Question: what are some of the most unexpected things that have happened to you whilst your experementing?

Kylie Belchamber answered on 13 Jun 2016:

Thanks for this question, it has brought back some funny memories!
I’ll give you two answers, a funny one and a sciency one.
The funny one:
I was once just outside the lab chatting to a friend who was using a high pressure oven to make activated charcoal (this is used in water filters to remove bad stuff). He hadn’t shut the door properly, and once the pressure built up, all of a sudden the door flew off, when across the room at 100mph and smashed into a cupboard! Luckily noone was in the room and noone got hurt, we can laugh about it now, but it was most certainly unexpected!

The sciency one:
I grow my cells for 2 weeks or more before I use them. To do this, they are in small plastic dishes in an incubator (like you would use to hatch chickens), and have to be kept sterile, because if you leave them on the side, bacteria will get in and the cells get infected and cannot be used. We sometimes get infections anyway, and it turns the liquid on the cells cloudy yellow. Once, after a weekend, I opened the incubator and the cells were blue and black and covered in mould! It was horrible.
I also work with sputum, which is the snotty goo you cough up if you have a bad cold or chest infection. We get samples of sputum from patients with COPD, and cystic fibrosis, and sometimes it is full of hard blobs of snot, sometimes it is stringy and will make long strings (kind of like mozerella on a pizza), and sometimes it is all bubbly. Working with sputum always brings an unexpected surprise, and you can’t do it before lunch!