• Question: What is the most dangerous experiment you've ever done?

    Asked by u11mustafab to Adam, Joanna, Louise S, Louise W, Marcus on 15 Nov 2012. This question was also asked by jade02, molineux.
    • Photo: Joanna Giles

      Joanna Giles answered on 15 Nov 2012:

      Hi! For me it’s probably working with some of the chemicals in our chemical room. Some are really nasty and smell it too. For example…

      Cobras have a protein called “Cobra Venom Factor” that is produced in their venom, and it is a really interesting tool to use in my lab to see how it works as an enzyme to break up some of the proteins in the blood.

      I had to purify the “Cobra Venom Factor” protein out from all the other proteins and toxins in the venom and that was quite a dangerous experiment. It took almost 2 days and I had to wear a face mask and all the other standard lab safety equipment – gloves/goggles/coat – to make sure that I didn’t get any toxins in me!

      The experiment worked and I got lots of cobra venom factor to use for my experiments…phew! Don’t want to do it again in a hurry!

    • Photo: Marcus Wilson

      Marcus Wilson answered on 15 Nov 2012:

      Its definitely some of the chemicals I work with too. because i look at how DNA is damaged i have to damage DNA in yeast cells.

      Yeast a very tough compared to us, so i have to use really high doses to get an affect. The most dangerous i would say was irradiating lots of yeast cells with lots of Ultar Violet irradiation. i made sure to use the proper protective equipement, but i still ended up with sunburnt wrists!

    • Photo: Louise Walkin

      Louise Walkin answered on 15 Nov 2012:

      I don’t actually get to do any dangerous experiments but there are lots of things in a lab that are dangerous that you need to be trained to use. We use big gas cyliners that are very dangerous and also liquid nitrogen which is used to freeze tissue/cells and it is also used in cooking I think to cool things very VERY quickly! It has the potential to reduce the oxygen concentration of the air and spilling a small amount of it can reduce the oxygen concentration of quite a big room! I get a bit nervous when I use it! 🙂

    • Photo: Louise Stanley

      Louise Stanley answered on 15 Nov 2012:

      Working with chemicals! Some of them can give really nasty burns (like phenol which is an acid) and the UV light box as we don’t want to be get burnt! We also use machines called centrifuges and these spin round at a very high speed and can produce extremely high “G” forces so you need to make sure you know what you are doing otherwise the consequences could be quite severe! I have also used a lot of flammable liquids which you use to sterilise equipment with a flame so it is very easy to accidentally set things on fire. Our lab did once have to break out the fire extinguisher…..

    • Photo: Adam Paige

      Adam Paige answered on 19 Nov 2012:

      I have used toxic chemicals (phenol, cisplatin, acrylamide), radioactivity (phosphorus-32 and -33, sulphur-35), poisonous gases (nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, hydrogen sulphide), freezing liquids (liquid nitrogen -180oC), possible cancer causing chemicals (ethidium bromide) and strong acids (hydrochloric acid and fuming sulphuric acid).

      Fuming sulphuric acid was great. you open the bottle and white fumes flood out. You have to wear special acid-resistant gloves that look like blue washing up (marigold) gloves!

      At university when I was a student, my friend working next to me suddenly asked me if the liquid in the bottle on the shelf had been brown earlier. We both looked at it puzzled when suddenly the glass bottle top shot out and bounced off the ceiling. Brown gas flooded out of the bottle. The lab demonstrators looked at it from a distance and then evacuated the lab. My friend had accidentally mixed ethanol and nitric acid which made a deadly nitrogen dioxide gas. We were lucky the bottle top came out, rather than the glass bottle exploding at us. Still, it was better than another student in my year who asked a demonstrator why his solution was bubbling. The demonstrator asked what was in it, paused, then thoughtfully said “can you just move it to the fume cupboard…it might be cyanide gas”!

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