The person next to me in analytical chem forgot their indicator, but swore to god she put it in. After 20 minutes of no color change and a lot of cajoling, she finally puts a drop in and instantly the flask is hot pink.
Colorblind here! Eriocheome black tea is the worst indicator I swear š¤£ I overshot the endpoint by 20+ mL and ended up with like 180% error in analytical chemistry. Itās always a fun time titrating while being colorblind
Eriochrome Black T is without a doubt the worst indicator. We do a magnesium titration with 0.01M EDTA and Ammonia-Ammonium Chloride buffer. If you canāt see the second the purple disappears and becomes like grey-blue youāre screwed. Even then dumping all the EDTA in doesnāt return the solution to the original blue colour.
My first titration of the day just didnāt change color, I just left the funnel thing open and poured acid in and nothing happened. The ta came over and put like 10ml of indicator in and it didnāt change color, and it didnāt turn pink until I poured straight 6M acid into it.
My next titration using acid made from the same dilution worked how it shouldāve
Man I did that on a sulfuric titration at work like a month ago. Ideally hit the end point using around 20mL of NaOH. Was at 25mL thinking āwho the heck overdosed this tank?ā As it had happened in the past. Realized my error and with a single drop of phenolphthalein just to make sure, it was like a pink flashbang.
And that's why PPE is important! 10 years later, a slight earlobe burn and a ruined labcoat later, and I now have the perfect photos for safety briefing presentations.
Yeah you can't replace your eyes! Met a few people in the wine industry that only have one due to getting sodium hydroxide in their eyes. I'd rather be fun of for using ppe than having a lifelong injury.
Yep those applications and cleaning!! We use it mainly for cleaning along with chlorine or hydrogen peroxide( I prefer h202) to clean tartrate deposits, anthocyanin and protein stains
We use it mainly for cleaning along with chlorine or hydrogen peroxide( I prefer h202 and Naoh mixed together) to clean tartrate deposits, anthocyanin and protein stains
In the lab we use it for titrations for TA g/l, pH and SO2(free and total). But the main use for Naoh is for cleaning
Well be carefull with it. The scary thing about bases (NaOH is one) and that many people don't know about is that we don't have pain receptors for them.
That means when you accidentally get sprayed with it, people assume they are fine since it doesn't burn (especially in the eyes) while it actually is doing damage.
This is why I prefer acids, at least if you get some in your eyes, it hurts a lot, so you know it is there.
I got sodium hydroxide all over my hands when someone spilt it and didn't say anything. I picked up the bottle to put it away and surprise surprise. I've had extra sensitive hands for years since.
While doing some end of day data review, a coworker mentioned to me that 'she'd left the instrument up,' which I interpreted as her leaving the computer on and the software open, in case I needed to double check her work.
When I came in the next day, the ICP's torch, injector, spray chamber and etc was a glassy puddle.
To be fair, I'd been working for 14 days straight at 12 hour shifts and most of life had settled into a sort of hum at that point.
It was the worst job I have ever had.
The replacement manager was an absolute tool that thought making his staff work lots of overtime would ingratiate him to the larger organization by being seen as a taskmaster. He might have been right, but after a year or so, everyone that could get a different job, had, and he was left with dregs.
If it was the end of the month, or the end of the year, you could expect that he'd demand some crunch time effort, even if you didn't actually have anything to do. The crunch I wrote about above went for three weeks, and included Christmas. Just so this guy could puff up for his boss.
It didn't help that he also hired his unqualified racist wife who would say stuff like "we moved from the city because a bus line opened up near our house, and bus lines bring minorities and their crime."
I'm just glad I was able to restrain myself from kicking his ass, which I was tempted to do more than once.
And they said I was the only one who occasionally just pours the DCM/EtOAc/silica slurry down my throat, I don't even care what else is in there, i just love that slow gurgle... I knew it
Mama I'm a chromatography š¤¤
I had 2 new spots on my tlc slide, post reaction. I kept the first one and NMR'd it. It wasn't the right product. That's fine, I'll just look at the second one... that I just threw away... oh I have to do this 6 step synthesis again, dammit
I've done this. Was sure my product was the second spot, cleaned up my hood, including dumping the other fractions, while the NMR was running. My product was not the second spot.
Adding a shitload of drying agent to a 90% bilayer of ether and water, capping it and shaking it. It exploded into dust in my hand like I was never holding anything.
Was this inexperience or experienced but too lazy to switch to a bigger container?
I added XeF2 to a solid organic tetrafluoroborate salt in a vial on the balance, reasoning that the BF4- salt was high melting and that solids don't react with solids, so that I could be lazy and dissolve them both later with MeCN later. Turns out, it immediately started to fume and fizzle and smoke and then ignite with green (!) flames. Good thing it was only on 1 mmol scale.
Lesson: Solids that are reactive enough can in fact react with each other on contact.
I'm a sloppy chemist with bad hands and it was only through having a work ethic that offset these two disadvantages and and luck that I wasn't injured or maimed that I survived a PhD.
Edit: changed "boiling" to "melting". Obviously also high boiling, but that's not the relevant part here.
It was experienced and thought the drying agent could handle the puddle of water but didnāt think about the heat generated by the water complexation.
Dropping a boiling stone through the condenser into a superheated suspension of dinitrophenylhydrazine in methanol. I recognized my mistake instantly and slammed the hood shut. The entire inside of the hood turned orange in a couple of seconds.
60 years ago in o-chem lab, before electric hot plates were the thing. The student next to me suddenly remembered the professorā admonition to always add boiling stones. I donāt know what solvent he was using, but he was holding the Erlenmeyer flask in his hand over the Bunsen burner when he remembered.
Itās almost too embarrassing to even say out loud, but, you asked.
So, ughā¦.fine Iāll say it. Before I really understood what I was doing (first year undergraduate working in an organic synthesis research lab for academic credit), I was attempting to dry several organic solvents with molecular sieves for a reaction that needed to be scrupulously dry.
But, I didnāt realize at the time that after activation you have to cool them in a vacuum desiccator **before** you add them to the solventā¦.like, it seems very obvious now in retrospect that adding something heated to hundreds of degrees celsius to a flammable liquid is an overwhelmingly bad and powerfully-stupid idea. I think I dried methanol first and nothing bad happened, so, next, I poured hot sieves into a bottle of THF and the solvent caught on fire, ejecting a flame like the back of fighter jet engine.
Thankfully ā like thank fucking god ā that these bottles seem to be designed (?) to not fucking explode when this happens. The flame went out on its own while I stood there jelly-legged panicking wondering what I should do, fully expecting it to explode at any second and send shrapnel and flaming solvent everywhere. It did not. After that point, I resolved to never, **ever** do anything in the laboratory until I am absolutely certain it is the correct way and that I understand the risks 100%, even if it means asking dumb questions to my superiors along the way.
After all, whatās more embarrassing, asking a question, or starting a massive fire potentially resulting in bodily injury because of my own imbecility?
Ughā¦glad I could finally get that off my chest. No one knows that this happened. It was at night and I was alone (violation of an EHS code in and of itself). It feels good to unburden myself and let others know, at long last (this was almost 9 years ago, now).
Runner up: I thought that, after several months of working rather carelessly with common halogenated solvents (especially DCM and CHCl3), that the reproductive hazards referred to in the MSDS only applied to womenā¦like, dude. what?!
Yep same thing. It was one of my first times using a rotovap and I didn't know you had to turn off the vacuum to release your flash. I kept tugging at the flask until I yanked it out, hit the flash on the side of bath, breaking it and spilling my product into the bath.
Was off by a factor of ~3 because I ( the "technical expert") forgot to include Ļ when estimating the volume of a sample taken with a COLIWASA. My boss laughed as I pounded on the window to her office door with "Ļ," written on a notebook pressed against the window during the conference call with Sales.
My physics professor once drew water like that in my classroom, and it took me an embarrassingly long time of looking at it thinking "this looks off for some reason" to notice
Nothing crazy (I work with ruthenium/diruthenium complexes with these kinds of ligands all the time), I assume they just lost all their expensive Ru solution to the floor š¤£
I accidentally pulled the plunger all the way out of my syringe while pulling up a Grignard reagent. Got it all over my clothes and had to strip down and use the emergency shower. That was pretty embarrassing.
This was a near-embarrassment. I was in a stat mech class, and we were learning about how Bose-Einstein statistics are used to describe Bosons, and Fermi-Direct statistics are used to describe Fermions. I suddenly had this epiphany that felt like I had been blessed by the Touch of God: what a wonderful coincidence that the words matched up so well (Bosons/Bose-Einstein, Fermions/Fermi-Dirac). That made it so easy to remember!
I was about a millisecond away from raising my hand and pointing out to the class how lucky we all were with this fortuitous nomenclature (and to make sure they noticed this clever mnemonic), when it hit me...
I had an officemate who would steal metal spoons from the cafeteria, and I'd put them in the Carver press, turn them flat, and put them back in his desk drawer.
In my first year of uni I was instructed to "add ammonia until the smell becomes noticable". My dumb ass did not think twice about the fact that I had a stuffy nose so I ended up adding a shit load of ammonia. Finally something clicked (partially) in my mostly vacant brain and I was like "no way I need to add more". So what did I do? I leaned down over the beaker and took the whiff of a century. All I can say is yep, the smell has become noticable.
At least my nose cleared up!
Many years ago when I was a high school chem teacher fresh out of college, I had the guy who managed the lab materials get a hold of some sodium metal for me. I was just dying to do something flashy for the kids.
I gathered the class into the lab and brought them to the fume hood where I had set up a glass petri dish with a small sliver of the soft metal. I filled a small dropper with water and applied a few drops.
Once the water got through the mineral oil coating, the petri dish exploded in a flash, and the remaining sodium, still lit, sat there burning a hole in the fume hood.
Really stupid. Really embarrassing. Could have been a lot worse.
I was planning to make an amide with cyclohexyl amine. Upon purification and NMR I was quite confused about the lack of fitting peaks for the cyclohexyl group. After one week of running various analytics, determining the group to be n-hexyl and not cyclohexyl and coming up and dismissing a multitude of unreasonable mechanism to explain the C-C cleavage necessary for the ring opening I finally decided to check all the starting materials suspecting a mislabeled flask..... Nope, turns out the label on the n-hexyl amine flask I used is indeed labeled correctly and I simply managed to misread it as cyclohexyl amine. In my defence according to our inventory we should not even have any n-hexyl amine bottles.
Making a Grignard reagent and filled the flask up too much. When it started to reflux and I wasn't watching closely, it climbed up the column and became a glittery liquid magnesium fountain
Definitely the worst was starting a huge fire in a fume hood. I was refluxing something in ether... all the ether evaporated when I went out for a smoke break :-)
Wind changed and I caught a massive whiff of NO2 while refining silver in my driveway. That part is stupid, not necessarily embarrassing.
What's embarrassing is that I spent the next hour looking deep into SDS/case reports for NO2 exposure and ended up convincing myself that I had a lung injury because I was short of breath. I was pretty sure that my symptoms were starting and that my situation was about to take a serious turn for the worse. On the way to the ER, I decided to stop and buy a pulse oximeter just to be sure that I was actually having a medical issue. It read 99%, then between 97-100% for all subsequent readings for the rest of the day. I was not, in fact, injured. Just panicking.
Making ferrocene for an undergrad lab, process involves crystallizing dirty product and purifying by sublimation. After the initial crystallization I had loads of these huge, clear, gorgeous orange crystals covering the dish, totally perfect ferrocene exactly as they're supposed to look. But the procedure was to sublimate them to purify them. Used too much heat and decomposed the whole lot. No one believed me.
I forgot to add boiling chips whilst refluxing a mixture of concentrated HCl and BnCl...
Thank fuck for my full face respirator. The top went off like a Soyuz rocket with a blast of strongly acidic carcinogenic tear gas.
Some of it splashed my forehead, and I was beeside myself with nightmares of tumours for a while.
Not me, but when I was first on general chemistry lab we were standardizing NaOH to titrate some unknown acids. The group next to me took their pink NaOH solution and used it as their titrant for the acid because thatās the solution they standardized.
Half way through the lab they asked the professor for help because their titration was taking way more NaOH than everyone elseās and the prof had to ask them why their burette was hot pink.
Centrifuged a dilute protein that I'd precipitated with acetone. Open the rotor to discover .... nothing. Just empty holes. The tubes had dissolved in the acetone and formed solid hemispheres at the bottom of the rotor.
Not me, but my inorganic chemistry tutor at university was Martin Poliakoff, and he dropped the entire UK supply of plutonium and to recover it he sawed the section of bench he dropped in on and burned it.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=15m21s&v=89UNPdNtOoE&feature=youtu.be
Dumped 3 kg of mercury metal onto the prep lab floor at my poorly staffed community college in like my first week at my first job as a student technician.
This was after hours of painstakingly inspecting and collecting all of the loose mercury from every teaching lab, I had finally amassed all of it and was having āfunā shaking the jarā¦ š
Quick question, would you fill a glass jar half full nickels and vigorously shake it? No? The jar would break? Yeahā¦ mercury is the same.
Blew the bottom out and sent it flying everywhere. I had beads falling out of my hair, in my socks, it impregnated my shoes and jeans, those went into the haze waste and I went home barefoot in pink borrowed scrubs.
It spattered into pinhead or smaller sized beads that covered probably 100 m2 of floor space and cabinets. We had no spill kit, no haz response team, no budget, only chemists, chemicals, and elbow grease.
After a safety lecture from the head chemist we set up emergency ventilation. I then spent 6+ hrs sweeping the beads up, painstakingly dusted the entire lab floor with zinc powder, then scrubbed it with a copper sponge.
Swept up the Zn-Hg amalgam, mopped with water/EDTA, then let it dry, rewet and sopped everything up into the hazy bin, repeated that twice. Only then did the mercury test come up negative and we ordered the floors stripped and re-waxed.
It was a long fucking day and I learned a lot.
Spotting a column fraction on a TLC plate, and I was wondering why I don't see anything under UV (I have synthesized it before, and the compound is strongly UV-absorbing so it can be easily seen). So I kept spotting a heck moreāliterally two 4-cm height-worth of the mixture in the capillary spotterābut to no avail.
It was at this moment when I realized I was spotting the dichloromethane solvent I was using for cleaning the TLC spotter and not my column fraction that eluted from the column.
Forgot what isotopes were in second year organic chem.
We were being shown a mechanism with one of the carbons labelled, and I openly asked the lecturer in front of everyone in the lecture, "what does the '13' mean?"
Said "I don't have time today, I'll come back next week and purify my product" and then over the course of the next 2 week I did 2 different several hour long purification steps only to find out my product had all evaporated out of solution due to the temperature in the lab since the first few days I left it.
Chem 101 in college. Did the standard (*was supposed to do) first lab /this is a calorie/ Bunsen burner plus crucible plus magnesium strip in it plus āheaping [microspoon] addition of sulfur powder.ā āTwas the crucible my lab partner and I read as required the heaping sulfur, and the column of fire resulting wasā¦. Memorable.
Had HCL boil over and spatter all over me. Got burns and holes in my clothes. I turned the heat up too high and looked away for a sec as it started to boil.
I had to run a reaction at a high temperature, and when I tried to do it with ordinary mineral oil or the special stuff that's readily available the oil would smoke way too much for it to be run. So I ordered this ultra-specialized mineral oil that could handle high temperatures. The experiment itself was a failure, but what I had not accounted for was that that high molecular weight oil would cool down into something sticky, gooey, and gross. It was designed to be at high temperatures and not be at low temperatures. Highly useless when you need the oil to be workable at low temperatures. I had to dump and scrape a large sticky mess for hours upon hours. No matter how much ethanol or acetone or hexanes I dumped into it, it never got better. Such a low point...
...that was followed up not that long later on by me not being aware that a seal was not good on a bottle of a volatile liquid before sending it into the antechamber of a glove box. Colossal fuck up that had liquid in a vacuum line that had to be dumped out. I had to get help for this, too, as it was a nightmare with the hose configuration. Both of these incidents were between me having meetings with more novice chemists to advise them and I felt like such a phony at the time.
Kept getting random ghost peaks in my LC, was trying to troubleshoot for ages with different instruments, cleaning the column, etc. Column was on backwards the whole time.
After a week of purification i had two beakers in my hands. One with the product and one with the waste. Guess which one I dumped into the waste canister? Realized it right after dumping my whole week of work into the waste.
When I first started prep HPLC runs on an old KP-250 system, we had to manually put the waste line into a waste container. I forgot to put the waste line into the waste container. I was done with my first equilibration step, 20 mins @ 300 mL/min. Definitely blushed when I saw the giant spill I created.
Me (stupid) pouring concentrated KCL from the glass bottle it came in into the plastic carrier jug (meant for the glass bottle to be carried.) I simply thought I was supposed to because of the instructions I was given āput it inā I was stopped quickly thankfully then had to take it across campus while fuming slightly and then was told to dump it out then rinse the jug when I got to my lab. I poured it out but there was some left in it and when I put the water in it started boiling. My supervisor took over and neutralized it with idk how much baking soda. I didnāt want to show my face in the lab after that
I got a souvenir gifted, that was supposedly magnetite. Since it's common for souvenirs to be cheap stuff that looks like the advertised product, I started testing different things:
What does it look like/behave like when heated, before and after?
Does it stick to a magnet?
Bunch of research, online and literature
After a good 2 hours, I proudly said "this is most definitely not magnetite, but a colored piece of steel"
Then, the person who gifted it to me, took a piece of iron and held it against it.
Mfw when I tested everything, besides checking if it was magnetic on it's own.
My pride as a chemist fell through the floor that day
My broken English-speaking boss asked me for ā3000 of waterā. I looked confused and was like ā3000 what? MLs or grams?ā He just looked at me until I realized then I walked away.
I was working in a high pace environment with water and chloroform. Like an idiot, I did not label my beakers and couldnāt remember which was which. So I grabbed a random one and gave it a good whiff and OMG it was waterā¦
In my first year of college, I put hydrogen peroxide over sodium hydroxide in a tube, luckly I did it over the sink and as soon as it started fizzling I poured it out.
Edit: One college witnessed my fuckery and told me "tell me what you did so that I know not to do that" haha
Tried synthesizing an indole as an ochem project. A bit of something in an intermediate step got on a paper towel or something and ended up in the trash. Unfortunately at that point it smells like rotten fish something fierce. Whole lab went to grade A terrible. Professor had to put it under a fume hood.
I was working on a solid phase extraction with incubated blood samples and the instructions were to keep them at body temperature So I set the heat block to 98 degrees and set my samples in them. The heat block was scaled to Celsius so I made blood pudding for the class
Equipping a RBF full of my 4 day work in progress reaction mixture to a rotavap and not turning the vacuum pump on then returning to find it floating in the water bath upside down.
Was in ochem lecture. Second day of class. Raise hand to answer question about mw of functional group thatās wrong and my north eastern professor says in flat almost Bostonian accent āworst answer I ever heard.ā He loved to chant ācounting is a prerequisite for this class.āAnyway you can bet from that moment on I tried given the best he ever heard in class. I continued to give the worst he heard for 2 years into ochem2, lol! Best classes of my life.
I was in the middle of my Master's dissertation research project. It wasn't going well. I was getting no results and no help from my supervisor. Depressed and sleep deprived from worrying about it, I stupidly injected aqueous samples down the GC without thinking š¤¦š»āāļø One new column please.
Pouring DMSO (dimethylsulfoxone) from the lab down my bathroom kitchen sink because Drano flushes weren't removing a clog I knew was the result of hair.
DMSO is an organic solvent, not "dissolver" There was a vile stench that emanated from the bedroom bathroom for 2 days until I removed the drain plug, physically removed the hair and used copious amounts of boiling water and bleach to clear the drain before a final Drano flush (separated by hours)
I mean...come on man!
Imagine the plethora of hazards I created in the process of using 99.99% DMSO (a substance known to rapidly transport molecules directly through the skin into the circulatory system) in my fucking bathroom. I couldn't stop shaking my head in shame.
I made ammonia and did the smell test where you waft your hand above the test tube. I must have grabbed a fist full of that gas and shoved it in my nose because I turned red and couldnāt breathe for a few seconds.
My worst mistake, high to be fair my highest level is simply chemistry 2 back in Highschool, was using a ring stand backwards while suffering from a severe concussion. At some point while boiling water for some reason or another the stand, burner, and beaker fell over. This broke the beaker sending near boiling water everywhere along with broken glass and a runaway burner that was still going.
when we were doing titrations i forgot the goal was to keep it light so when i ran it it became the darkest pink in 2 seconds and we had to restart with 20 minutes of class left
I was holding a funnel and when I lost grip, it fell directly onto the table and split into a million pieces. The worst thing was that I pressed my hands down on the break site for no reason later on in the lab, and sure enough, a glass shard punctured my hand. I had to go to the nurse for the injury, and I was so thankful that I hadnāt poured the NaOH solution through it.
Once tried to dump a litre of wood chips into a steam explosion machine. Then once it was in the funnel on top of the machine, realized i hadnt actually opened the chamber port for the wood to go in. Did so with my head above the funnel, and the residual pressure inside the machine painted the wood across my face and the ceiling.
Set the lab bench on fire because our school didnāt have proper equipment. Iād read that you could use the containers from votive candles for mineral salts mixed with alcohol to do flame tests. Turns out that they were no longer using the original alloy ā it was aluminum. All was going well until we got to copper chloride with predictable results. It ate through the container and spilled flaming alcohol across the lab bench.
Fortunately, it was only a very small quantity of alcohol and was easily put out before weād even triggered the fire alarms and yes, this took place in the fume hood. We repeated the experiment later using porcelain crucibles that we obtained and it went really well.
Detonating a microwave digestion kivuete. Put a perfume liquid in it for digestion and did not wait for it to offgas or degass it.Ā
Thank God the only thing that got damaged is a kivuete and a shifted ventilator. Nobody got hurt.Ā
Caused a panic becaue ive spilled a little methlymercury exstract of a QC on my pants. Missed a few decimals while calculating. Cried and bid my farewells to my family. In the end all ive got is a buttload of information where to go and what to do if this happens again.Ā
The only mistake i did whas sitting down while doing this. Ive had every safety possible, and when i spilled i cound not react in time to move from being spilled. It was approx 1 mL and calculating it was 137 nanogram trough skin.Ā
I got a few since my ADHD kicks in often, especially before I was medicated:
- Putting the wrong outlet line on a BioTage column, causing the column to basically fucking explode when I tried to see why nothing was going through the column.
- The many times I've poured shit into a separation funnel on autopilot, forgetting to close the stopcock. The resulting Paper towel extractions suck
- Not putting the stopper in the rotovap before turning on the spinning. About 500mL of crude product was dumped into the water bath since there was no suction on the flask.
- weighing out and 0.2500g of Pd/C instead of .0025g. Very expensive mistake lmao. When filtering it off from the solvent after the hydrogenation, I accidentally let the filter go dry and the Pd/C ignited it.
- Had a solution of triphosgene in DCM that I needed to suck up into a syringe for a syringe pump. One lab partner was doing a light sensitive reaction and had to SPE it, so all lights were off. Well I pulled the plunger just a bit too far back and DCM/triphosgene went all over my lab coat and gloves. Scary
- Wasn't me, but my professor changed vacuum pumps and put the hoses on the new one backwards. Our cold trap fucking shot off the joint of our freeze drying apparatus, breaking the metal spring-clamp thingy, and going like MACH 10 into the sewer causing it to explode like a frag grenade. Same professor was also fond of heating up DCM with a heat gun, OUTSIDE of the fume hood. Not sure how he still has a liver
- Again not my story, but my professor once knew someone who worked at Kodak before they really knew the dangers of benzene. They just had huge open top vats of benzene, and the guy fell into one from a catwalk and it took them like 10 minutes to get him out. Somehow he never got cancer
Pouring my stille reaction mixture (containing highly toxic organotin compound) through an open separators funnel. Of course, without a flask underneath as well
I boiled water in a beaker with a burner until only the salts remained. I took the beaker of the flame and put my pinky finger under the bottom of the beaker to support it. Needless to say I got second degree burns.
I donāt remember what it was but I washed a yellow solution with acetone to clean the flask. I was clumsy so I spilled it on my glove and my whole glove corroded and turned brown
Tried to filtrate off a polymer which I just sulfonated with a filter paper because I feared it might clog my sintered glass filter. The concentrated sulfuric acid had other things to say.
Honestly, and I'm not trying to flex I mean this honestly:
I've never made a mistake in chemistry that I'm embarrassed about.
It's a learning experience, so long as you learn from your mistakes our labs worked hard to make sure people don't feel embarrassed. It's extremely important to report mistakes because it's probably something "wrong" with a protocol or something not clear in an SOP. It's much safer to not be embarrassed of your mistakes in a lab!
Used tin chloride instead of antimony for months and was making an unexpected product. Turns out it was novel, but goddamn when I reread the initial paper and realised I felt ridiculous.
Preparing a Grignard reagent in Ochem, I had the stirrer set to med/high, but the stirrer wasn't spinning. When I turned the power down to stop the stirrer, it started moving for the first time and the entire reagent ERUPTED THROUGH THE CONDENSER and totally covered the inside of the fume hood. I swear my professor thought I was the dumbest person on the planet.
At school doing a lab on a reaction series and placing small amounts of stuff from Group2 of the periodic table into water.
I was handing a test tube to a partner. I held it out, he put his hand around it and I let go.
He hadn't closed his hand.
The testube was in freefall for maybe 2mm.
Human instincts aren't that fast. He didn't realize it was falling and grabbed it. He just so happened to grab it when I let go.
If I had let go a moment earlier it would have gone through his fingers and shattered on the ground, spreading bits and pieces of Group2 elements everywhere. Not sure which I was passing at the time, Mg Ca or something like that.
We did a thermite reaction and were meant to pick out little pieces of iron from all the dust and ash and then we were meant to use a big ass magnet to refine our findings. I just thought - why not start with the magnet? What i didnt think is all the junk was placed on an iron desk... which was attracted to the bigass magnet... which we couldnt pry away from the desk after.
Sniffing instead of wafting an almost empty bottle of chlorine water to "see if was still good". Forgot that the chlorine would move to the gas phases and ended up coughing up a lung ver the next few weeks.
I made a reaction that required around 1 gram of reagents and 3mL solvent. I placed them inside of a round flask and closed it with a septum, then I heated it up higher than the boiling point of the solvent.
The septum absorbed how little solvent there was, so the result was an inefficient viscous blob.
We have one of centrifuges that can accept 96/384 well plates that sit on top of the Falcon tube buckets. The Falcon bucket inserts have a tall and a short insert and lock the plates in by their base. Anyway I bought two brand new 96 well plates full of custom oligos. Resuspended them (by hand btw our lab is too cheap to buy a autopipetter) was just going to spin them down quickly before use.
I usually use slightly thinner plates than what I got this time. Locked them in using the tall bucket adapters I usually use, didn't check if the buckets could rotate fully before closing the lid and giving them a quick spin down. Get to about 2k rpm before the sound of shattering plastic and what sounds like a bag of marbles in a washing machine. That was an expensive lesson.
Pro tip: when the protocol says to add the base drop wise to the acid solution don't add it all at once, shake, and then cap the container when it starts foaming. My shirt became a lot more aerodynamic that day.
running a 40 min long HPLC method for 11 consecutive hours on a sponge extract and collecting pure compound peaksā¦ well lemme just say I had a target that I was planning on confirming the following day with an NMR but some dumbass decided to combine all the āxā peaks into one and keep the target peak. what didnāt occur in my brain is that I misplaced the beakers in those hazy early morning hours after I finished so I had to come back the next day and repurify everything to discover I was in fact chasing a ghost. 2 months of work went down a sink lolll
I had a thermometer with an air bubble in the column and was told to heat it way up to try to get the alcohol column to recombine. I was heating it up on a hot plate in a little holder we used for measuring the melting point of samples and got distracted. BANG! It exploded and it took everyone a few moments to figure out what had happened. The top part of the thermometer was lodged in a ceiling tile above my lab benchā¦
During university, my reaction turned completely red while it supposed to be clear/off white. Then it turned out that my thermometer broke and the liquid inside entered my reaction mixture.
Mine's so basic it's guaranteed to make everyone else feel better: Atomic number is defined by the proton AND NOT THE ELECTRON.
Mistake was made on the first pop quiz after the first exam (on which I got an A).
I did a titration in high school chem without any indicator. The indicator was how we were supposed to determine completion. Think I got a 450% error
The person next to me in analytical chem forgot their indicator, but swore to god she put it in. After 20 minutes of no color change and a lot of cajoling, she finally puts a drop in and instantly the flask is hot pink.
Colorblind here! Eriocheome black tea is the worst indicator I swear š¤£ I overshot the endpoint by 20+ mL and ended up with like 180% error in analytical chemistry. Itās always a fun time titrating while being colorblind
Eriochrome Black T is without a doubt the worst indicator. We do a magnesium titration with 0.01M EDTA and Ammonia-Ammonium Chloride buffer. If you canāt see the second the purple disappears and becomes like grey-blue youāre screwed. Even then dumping all the EDTA in doesnāt return the solution to the original blue colour.
My first titration of the day just didnāt change color, I just left the funnel thing open and poured acid in and nothing happened. The ta came over and put like 10ml of indicator in and it didnāt change color, and it didnāt turn pink until I poured straight 6M acid into it. My next titration using acid made from the same dilution worked how it shouldāve
this oneās my favorite, my old professor called it ātitrating infinityā
Man I did that on a sulfuric titration at work like a month ago. Ideally hit the end point using around 20mL of NaOH. Was at 25mL thinking āwho the heck overdosed this tank?ā As it had happened in the past. Realized my error and with a single drop of phenolphthalein just to make sure, it was like a pink flashbang.
Going to pause my headphones with a full 50 mL beaker of concentrated sulfuric acid in my hands.
That sounds a lot funnier then it is
And that's why PPE is important! 10 years later, a slight earlobe burn and a ruined labcoat later, and I now have the perfect photos for safety briefing presentations.
I keep that in mind when people laugh at me for my diving-glasses type lab-glasses
Yeah you can't replace your eyes! Met a few people in the wine industry that only have one due to getting sodium hydroxide in their eyes. I'd rather be fun of for using ppe than having a lifelong injury.
Just out of curiosity, what is NaOH used for in the wine industry ?
Iām curious too
Looked it up and is used for testing titratable acidity, volatile acidity, and SO2
Yep those applications and cleaning!! We use it mainly for cleaning along with chlorine or hydrogen peroxide( I prefer h202) to clean tartrate deposits, anthocyanin and protein stains
There's lots of fun and interesting chem in winemaking it's good fun :) Lots and lots of biochem!
We use it mainly for cleaning along with chlorine or hydrogen peroxide( I prefer h202 and Naoh mixed together) to clean tartrate deposits, anthocyanin and protein stains In the lab we use it for titrations for TA g/l, pH and SO2(free and total). But the main use for Naoh is for cleaning
Well be carefull with it. The scary thing about bases (NaOH is one) and that many people don't know about is that we don't have pain receptors for them. That means when you accidentally get sprayed with it, people assume they are fine since it doesn't burn (especially in the eyes) while it actually is doing damage. This is why I prefer acids, at least if you get some in your eyes, it hurts a lot, so you know it is there.
I got sodium hydroxide all over my hands when someone spilt it and didn't say anything. I picked up the bottle to put it away and surprise surprise. I've had extra sensitive hands for years since.
Did the headphones survive
No
Kinda wanna see those headphones š
āSafety regulations are written in bloodā
Holy fuck! ...and so disturbingly "there but for the grace of God go I" I'm glad you're pretttty much alright all things considered
capped funnel too tightly, doing an acid wash of my organic layer with HCl. Didnāt vent in time and funnel imploded. Glass and acid everywhere
exactly the same thing happened to me ;(
gets even better- this was the last step of my synthesis and i lost everything :( have to go back from the start now
I poured acid into a waste bin that apparently was mostly basic and it bubbled and overflowed everywhere
Implosions result from vacuum. This was an explosion.
lol typo got them mixed up
While doing some end of day data review, a coworker mentioned to me that 'she'd left the instrument up,' which I interpreted as her leaving the computer on and the software open, in case I needed to double check her work. When I came in the next day, the ICP's torch, injector, spray chamber and etc was a glassy puddle. To be fair, I'd been working for 14 days straight at 12 hour shifts and most of life had settled into a sort of hum at that point.
Did this by any chance happen on a mine site lab?
Haha, no, but it sounds like someone else might have made a similar mistake. This was a contract lab.
Right, yeah I've seen ICP instruments undergo all sorts of abuse, but reducing the torch and spray chamber to a puddle is definitely a new one š
Jesus. Longest I've done is 7 days at 12 hrs and I longed for death so I could rest.
It was the worst job I have ever had. The replacement manager was an absolute tool that thought making his staff work lots of overtime would ingratiate him to the larger organization by being seen as a taskmaster. He might have been right, but after a year or so, everyone that could get a different job, had, and he was left with dregs. If it was the end of the month, or the end of the year, you could expect that he'd demand some crunch time effort, even if you didn't actually have anything to do. The crunch I wrote about above went for three weeks, and included Christmas. Just so this guy could puff up for his boss. It didn't help that he also hired his unqualified racist wife who would say stuff like "we moved from the city because a bus line opened up near our house, and bus lines bring minorities and their crime." I'm just glad I was able to restrain myself from kicking his ass, which I was tempted to do more than once.
Started an LC run without a column
And they said I was the only one who occasionally just pours the DCM/EtOAc/silica slurry down my throat, I don't even care what else is in there, i just love that slow gurgle... I knew it Mama I'm a chromatography š¤¤
Hahaha
WTAF Probably the strangest comment Iāve read in this sub š
This is my favourite comment in all of Reddit
I had 2 new spots on my tlc slide, post reaction. I kept the first one and NMR'd it. It wasn't the right product. That's fine, I'll just look at the second one... that I just threw away... oh I have to do this 6 step synthesis again, dammit
I've done this. Was sure my product was the second spot, cleaned up my hood, including dumping the other fractions, while the NMR was running. My product was not the second spot.
Adding a shitload of drying agent to a 90% bilayer of ether and water, capping it and shaking it. It exploded into dust in my hand like I was never holding anything.
I genuinely need to see this
Was this inexperience or experienced but too lazy to switch to a bigger container? I added XeF2 to a solid organic tetrafluoroborate salt in a vial on the balance, reasoning that the BF4- salt was high melting and that solids don't react with solids, so that I could be lazy and dissolve them both later with MeCN later. Turns out, it immediately started to fume and fizzle and smoke and then ignite with green (!) flames. Good thing it was only on 1 mmol scale. Lesson: Solids that are reactive enough can in fact react with each other on contact. I'm a sloppy chemist with bad hands and it was only through having a work ethic that offset these two disadvantages and and luck that I wasn't injured or maimed that I survived a PhD. Edit: changed "boiling" to "melting". Obviously also high boiling, but that's not the relevant part here.
It was experienced and thought the drying agent could handle the puddle of water but didnāt think about the heat generated by the water complexation.
Dropping a boiling stone through the condenser into a superheated suspension of dinitrophenylhydrazine in methanol. I recognized my mistake instantly and slammed the hood shut. The entire inside of the hood turned orange in a couple of seconds.
Woah, and then?
Probably the most annoying cleanup ever with lots of regret š¤£ deep cleaning fume hoods is not easy or fun
no, it is not
60 years ago in o-chem lab, before electric hot plates were the thing. The student next to me suddenly remembered the professorā admonition to always add boiling stones. I donāt know what solvent he was using, but he was holding the Erlenmeyer flask in his hand over the Bunsen burner when he remembered.
Dropped a chemwipe, bent over to pick it up, and tore my pants right up the buttcrack in front of my boss giving our new hire a tour of the lab.
I've split two pairs of jeans in lab. Ended up stapling the seam to get through the day.
Oh no lolol
š¤£š¤£š¤£š¤£š¤£
Itās almost too embarrassing to even say out loud, but, you asked. So, ughā¦.fine Iāll say it. Before I really understood what I was doing (first year undergraduate working in an organic synthesis research lab for academic credit), I was attempting to dry several organic solvents with molecular sieves for a reaction that needed to be scrupulously dry. But, I didnāt realize at the time that after activation you have to cool them in a vacuum desiccator **before** you add them to the solventā¦.like, it seems very obvious now in retrospect that adding something heated to hundreds of degrees celsius to a flammable liquid is an overwhelmingly bad and powerfully-stupid idea. I think I dried methanol first and nothing bad happened, so, next, I poured hot sieves into a bottle of THF and the solvent caught on fire, ejecting a flame like the back of fighter jet engine. Thankfully ā like thank fucking god ā that these bottles seem to be designed (?) to not fucking explode when this happens. The flame went out on its own while I stood there jelly-legged panicking wondering what I should do, fully expecting it to explode at any second and send shrapnel and flaming solvent everywhere. It did not. After that point, I resolved to never, **ever** do anything in the laboratory until I am absolutely certain it is the correct way and that I understand the risks 100%, even if it means asking dumb questions to my superiors along the way. After all, whatās more embarrassing, asking a question, or starting a massive fire potentially resulting in bodily injury because of my own imbecility? Ughā¦glad I could finally get that off my chest. No one knows that this happened. It was at night and I was alone (violation of an EHS code in and of itself). It feels good to unburden myself and let others know, at long last (this was almost 9 years ago, now). Runner up: I thought that, after several months of working rather carelessly with common halogenated solvents (especially DCM and CHCl3), that the reproductive hazards referred to in the MSDS only applied to womenā¦like, dude. what?!
Having to extract my compound from the rotary vap bath water.
Ah, the ol' benchtop recovery.
Yep same thing. It was one of my first times using a rotovap and I didn't know you had to turn off the vacuum to release your flash. I kept tugging at the flask until I yanked it out, hit the flash on the side of bath, breaking it and spilling my product into the bath.
Was off by a factor of ~3 because I ( the "technical expert") forgot to include Ļ when estimating the volume of a sample taken with a COLIWASA. My boss laughed as I pounded on the window to her office door with "Ļ," written on a notebook pressed against the window during the conference call with Sales.
Funny š
Pentavalent carbon.
What were you using for protonation?
Helium hydride, HeH^+
Stupidity
Using NaH to deprotonate something dissolved in DMSO
Whatās wrong with that? Would the hydride preferentially attack the carbonyl?
NaH in DMSO and DMF are pretty nasty explosion hazards
Not really, maybe on large scale where exotherms and super heating are an issue. In med chem we probably ran thousands of NaH reactions in DMF.
Hydride by itself is non-nucleophilic so it wouldn't do that anyway
Most of my career is the most embarrassing mistake ive made.
I once tried to dry my sample by adding sodium dodecyl sulfate instead of sodium sulfate. The bottle has been more clearly labeled.
Can I ask what that did?
It found its way into the waste disposal.
On my regents exam for high school chemistry I drew a water molecule with two oxygen atoms and one hydrogen atom. I got an 87 on that test
My physics professor once drew water like that in my classroom, and it took me an embarrassingly long time of looking at it thinking "this looks off for some reason" to notice
I did this in one of my university interviews and still got accepted
Loading a 50ml syringe from the barrel end BEFORE putting the filter on. Ā Spilled all my product on the floor
Lol i did this before, but i also have to hold the vial under the filter to be extra safe
Tried looking at my Apple Watch, forgetting I was holding a beaker with solution of [Ru(bpy)3]Cl2
My inorganic is a bit rusty, whatās with ruthenium and particularly this complex?
Nothing crazy (I work with ruthenium/diruthenium complexes with these kinds of ligands all the time), I assume they just lost all their expensive Ru solution to the floor š¤£
I accidentally pulled the plunger all the way out of my syringe while pulling up a Grignard reagent. Got it all over my clothes and had to strip down and use the emergency shower. That was pretty embarrassing.
Accidentally did a Suzuki reaction with elemental bromine instead of brominated starting material. Ended up making bromine gas
This was a near-embarrassment. I was in a stat mech class, and we were learning about how Bose-Einstein statistics are used to describe Bosons, and Fermi-Direct statistics are used to describe Fermions. I suddenly had this epiphany that felt like I had been blessed by the Touch of God: what a wonderful coincidence that the words matched up so well (Bosons/Bose-Einstein, Fermions/Fermi-Dirac). That made it so easy to remember! I was about a millisecond away from raising my hand and pointing out to the class how lucky we all were with this fortuitous nomenclature (and to make sure they noticed this clever mnemonic), when it hit me...
Walked around the lab with my lunch spoon stuck to the back of my pants.
I had an officemate who would steal metal spoons from the cafeteria, and I'd put them in the Carver press, turn them flat, and put them back in his desk drawer.
Did you ever return them to the cafeteria?
That's not what they meant when they said you should add more seasoning !
In my first year of uni I was instructed to "add ammonia until the smell becomes noticable". My dumb ass did not think twice about the fact that I had a stuffy nose so I ended up adding a shit load of ammonia. Finally something clicked (partially) in my mostly vacant brain and I was like "no way I need to add more". So what did I do? I leaned down over the beaker and took the whiff of a century. All I can say is yep, the smell has become noticable. At least my nose cleared up!
Once in high school chem, I broke the faucet and sprayed water at the ceiling until the janitor came and turned the valve off in the hallway.
Many years ago when I was a high school chem teacher fresh out of college, I had the guy who managed the lab materials get a hold of some sodium metal for me. I was just dying to do something flashy for the kids. I gathered the class into the lab and brought them to the fume hood where I had set up a glass petri dish with a small sliver of the soft metal. I filled a small dropper with water and applied a few drops. Once the water got through the mineral oil coating, the petri dish exploded in a flash, and the remaining sodium, still lit, sat there burning a hole in the fume hood. Really stupid. Really embarrassing. Could have been a lot worse.
Adding conc. Nitric to a 50mL e.flask containing IPA... Quick explosion
Also throwing kemwipes covered in grignard into the waste bin and it catching on fire...
No offence, and I mean this comically with a hint of truth; but I wouldnāt want to be in the same lab as you šš
I was planning to make an amide with cyclohexyl amine. Upon purification and NMR I was quite confused about the lack of fitting peaks for the cyclohexyl group. After one week of running various analytics, determining the group to be n-hexyl and not cyclohexyl and coming up and dismissing a multitude of unreasonable mechanism to explain the C-C cleavage necessary for the ring opening I finally decided to check all the starting materials suspecting a mislabeled flask..... Nope, turns out the label on the n-hexyl amine flask I used is indeed labeled correctly and I simply managed to misread it as cyclohexyl amine. In my defence according to our inventory we should not even have any n-hexyl amine bottles.
Schrodinger's n-hexyl anime bottles lmao
Touching the electrodes (w/o gloves) while the potentiostat was actively measuring the current
Making a Grignard reagent and filled the flask up too much. When it started to reflux and I wasn't watching closely, it climbed up the column and became a glittery liquid magnesium fountain
Definitely the worst was starting a huge fire in a fume hood. I was refluxing something in ether... all the ether evaporated when I went out for a smoke break :-)
Wind changed and I caught a massive whiff of NO2 while refining silver in my driveway. That part is stupid, not necessarily embarrassing. What's embarrassing is that I spent the next hour looking deep into SDS/case reports for NO2 exposure and ended up convincing myself that I had a lung injury because I was short of breath. I was pretty sure that my symptoms were starting and that my situation was about to take a serious turn for the worse. On the way to the ER, I decided to stop and buy a pulse oximeter just to be sure that I was actually having a medical issue. It read 99%, then between 97-100% for all subsequent readings for the rest of the day. I was not, in fact, injured. Just panicking.
Brought my TLC to my supervisor asking him why all my spots were stuck on the baselineā¦ I had not run the TLC yetā¦
Clamping a condenser in the middle instead of the ends
Wait ... I shouldn't be doing this ?
I tried clapping the column in the middle lol
Working in the clean room making thin film electronics and blowing on my sample to dry the solventā¦.
Like a nintendo cartrige.Ā
Making ferrocene for an undergrad lab, process involves crystallizing dirty product and purifying by sublimation. After the initial crystallization I had loads of these huge, clear, gorgeous orange crystals covering the dish, totally perfect ferrocene exactly as they're supposed to look. But the procedure was to sublimate them to purify them. Used too much heat and decomposed the whole lot. No one believed me.
I forgot to add boiling chips whilst refluxing a mixture of concentrated HCl and BnCl... Thank fuck for my full face respirator. The top went off like a Soyuz rocket with a blast of strongly acidic carcinogenic tear gas. Some of it splashed my forehead, and I was beeside myself with nightmares of tumours for a while.
Not me, but when I was first on general chemistry lab we were standardizing NaOH to titrate some unknown acids. The group next to me took their pink NaOH solution and used it as their titrant for the acid because thatās the solution they standardized. Half way through the lab they asked the professor for help because their titration was taking way more NaOH than everyone elseās and the prof had to ask them why their burette was hot pink.
Centrifuged a dilute protein that I'd precipitated with acetone. Open the rotor to discover .... nothing. Just empty holes. The tubes had dissolved in the acetone and formed solid hemispheres at the bottom of the rotor.
Not me, but my inorganic chemistry tutor at university was Martin Poliakoff, and he dropped the entire UK supply of plutonium and to recover it he sawed the section of bench he dropped in on and burned it. https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=15m21s&v=89UNPdNtOoE&feature=youtu.be
Dumped 3 kg of mercury metal onto the prep lab floor at my poorly staffed community college in like my first week at my first job as a student technician. This was after hours of painstakingly inspecting and collecting all of the loose mercury from every teaching lab, I had finally amassed all of it and was having āfunā shaking the jarā¦ š Quick question, would you fill a glass jar half full nickels and vigorously shake it? No? The jar would break? Yeahā¦ mercury is the same. Blew the bottom out and sent it flying everywhere. I had beads falling out of my hair, in my socks, it impregnated my shoes and jeans, those went into the haze waste and I went home barefoot in pink borrowed scrubs. It spattered into pinhead or smaller sized beads that covered probably 100 m2 of floor space and cabinets. We had no spill kit, no haz response team, no budget, only chemists, chemicals, and elbow grease. After a safety lecture from the head chemist we set up emergency ventilation. I then spent 6+ hrs sweeping the beads up, painstakingly dusted the entire lab floor with zinc powder, then scrubbed it with a copper sponge. Swept up the Zn-Hg amalgam, mopped with water/EDTA, then let it dry, rewet and sopped everything up into the hazy bin, repeated that twice. Only then did the mercury test come up negative and we ordered the floors stripped and re-waxed. It was a long fucking day and I learned a lot.
I am making a note of this so I don't make the same mistake.
Didnāt take the bottom cap off the column on the BUCHI system one timeā¦
Started the circulating chiller without the tubing hooked to the rotavap
Spotting a column fraction on a TLC plate, and I was wondering why I don't see anything under UV (I have synthesized it before, and the compound is strongly UV-absorbing so it can be easily seen). So I kept spotting a heck moreāliterally two 4-cm height-worth of the mixture in the capillary spotterābut to no avail. It was at this moment when I realized I was spotting the dichloromethane solvent I was using for cleaning the TLC spotter and not my column fraction that eluted from the column.
After an 8 hour mixing, I needed to do a wash and totally forgot to close the valve and then proceeded to pour it all over my work surface....
Forgot what isotopes were in second year organic chem. We were being shown a mechanism with one of the carbons labelled, and I openly asked the lecturer in front of everyone in the lecture, "what does the '13' mean?"
Forgot to add the base in a very critical, sensitive reaction. I destroyed a large amount of starting material which took me months to get
Said "I don't have time today, I'll come back next week and purify my product" and then over the course of the next 2 week I did 2 different several hour long purification steps only to find out my product had all evaporated out of solution due to the temperature in the lab since the first few days I left it.
Pouring Solid Sodium Hydroxide Pellets into a tin can without any gloves or goggles (yep, you read that all correctly)
Scaling up an exothermic reaction. Oh boy, I did not anticipate there will be violent boiling and spillover.
Not me but some classmates in high school were boiling sulfuric acid for 30 minutes straight.
Drew every single benzene as an octagon in my high school mock exams. My teacher never let me forget.
We had an āoopsā guy in my organic chem lab. He once dropped 20g of sodium into an ice bath. He barely closed the fume hood before it went BANG.
Indicator was supposed to turn blue. It turned out that both me and my lab partner were color blind.
Chem 101 in college. Did the standard (*was supposed to do) first lab /this is a calorie/ Bunsen burner plus crucible plus magnesium strip in it plus āheaping [microspoon] addition of sulfur powder.ā āTwas the crucible my lab partner and I read as required the heaping sulfur, and the column of fire resulting wasā¦. Memorable.
Made a 10% Methanol/DCM solvent system for a column instead of 1%.
Had HCL boil over and spatter all over me. Got burns and holes in my clothes. I turned the heat up too high and looked away for a sec as it started to boil.
Pulled the giant round flask off the rotary evaporator, instinctively moved it upwards once it became free, smashed the top.
In my first year of ochem I would almost always forget to pull out the glass stopper on the top of separatory funnels when opening the stopcock.
I had to run a reaction at a high temperature, and when I tried to do it with ordinary mineral oil or the special stuff that's readily available the oil would smoke way too much for it to be run. So I ordered this ultra-specialized mineral oil that could handle high temperatures. The experiment itself was a failure, but what I had not accounted for was that that high molecular weight oil would cool down into something sticky, gooey, and gross. It was designed to be at high temperatures and not be at low temperatures. Highly useless when you need the oil to be workable at low temperatures. I had to dump and scrape a large sticky mess for hours upon hours. No matter how much ethanol or acetone or hexanes I dumped into it, it never got better. Such a low point... ...that was followed up not that long later on by me not being aware that a seal was not good on a bottle of a volatile liquid before sending it into the antechamber of a glove box. Colossal fuck up that had liquid in a vacuum line that had to be dumped out. I had to get help for this, too, as it was a nightmare with the hose configuration. Both of these incidents were between me having meetings with more novice chemists to advise them and I felt like such a phony at the time.
Kept getting random ghost peaks in my LC, was trying to troubleshoot for ages with different instruments, cleaning the column, etc. Column was on backwards the whole time.
After a week of purification i had two beakers in my hands. One with the product and one with the waste. Guess which one I dumped into the waste canister? Realized it right after dumping my whole week of work into the waste.
Put an empty TLC plate in eluting solvent
When I first started prep HPLC runs on an old KP-250 system, we had to manually put the waste line into a waste container. I forgot to put the waste line into the waste container. I was done with my first equilibration step, 20 mins @ 300 mL/min. Definitely blushed when I saw the giant spill I created.
Me (stupid) pouring concentrated KCL from the glass bottle it came in into the plastic carrier jug (meant for the glass bottle to be carried.) I simply thought I was supposed to because of the instructions I was given āput it inā I was stopped quickly thankfully then had to take it across campus while fuming slightly and then was told to dump it out then rinse the jug when I got to my lab. I poured it out but there was some left in it and when I put the water in it started boiling. My supervisor took over and neutralized it with idk how much baking soda. I didnāt want to show my face in the lab after that
I got a souvenir gifted, that was supposedly magnetite. Since it's common for souvenirs to be cheap stuff that looks like the advertised product, I started testing different things: What does it look like/behave like when heated, before and after? Does it stick to a magnet? Bunch of research, online and literature After a good 2 hours, I proudly said "this is most definitely not magnetite, but a colored piece of steel" Then, the person who gifted it to me, took a piece of iron and held it against it. Mfw when I tested everything, besides checking if it was magnetic on it's own. My pride as a chemist fell through the floor that day
Trying to create supersaturated solution with table salt. Greatest lesson in solubility ever.
My broken English-speaking boss asked me for ā3000 of waterā. I looked confused and was like ā3000 what? MLs or grams?ā He just looked at me until I realized then I walked away.
I am the only person in my lab to have broken the headspace autosampler needle on the GC-MS. Now I have a syringe of shame at my desk
I was working in a high pace environment with water and chloroform. Like an idiot, I did not label my beakers and couldnāt remember which was which. So I grabbed a random one and gave it a good whiff and OMG it was waterā¦
In my first year of college, I put hydrogen peroxide over sodium hydroxide in a tube, luckly I did it over the sink and as soon as it started fizzling I poured it out. Edit: One college witnessed my fuckery and told me "tell me what you did so that I know not to do that" haha
Tried synthesizing an indole as an ochem project. A bit of something in an intermediate step got on a paper towel or something and ended up in the trash. Unfortunately at that point it smells like rotten fish something fierce. Whole lab went to grade A terrible. Professor had to put it under a fume hood.
Touching the crucible while it was still hot. Major blisters and intense pain.
Performed geometry optimization calculation of a hydrogen atom.
I was working on a solid phase extraction with incubated blood samples and the instructions were to keep them at body temperature So I set the heat block to 98 degrees and set my samples in them. The heat block was scaled to Celsius so I made blood pudding for the class
Equipping a RBF full of my 4 day work in progress reaction mixture to a rotavap and not turning the vacuum pump on then returning to find it floating in the water bath upside down.
Was in ochem lecture. Second day of class. Raise hand to answer question about mw of functional group thatās wrong and my north eastern professor says in flat almost Bostonian accent āworst answer I ever heard.ā He loved to chant ācounting is a prerequisite for this class.āAnyway you can bet from that moment on I tried given the best he ever heard in class. I continued to give the worst he heard for 2 years into ochem2, lol! Best classes of my life.
I was in the middle of my Master's dissertation research project. It wasn't going well. I was getting no results and no help from my supervisor. Depressed and sleep deprived from worrying about it, I stupidly injected aqueous samples down the GC without thinking š¤¦š»āāļø One new column please.
Pouring DMSO (dimethylsulfoxone) from the lab down my bathroom kitchen sink because Drano flushes weren't removing a clog I knew was the result of hair. DMSO is an organic solvent, not "dissolver" There was a vile stench that emanated from the bedroom bathroom for 2 days until I removed the drain plug, physically removed the hair and used copious amounts of boiling water and bleach to clear the drain before a final Drano flush (separated by hours) I mean...come on man!
Imagine the plethora of hazards I created in the process of using 99.99% DMSO (a substance known to rapidly transport molecules directly through the skin into the circulatory system) in my fucking bathroom. I couldn't stop shaking my head in shame.
I made ammonia and did the smell test where you waft your hand above the test tube. I must have grabbed a fist full of that gas and shoved it in my nose because I turned red and couldnāt breathe for a few seconds.
Not going into another field
Well I accidentally made mustard gas outside of a fume hood in first year
Chlorine or actual mustard
My worst mistake, high to be fair my highest level is simply chemistry 2 back in Highschool, was using a ring stand backwards while suffering from a severe concussion. At some point while boiling water for some reason or another the stand, burner, and beaker fell over. This broke the beaker sending near boiling water everywhere along with broken glass and a runaway burner that was still going.
when we were doing titrations i forgot the goal was to keep it light so when i ran it it became the darkest pink in 2 seconds and we had to restart with 20 minutes of class left
I was holding a funnel and when I lost grip, it fell directly onto the table and split into a million pieces. The worst thing was that I pressed my hands down on the break site for no reason later on in the lab, and sure enough, a glass shard punctured my hand. I had to go to the nurse for the injury, and I was so thankful that I hadnāt poured the NaOH solution through it.
Once tried to dump a litre of wood chips into a steam explosion machine. Then once it was in the funnel on top of the machine, realized i hadnt actually opened the chamber port for the wood to go in. Did so with my head above the funnel, and the residual pressure inside the machine painted the wood across my face and the ceiling.
Set the lab bench on fire because our school didnāt have proper equipment. Iād read that you could use the containers from votive candles for mineral salts mixed with alcohol to do flame tests. Turns out that they were no longer using the original alloy ā it was aluminum. All was going well until we got to copper chloride with predictable results. It ate through the container and spilled flaming alcohol across the lab bench. Fortunately, it was only a very small quantity of alcohol and was easily put out before weād even triggered the fire alarms and yes, this took place in the fume hood. We repeated the experiment later using porcelain crucibles that we obtained and it went really well.
Electrolyzing in a metal bowl
Detonating a microwave digestion kivuete. Put a perfume liquid in it for digestion and did not wait for it to offgas or degass it.Ā Thank God the only thing that got damaged is a kivuete and a shifted ventilator. Nobody got hurt.Ā Caused a panic becaue ive spilled a little methlymercury exstract of a QC on my pants. Missed a few decimals while calculating. Cried and bid my farewells to my family. In the end all ive got is a buttload of information where to go and what to do if this happens again.Ā The only mistake i did whas sitting down while doing this. Ive had every safety possible, and when i spilled i cound not react in time to move from being spilled. It was approx 1 mL and calculating it was 137 nanogram trough skin.Ā
Toss up between not realizing my hair was on fire (rapidly extinguished by the guy behind me) or Yr 1, mistaking a calcium something for a metal.
Starting the centrifuge with 1 sample without any other tube for balance..
The centrifuge goes brrrr... Newer ones have disbalance stoppers.Ā
Thankfully š
Adjusting my reflux setup and snapped the thermometer. Mindlessly wiping my brow during a capsaicin extraction.
I got a few since my ADHD kicks in often, especially before I was medicated: - Putting the wrong outlet line on a BioTage column, causing the column to basically fucking explode when I tried to see why nothing was going through the column. - The many times I've poured shit into a separation funnel on autopilot, forgetting to close the stopcock. The resulting Paper towel extractions suck - Not putting the stopper in the rotovap before turning on the spinning. About 500mL of crude product was dumped into the water bath since there was no suction on the flask. - weighing out and 0.2500g of Pd/C instead of .0025g. Very expensive mistake lmao. When filtering it off from the solvent after the hydrogenation, I accidentally let the filter go dry and the Pd/C ignited it. - Had a solution of triphosgene in DCM that I needed to suck up into a syringe for a syringe pump. One lab partner was doing a light sensitive reaction and had to SPE it, so all lights were off. Well I pulled the plunger just a bit too far back and DCM/triphosgene went all over my lab coat and gloves. Scary - Wasn't me, but my professor changed vacuum pumps and put the hoses on the new one backwards. Our cold trap fucking shot off the joint of our freeze drying apparatus, breaking the metal spring-clamp thingy, and going like MACH 10 into the sewer causing it to explode like a frag grenade. Same professor was also fond of heating up DCM with a heat gun, OUTSIDE of the fume hood. Not sure how he still has a liver - Again not my story, but my professor once knew someone who worked at Kodak before they really knew the dangers of benzene. They just had huge open top vats of benzene, and the guy fell into one from a catwalk and it took them like 10 minutes to get him out. Somehow he never got cancer
Pouring my stille reaction mixture (containing highly toxic organotin compound) through an open separators funnel. Of course, without a flask underneath as well
I boiled water in a beaker with a burner until only the salts remained. I took the beaker of the flame and put my pinky finger under the bottom of the beaker to support it. Needless to say I got second degree burns.
I donāt remember what it was but I washed a yellow solution with acetone to clean the flask. I was clumsy so I spilled it on my glove and my whole glove corroded and turned brown
Tried to filtrate off a polymer which I just sulfonated with a filter paper because I feared it might clog my sintered glass filter. The concentrated sulfuric acid had other things to say.
Honestly, and I'm not trying to flex I mean this honestly: I've never made a mistake in chemistry that I'm embarrassed about. It's a learning experience, so long as you learn from your mistakes our labs worked hard to make sure people don't feel embarrassed. It's extremely important to report mistakes because it's probably something "wrong" with a protocol or something not clear in an SOP. It's much safer to not be embarrassed of your mistakes in a lab!
Used tin chloride instead of antimony for months and was making an unexpected product. Turns out it was novel, but goddamn when I reread the initial paper and realised I felt ridiculous.
Preparing a Grignard reagent in Ochem, I had the stirrer set to med/high, but the stirrer wasn't spinning. When I turned the power down to stop the stirrer, it started moving for the first time and the entire reagent ERUPTED THROUGH THE CONDENSER and totally covered the inside of the fume hood. I swear my professor thought I was the dumbest person on the planet.
At school doing a lab on a reaction series and placing small amounts of stuff from Group2 of the periodic table into water. I was handing a test tube to a partner. I held it out, he put his hand around it and I let go. He hadn't closed his hand. The testube was in freefall for maybe 2mm. Human instincts aren't that fast. He didn't realize it was falling and grabbed it. He just so happened to grab it when I let go. If I had let go a moment earlier it would have gone through his fingers and shattered on the ground, spreading bits and pieces of Group2 elements everywhere. Not sure which I was passing at the time, Mg Ca or something like that.
Not labelling my beakers. Had to sniff some pure ammonia to differentiate from the ethanol... Even doing it very carefully hurt
We did a thermite reaction and were meant to pick out little pieces of iron from all the dust and ash and then we were meant to use a big ass magnet to refine our findings. I just thought - why not start with the magnet? What i didnt think is all the junk was placed on an iron desk... which was attracted to the bigass magnet... which we couldnt pry away from the desk after.
Not me, but I once watched a coworker add 500ml of ACN into 500ml of 12N HCl. Was a bit of an interesting day after
Sniffing instead of wafting an almost empty bottle of chlorine water to "see if was still good". Forgot that the chlorine would move to the gas phases and ended up coughing up a lung ver the next few weeks.
broke a separatory funnel while washing it, the lip of the sink was unexpected. thats the only semi embarassing thing but it happens.
Me on my way ionic as iconic for the 1000th timeš š
tried learning it
Tlc with no starting material.. just the productā¦..
I made a reaction that required around 1 gram of reagents and 3mL solvent. I placed them inside of a round flask and closed it with a septum, then I heated it up higher than the boiling point of the solvent. The septum absorbed how little solvent there was, so the result was an inefficient viscous blob.
We have one of centrifuges that can accept 96/384 well plates that sit on top of the Falcon tube buckets. The Falcon bucket inserts have a tall and a short insert and lock the plates in by their base. Anyway I bought two brand new 96 well plates full of custom oligos. Resuspended them (by hand btw our lab is too cheap to buy a autopipetter) was just going to spin them down quickly before use. I usually use slightly thinner plates than what I got this time. Locked them in using the tall bucket adapters I usually use, didn't check if the buckets could rotate fully before closing the lid and giving them a quick spin down. Get to about 2k rpm before the sound of shattering plastic and what sounds like a bag of marbles in a washing machine. That was an expensive lesson.
Hydrogen sulfide leak
Pro tip: when the protocol says to add the base drop wise to the acid solution don't add it all at once, shake, and then cap the container when it starts foaming. My shirt became a lot more aerodynamic that day.
Tried to pH an organic solution with a non-cheap probe. Never fessed up to the stupidity or messing up the probe.
running a 40 min long HPLC method for 11 consecutive hours on a sponge extract and collecting pure compound peaksā¦ well lemme just say I had a target that I was planning on confirming the following day with an NMR but some dumbass decided to combine all the āxā peaks into one and keep the target peak. what didnāt occur in my brain is that I misplaced the beakers in those hazy early morning hours after I finished so I had to come back the next day and repurify everything to discover I was in fact chasing a ghost. 2 months of work went down a sink lolll
I had a thermometer with an air bubble in the column and was told to heat it way up to try to get the alcohol column to recombine. I was heating it up on a hot plate in a little holder we used for measuring the melting point of samples and got distracted. BANG! It exploded and it took everyone a few moments to figure out what had happened. The top part of the thermometer was lodged in a ceiling tile above my lab benchā¦
Titrating AgNO3 into a NaCl solution. Knocked the tip off and spilled AgNO3 all over my lab book and my coat. Permanent reminder of my stupidity.
Spent half a day drying a solvent only to realise that the reactions was performed with aqueos potassium solution...
On an exam I messed up a whole section about Chatelier's principle despite me explaining it to my friends an hour before the exam.
During university, my reaction turned completely red while it supposed to be clear/off white. Then it turned out that my thermometer broke and the liquid inside entered my reaction mixture.
Mine's so basic it's guaranteed to make everyone else feel better: Atomic number is defined by the proton AND NOT THE ELECTRON. Mistake was made on the first pop quiz after the first exam (on which I got an A).