• Question: What was the most expensive thing you have ever done or messed up?

    Asked by anon-41307 on 22 Nov 2022.
    • Photo: Vincent Monchal

      Vincent Monchal answered on 22 Nov 2022:

      I regularly use a machine called a mass spectrometer that coast a lot of money and there is a tube inside made of glass with a really weird shape. Sometime that part of the machine can melt and it’s really expensive to replace as well, and the worst part is that most of the time we don’t know why it have decided to melt.

    • Photo: Vanessa Rodrigues

      Vanessa Rodrigues answered on 22 Nov 2022:

      Haven’t messed up anything yet. All the training has paid off.

      I’ve had close calls with a femtosecond laser oscillator during my PhD. It is driven by controller device that kept overheating. I had to constantly monitor it between tests and it fluctuated a lot with room temperature. It was the heart of my experimental design, and of course the most expensive equipment in the lab.

    • Photo: Anna Desmond

      Anna Desmond answered on 24 Nov 2022:

      I haven’t messed anything up but an expensive equipment I use called a rotary vap keeps breaking down because it’s so old.

    • Photo: Ingmar Schoen

      Ingmar Schoen answered on 25 Nov 2022:

      The most costly part of our laboratory experiments are actually the instruments, in our case special microscopes. I don’t remember breaking anything important, but when something fails, it can be expensive to get it repaired.

    • Photo: Cristina Cuesta Marti

      Cristina Cuesta Marti answered on 30 Nov 2022:

      In science, many things are expensive but I would need to highlight something would be specific analysis that are done with a mass spectrometer, as Vincent mentioned, in our case to analyse the metabolites (composition) of different samples we generated from growing multiple bacteria.

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