• Question: did you ever get injured in a dangerous experiment?

    Asked by ciarán to Andrew, Dilip, Emma, John, Ruth on 9 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Dilip Rai

      Dilip Rai answered on 9 Nov 2015:

      Thankfully not. The experiments that I carry out are not so dangerous. But one has always to be on the toe as accidents can happen in science.

    • Photo: John Gleeson

      John Gleeson answered on 9 Nov 2015:

      When I was in undergrad and I was doing my final year project I was making new types of antimicrobials and one of the steps involved injecting this nasty chemical into my reaction. The step mentioned double gloves and ensuring the protection glass was all the way down. Boy was I glad I did that… I opened the bottle stuck in the syringe and as I drew it up, the liquid started reacting with the air and producing smoke and the syringe exploded…. I wasn’t harmed but it burned through my gloves which I quickly disposed of and I was really shaken up.

      These days I don’t have a bother! 🙂

    • Photo: Ruth Hamill

      Ruth Hamill answered on 9 Nov 2015:

      No, luckily touch wood. Working in molecular biology you work on a daily basis with nasty chemicals that can cause havoc in your DNA if you don’t manage the risks properly. Recently, many of these have been replaced with harmless substitutes and this is a big principle in health and safety awareness in science, replace a hazardous substance with a safer one where possible and use the appropriate protective equipment such as double gloves as John alludes to.

    • Photo: Emma Feeney

      Emma Feeney answered on 12 Nov 2015:

      No I never have been, touch wood. Sometimes even simple experiments can be dangerous if you don’t follow the instructions well. For example, if you don’t balance things a in a centrifuge properly, it can be really dangerous (a centrifuge is a big spinning machine that spins things at high speeds and separates components of different densities). If its not properly balanced, and its switched on and allowed to run, it can shake so much that it can go through a wall or even explode!

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