• Question: has any thing ever gone wrong in the lab

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      Asked by 449grcb52 to Sankar, Alan, Becky, Jo, Sarah on 9 Mar 2015. This question was also asked by Sankar's biggest fan.
      • Photo: Sankar Meenakshisundaram

        Sankar Meenakshisundaram answered on 9 Mar 2015:

        Hi, yes indeed many things have gone wrong in the lab. I do not mean by dangerous explosion. I have performed many experiments expecting to get something, i would get totally different result. For example, i wanted to prepare a compound which is white in colour, what i ended up having was a black stuff. The beauty of being a scientist is, i will have to understand two things now, why i did not get white stuff and why i got the black stuff and what is that? so you learn twice from your failure rather than from your success. So failure is important in science 🙂 you learn a lot from it.

      • Photo: Sarah Kirk

        Sarah Kirk answered on 11 Mar 2015:

        We have had a small fire in the lab, but we are all fire safety trained so we knew how to control it. Sometimes a lab can get flooded too, which is especially bad if the water leaks into the labs below you!

      • Photo: Becky Gregory

        Becky Gregory answered on 11 Mar 2015:

        Yes, things go wrong in the lab all the time, whether it is an experiment that didn’t work, or a piece of equipment that broke. Luckily, nothing seriously wrong has happened to me yet, although one of my colleagues once set fire to the bin accidentally. However, we all have to be trained to use fire extinguishers, so he safely put out the fire.

      • Photo: Alan McCue

        Alan McCue answered on 11 Mar 2015:

        Yes sometimes things go wrong. I’ve been fortunate that when things go wrong for me it costs me time and never caused me any really danger or harm. It is important to always try and be safe so that way even if something goes wrong the danger is not that high.

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