• Question: What would you do if an experiment went wrong and everything blew up? Would you laugh? Cry? Run? GO back for your results? Please include as much detail as you can!!

    Asked by megnog to Chris, Kay, Kerstin, Lorna, Liv on 16 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Olivia Hibbitt

      Olivia Hibbitt answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      Hi megnog,
      This has happened to me many times…..not as dramatic as blowing up….perhaps c-grade disaster movie! One of the worst ones was the time I got bacteria squirted in my eye at high pressure. I got distracted by a post-doc and the bacteria I was injecting into a machine got blown back directly into my eye. It wept green stuff for about a week! There was another time when a PhD student forgot to screw the lid down on a centrifuge….this machine spins something that weighs about 15 kg at 9000 revolutions per minute…..it started making a ear-splitting noise and shaking…..very scary! Of course THE most important thing to think about is your results….I would go into a burning building to get my lab book!!!

    • Photo: Kerstin Zechner

      Kerstin Zechner answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      Hehehe, nice question! Everything? As in all the work for my PhD, or just that one experiment? I think if it was all my work, I would cry…a lot! But I have recorded a lot of my results, so hopefully those would be safe from the explosion… In the case of a single experiment I think I would first swear a little, clear my mind, then try and see what went wrong and repeat the experiment. Well all that’s assuming my boss would let me continue working in the lab after making it blow up 😉

    • Photo: Kay Penicud

      Kay Penicud answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      Experiments go wrong a lot of the time! I haven’t made anything blow up since I was in sixth form (and that was actually my lab partners fault not mine!) he mixed up the ethanol and water in an experiment….ethanol is very flammable and we caused a nice little fire!

      If an experiment goes wrong often you can still learn a lot. If it really has been a bad few days in the lab, I tend to go for lots of runs and play lots of football and badminton. I find it helps me think how to get past the difficulties I’m having.

    • Photo: Lorna Houlihan

      Lorna Houlihan answered on 17 Mar 2010:

      My experiments go wrong all the time!! So have a little rant/cry/curse a little, count to ten and then go back to the experiment and try to do it again!!

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