• Question: Did a experiment ever go wrong and you/your friend/ or an animal was harmed? :) Text back soon lols

    Asked by lemonsqueeze99 to Indi, Jarv, John, Ken, Vicky on 12 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by sharon97.
    • Photo: Jarvist Moore Frost

      Jarvist Moore Frost answered on 9 Mar 2012:

      Ooh, I’d say most of my experiments go wrong! I think that’s the same for most people. Unless it’s nearly impossible to do, it probably isn’t worth doing.

      I’ve never been harmed in a failed experiment though, Scientists spend a lot of time thinking about safety. The things that we do are hazardous, and the materials are certainly potentially dangerous, but you can figure out how to be safe by wearing the correct gear, and designing experiments well.

      I know people who used to work with high power lasers where occasionally they’d burn a hole through the sleeves of their jumpers if they dangled in the beam!

    • Photo: Vicky Young

      Vicky Young answered on 9 Mar 2012:

      Yeah I’m with Jarvist on this one, most of my experiments go wrong somewhere but that’s usually my fault. We are very careful with what we do and you are trained to know what is dangerous.

      I did slipped in the lab last week and fell on top a bin which cut my arm. That was embarrassing.

    • Photo: Ken Dutton-Regester

      Ken Dutton-Regester answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      Yeah, I have been pretty safe in my laboratory. However, I remember my old boss had a bit of an incident when a machines safety mechanism failed. He was working in a tissue culture hood; this is an isolated working space (think a large metal box) that you use to keep contamination off of your precious tissue samples. These hoods have UV lights at the top of them that you can turn on when you have finished your work. The idea behind this is that the UV will kill off any remaining cells from your experiments so that the next person to use the hood will not get any cross-contamination from your experiment.

      Anyway, when you turn the working light on, the UV light turns off and vice versa. This is a safety mechanism so that you don’t work in front of the hood while the UV is on. One day, my boss came in to do some experiments but the safety mechanism failed, meaning he spent 3 hours in front of a direct UV source (Think about this in terms of staying 3 hours straight in the midday sun without sunscreen and how much sunburn you would get- if you did this in Australia you would have monster pus blisters by night time). He didn’t realise the UV was on* until later that night he woke up at midnight and couldn’t open his eyes and was in a ridiculous amount of pain. Luckily he ended up fine and didn’t lose his eye sight, but he did have a killer suntan on his face for a couple of months.

      Probably the most common experiment going wrong involves financial accidents (the ones that hit your boss’s research wallet). I remember when we got in a new machine that cost about $200,000. Just as my friend was testing it for the first time my boss pops his head into the room to see how the new machine was running. Just as he does this, my friend realised he didn’t calibrate the machine properly and in one movement, continued to physically wreck pins on the machine that cost $1000 each (there were 8 pins in total- so $8000). Needless to say, my boss said “Hmmm, maybe I should come back later” to my friend, whose face was as red as a beetroot.

      * Note-you can’t feel UV. The warmness that you feel from the sun is actually energy produced by infrared rays that are also emitted from the sun.

    • Photo: John Prytherch

      John Prytherch answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      As the others say, experiments very often go wrong. I don’t work with animals (luckily for the animals), and when we’re at sea we take extra care, as there could be serious consequences if something went wrong.
      For example, we are not normally allowed up the foremast of the ship (where most of our sensors are) if there are large waves and the ship is moving a lot.
      As an aside, things going wrong with experiments isn’t always a bad thing. It’s often when things go wrong that we learn something new, which is the whole point of science 🙂

    • Photo: Indi Ghangrekar

      Indi Ghangrekar answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      Like the others said, yes experiments can go wrong often due to silly mistakes because I’ve been tired but wanted to finish off a piece of work. Thankfully, I have never been involved in an accident and cannot recall any friends having anything go so wrong that they were harmed. I haven’t heard of an accident harming an animal either, you have to be extra careful when working around them!

      Like Jarvist said, because there are so many potentially dangerous chemicals or pieces of equipment that we sometimes use, we have lots of health and safety training and have to wear protective equipment. Sometimes the health and safety stuff can be tedious but actually I am grateful for it because as I said, I haven’t had an accident yet!!

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