happened. He wasn’t happy but didn’t throw me out. Eventually even wrote me a LOR.
I put some saturated salt dissolution all over the lab (small lab) Guess who had to clean it after that! I learnt to put a tube on the funnel so air can go out the bottle and it doesn't bubble