• Question: whats the biggest mistake you've ever made in an experiment?

    Asked by bubbles to Mark, Linda, Koi, Franco, Claire on 20 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Franco Falcone

      Franco Falcone answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      @Bubbles Nothing major, sometimes I may have added reagents to the wrong tube, or the wrong reagent, or forgotten one step in a protocol; this will usually cost time and money but it’s not a huge problem and the experiment can be repeated. Sometimes you can drop a tube and lose its content. It can be very frustrating, but that’s life! Not being overworked or distracted and being patient helps a lot avoiding such accidents.

    • Photo: Claire Bourke

      Claire Bourke answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      @bubbles,
      unfortunately I make little mistakes all of the time, which is why on my profile one of my 3 wishes would be to get my experiments perfect everytime! Many of my experiments can take a long time and involve many steps so there are lots of chances to make mistakes. As Franco says, avoiding getting distracted makes a big difference. I also keep careful records of every experiment so that I can trace back what I did for each one and double check I did everything right. To avoid spillages I always put tubes and bottles into racks to stop them from falling over and try to keep as clean and tidy as possible so that I don’t know things over. Even with the best laid plans however, nobody is perfect and mistakes can happen.

      A big part of my job is to identify areas where mistakes can happen and think up ways to reduce them, and to analyse experiments that didn’t work and think about ways to get them working, which can be quite time consuming. However, sometimes the best feeling is when you do an experiment which is very hard to get right and you have tried many times and never got it quite right before, finally works. All that trouble-shooting, note taking and effort to minimise mistakes really does pay off!

    • Photo: Mark Booth

      Mark Booth answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      Hi bubbles

      Any mistakes I make are likely to be related to data analysis – these are usually easily corrected.

    • Photo: Arporn Wangwiwatsin

      Arporn Wangwiwatsin answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      Hi bubbles,

      I made little mistakes here and there (and that is really part of the learning) but I cannot think of anything major. Most mistakes can be corrected, or repeated. And the first round with mistake would guide the second round to be done better! (though I can give you an example of silly things I did – putting tubes on a heater to start the reaction and did not close the tubes properly… and hour later I went back to continue the experiment only to find empty tubes… and having restart the process all over again!). Luckily these were not precious samples. If they had been precious samples it would have been the major mistake.

      Another funny(?) mistake (nothing to do with experiments in lab) was when I tried to make muffins, but ended up with rock-hard lumps of something not at all resembling muffins…that was my first time baking.

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