Health and safety gets mad
Lab horror stories are fine – as long as we remember why we tell them
If you put any group of chemists together for any length of time, lab horror stories will start to creep out. We’ve all heard them, as colleagues compete with each other to claim the worst near-disaster in the lab: ‘In a moment of madness I poured water down the spout which caused a fireball to rush straight past my head’; ‘I poured the entire bottle of calcium into the bucket of water shortly before realising this one was fresh’; ‘That was when I learned that you should not open a bottle marked “lachrymator” on the bench…’ These are all real examples – specifically mine!