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Asked by fudgepip to Charlie, Eoin, Jemma, Julian, Steve on 20 Mar 2011.
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Jemma Ransom answered on 17 Mar 2011:
I once saw a colleauge accidently explode a test tube, that was quite funny (she was thankfully uninjured) 🙂
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Julian Rayner answered on 17 Mar 2011:
Hi fudgepip. Didn’t see it, but a colleague told me a story that I loved. He was at a conference once, standing on a balcony with his mates, and his friends bet him he wouldn’t jump off the balcony, roll down the awning, and land on the lawn below. He took the bet, but of course crashed through awning (which couldn’t support his weight), and landed on a table underneath. Sitting at the table was James Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for solving the structure of DNA…. My colleague was escorted from the conference by security and told not to come back.
Who says scientists are no fun?
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Eoin Lettice answered on 18 Mar 2011:
There is lots of cool comedy based on science – The Simpsons have had lots of famous scientists on the show – including Stephen Jay Gould (a paleontologist) and Stephen Hawking (a physicist). I love the simpsons, so that was very funny.
I also laughed out loud recently when I saw this clip of Mitchell and Webb making fun of Homeopathy – which isn’t based on science at all! -
Stephen Moss answered on 18 Mar 2011:
Hi Fudgepip
I can remember two quite funny (if slightly hair-raising) incidents that happened in labs where I worked. The first was when I was a PhD student in a lab in Edinburgh, and another student in the lab decided to make some dilute sulphuric acid by pouring water into some concentrated sulphuric acid. You may already know that you NEVER add water to conc sulphuric, always the other way round. There was an inevitable violent reaction and my friend got his trousers splashed with large drops of sulphuric acid. As we stood there, holes literally started appearing in his jeans, getting bigger and bigger at some speed. Luckily he managed to tear them off before his skin started burning too, but he then had the embarrassment of having to rush home in a lab coat with his bare legs, grey socks and shoes underneath! Luckily for him he lived near work, so it was only a short walk.
The second event was similar, but by now I was working in London after my PhD and this time it involved radioactivity. A friend in the lab managed to get radioactive nucleotides (containing radioactive sulphur) all over his trousers while setting up to sequence some DNA. Again, off came the trousers, and on went the lab coat. Eventually he found a female colleague who had some spare knee-length aerobics pants that he borrowed. He must have had some very odd looks when he left work and went home on the tube that night.
Rules these days (and sensible ones too) mean that lab coats must always be worn in the lab, so incidents such as these are probably confined to the past.
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Charlie Ryan answered on 20 Mar 2011:
hi fudgepip great question but sorry i can’t really think of anything right now! There must be something – it can be very funny at times – but nothing comes to mind straight away!! What about breathing in helium??
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