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Have you ever crossed international borders with protein crystals in a big Styrofoam hand luggage, set your hair on fire, or forgotten to use the extractor and nearly gassed your co-workers? Colleagues of mine have, although thankfully these tales have happy endings. We know there are plenty of other lab nightmares that happen every day.

This Halloween we asked around the F1000 office for chilling tales in the laboratory. A handful are below, we’d love to hear yours on twitter, using #labnightmares

Sabina Alam, F1000 Research Editorial Director, on bloodwork in the lab:

My PhD work involved using human blood- so I used to bribe my lab mates every three months with homemade cookies and cakes if they ‘volunteered’ to have 50ml of their blood drawn. Once a Masters student, a strapping athlete who was doing his project in our lab joined the volunteer group- but then fainted when the nurse prepared to take his blood. Turns out he was scared of needles.  I still gave him a cookie!

Shane Canning, Head of Communications, on ventilating the lab:

My final year project for my undergraduate degree was about the removal of heavy metals from industrial effluent using peat. Prior to running the experiments I had to pre-treat the peat by adding concentrated sulphuric acid to a large beaker containing the peat and heating the beaker on a hot plate.

One day I did this, and then went about preparing various pieces of equipment needed for the experiments. After about half an hour I started to feel a burning sensation in my chest and noticed a strange smell. On investigating I realised I hadn’t turned on the fan in the fume cupboard.

I quickly turned it on and opened all the windows in the lab. The burning remained for about a week and I never again forgot to turn on the fan before heating acid.

On supervising students:

Miranda Gray, F1000 Outreach Manager:

An undergrad in a lab I was teaching set her hair on fire with a Bunsen burner.  I gasped “Sweetie, you’re on fire” and used my hands to pat out the fire before sending her to the sink to make sure it was out.  She always pulled her hair into a ponytail after that day.

Holly Murray, F1000Research Publishing Editor:

I had a student check to see whether a Bunsen burner was on by putting their hand over blue flame.  I also taught a lab involving nasal swabs and every time without fail at least 1 student would shove the swab so far up their nose they got a nose bleed (despite being warned).

My own actual nightmare was when the freezers storing all my samples broke over the weekend and I lost everything—pre-analysis.

Losing your samples is awful, we can’t help you with that, but we can stop you from losing all your references. Why not give F1000Workspace a try? Sign-up now for a free account at F1000.com/work