• Question: Has an experiment ever gone badly wrong???

    • Keywords:
      • Click on a keyword to find out more on the RSC site:
      Asked by anon-289315 on 13 Mar 2021. This question was also asked by anon-287556, anon-290183, anon-287311, anon-289149.
      • Photo: Zahra Rattray

        Zahra Rattray answered on 13 Mar 2021:

        Yes- quite a few experiments have not gone to plan. Sometimes the medicines I am using might crash out of solution, then they don’t work when I am trying to put them on cancer cells.

      • Photo: Philip Camp

        Philip Camp answered on 13 Mar 2021:

        Lots of things don’t go to plan, as Zahra says. But that sometimes shows up something interesting and unanticipated. But I guess you’re also thinking about explosions and things like that! Yes, sometimes experiments can be dangerous because of particular chemical compounds being unusually unstable. But an essential part of doing any science, in academia and in industry, is assessing risk and making sure that all possible safety precautions are put in place, and so we are always prepared for any eventuality.

      • Photo: Jesko Koehnke

        Jesko Koehnke answered on 13 Mar 2021:

        Throughout history? Of course! For me personally ? Badly wrong in the sense that someone got injured or property destroyed, thankfully not. Have experiments made me look like a naive idiot? Absolutely!

      • Photo: Goetz Bucher

        Goetz Bucher answered on 15 Mar 2021:

        For me? Yes, but I was lucky (flooded a room with a very toxic gas, but got out in time).
        Over all – of course! Just think of the Chernobyl nuclear desaster. The engineers there were performing an experiment (while watching a football game, while having a change in shifts….)….

      • Photo: Martin McCoustra

        Martin McCoustra answered on 15 Mar 2021:

        When I was a student, I had a couple of explosions in the lab. The containers that held the chemicals were completely destroyed. The substances that I was working with were not supposed to explode. But they did. We had to report what happened to prevent other people encountering that same problem.

      • Photo: Andrew Parrott

        Andrew Parrott answered on 23 Mar 2021:

        There have been numerous accidents in the chemical industry in the past, some very serious causing many deaths. E.g. recently there was the huge explosion in Beirut’s port due to bad storage of chemicals. Such accidents are getting less common but they do still happen. That’s why doing things more safely is very important. Also why shift to more clean chemistry is important, so if things do go wrong the effects are not so bad.

        Personally I have had experiments go badly wrong in terms of giving me no results (which is worse than a negative result, as you just have to do the experiment again) but nothing too serious in terms of injury to anybody.

    Comments