This is not the first time this happens. Back in 2009 six people became ill at Harvard after drinking coffee from a communal espresso machine that was contaminated with sodium azide.

Oh and let's not forget the Berkeley cadmium poisoning.

Edit: I'm going to compile other cases I wasn't aware of that you guys mentioned in the comments

• 1994 Rockefeller University NY: attempted poisoning - coffee https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1994/07/27/779377.html?pageNumber=23

• 1997 UC San Diego: acrylamide in coffee pot https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.278.5344.1704b?referrer=android-app%3A%2F%2Fcom.reddit.frontpage%2F

• 2014 Gustave-Roussy Institute case in France: sodium azide in a coffee kettle https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2014/04/26/la-vengeance-d-un-stagiaire-vire-a-la-tentative-d-empoisonnement_4407857_3224.html

• 2015 Stanford University case: paraformaldehyde in water bottles https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2016/01/16/former-stanford-student-sentenced-in-poisoning-case/

• 2017 Yale University case: sodium azide in an office coffee machine https://yaledailynews.com/articles/police-launch-inquiry-after-toxin-sickens-four

• 2023 Florida chemistry student poisoning family case: hydrocodone and methadone poisoning by pumping the chemicals on the front door of the house https://www.the-independent.com/tv/news/chemistry-student-filmed-poisoning-family-by-injecting-chemicals-into-their-front-door-b2401121.html

• 2026 UW Madison case: chloroform poisoning in a water bottle https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/university-wisconsin-scientist-allegedly-tired-kill-lab-colleague-pois-rcna341216

Original cases I mentioned:

• 2009 Harvard poisoning case: communal coffee spiked with sodium azide https://abcnews.com/amp/US/poisoned-harvard-researcher-spiked-coffee-fatal/story?id=8918291

• 2017 Berkeley case: cadmium poisoning in a water bottle https://abc7news.com/amp/post/bay-area-woman-poisoned-worker-david-xu-speaks-1st-time-felony-conviction-expunged-judge/19933507/

• 2026 University of Wyoming case: acrylamide poisoning in tea https://www.reddit.com/r/labrats/s/q74na4eoXm

How are you fairing the war on science?

This is after 4 months of running a membrane Bioreactor. Currently broken down and moving from a 2 stage to a larger single stage reactor.

Hi, I'm a 1st year master's student rotating in a biology lab that I really like so far, but some of my PI's lab practices seem a little bit too relaxed, and it makes me nervous that I will have to share stuff when I start my project. For context, I have around 3 years of lab experience from undergrad and research internships, so I've seen a lot of variations of the same techniques like cell culture. However, I understand I am still newish to research and he has obviously been doing this a lot longer than me. But here are some things I saw that made me very nervous (with mammalian cells):

- grabbed cell dishes/plates from incubator with no gloves on

- touches everything (reagents, media, pipettes, stuff in fridge) with no gloves until he is ready to actually start working

- took out ~20 different plates from incubator at the same time to image them one by one, which left all the cells out at RT for over an hour

- Sprayed EtOH on media bottle after putting it in the BSC instead of before

- keeps cells he knows have been contaminated with yeast in the same incubator as healthy, uncontaminated cells (he is trying to treat them with an antifungal)

- working with cells he knows are contaminated with yeast in the same BSC that he uses for everything else

Maybe these are little things that don't really matter, but it just seems to go against a lot of what I have been taught over the years. Am I overreacting?

I work in a human genomics lab where I do library prep and sequencing. I don't work with starting materials like blood, plasma, or tissue. It's about time for me to buy new clothes and I kind of want to just start wearing scrubs. I'm a dress and skirt wearer and my work clothes rotate the same 8 or 9 outfits that are lab safe pants that aren't jeans.

There are research fellows in other departments who are MD PhD's and they often wear scrubs, but they also do surgeries where scrubs are needed. There isn't a direct need for me to wear scrubs based on the lab work I do, but I'm just kind of tired of the clothes and outfits that I do have and feel like scrubs might just be easier.

My department is one person (me) so it's not like I'd have a colleague saying I'm wearing the wrong thing. I often go an entire week without someone checking in on my lab so I don't really see the reason of wearing an actual outfit when I could just wear scrubs.

Ordered a small transfection reagent from Sartorius.. why do they need to package this tiny box in a huge box like this? And I have to send this back by courier? They don’t pick it up from where I am…

Looking to see how much of this is normal. My PI is incredibly slow to communicate the science of our group. After the final data are collected, it takes about 1-2 years on average of the lead researcher meeting the PI every week while they write together. This ‘writing together’ consists of the lead scientist writing the paper solo, then the PI looking over the work and suggesting things get moved around, arguments get re-framed, etc. Often, this flip flops and goes in cycles, where the PI requests major changes, then further major changes that revert the manuscript back to how it was before. No matter how much writing work the lead scientist does, it always needs to be read over in this way, which takes a year or more. The PI can only carry out this process for at most 2 manuscripts at a time. We have 20+ people in our lab. Consequently, most will never have their lead work published, as PhD/postdoc terms are typically < 4 years in the UK. Once a person leaves, their work will never be published because they can no longer meet regularly with the PI, so if you don’t complete this dance in time, you will not have anything to show for your work. We work in human health-related biotech, so by not publishing our findings, we squander the money given to the lab to work on our particular disease that would certainly be better spent elsewhere.

There is no way around it. It means that if a PhD student reaches 3 years, and is just wrapping up the data collection side of their project, they will not have anything to show for their work by the time of their postdoc applications, and likely ever. It penalizes slow, accurate, bold science, and favors churning out something passable but incremental, then dressing it up as something fantastic over the two years spent writing. My colleagues have understandably taken this route repeatedly, doing good but incremental science that is then publishable during their time in the lab. Others who did not take this approach left empty-handed.

Does anyone have experience with situations like this - how normal is the environment I’ve just described, and does anyone have advice on how to navigate it?

I’m a junior studying EE working in an optics lab. I joined over the summer and was very passionate about doing a PhD. The passion I feel for this stuff is still there, I’m eternally grateful for all that I get to work on, but I’m so tired of being the stupidest person in the room 24/7.

I work with a 3rd year PhD student and another undergrad my year who joined the same time as me and who has extensive research experience (first author publication) in a different field than optics. I just feel like I’m barely staying afloat, and that everyone is running intellectual laps around me. My PI also believes that undergrads should have the responsibilities of a full time PhD student, so constant individual contribution is expected. Despite his somewhat toxic nature, I joined the lab so that I can work on something that was very interesting to me and gain extensive research experience (in my school, undergrads are mainly used to do simple data analysis or lab infrastructure development)

I genuinely don’t know what to do. I don’t know if I’m cut out for this thing, if I’m just stuck in a lab that expects too much from me, or if it’s a combination of both. I do my best to show up everyday but during discussions I’m just quiet because I’m trying to process what’s being said last. I really need some help here.

So my boss asked me to hunt for something in the-80 freezer (thermoscientific TSX) , and ofc (since neither of us knew where the samples were) the door was open overall quite a long time (I shut it periodically so it wasn’t alarming but still overall open quite a bit). I was also looking in another freezer, a phcbi VIP ECO. It’s been a few hours and the other freezer is back up to -80 but the thermofisher is stuck at -64. The touchpad says the health is all good etc etc but it’s odd to me it’s taking so much longer than the other freezer… should I be worried? Is it time to call a mechanic? I have heard the TSX freezers are worse, is this a feature of that?

EDIT: checked back in and it’s within the -70 and above range #phew. But good to know about freezer diving techniques— my boss has been out for a few leeks and just told me to find something without much direction (new to lab life) so I definitely didn’t know what I was doing. Also I don’t think this freezer has ever been defrosted….

I did a DNA extraction and then used a Nanodrop to quantify my product and these results don’t look good. What likely happened? Was it the extraction or the nanodrop?

I‘m trying to learn to differentiate macrophages from peripheral blood monocytes and this is the state of my cell culture after six days of differentiation. From the morphology I can differentiate three types of cells: spindle-like, round large, and small cells. I assume the spindle-like cells are the attached macrophages — and the rest? Are the large round cells detached macrophages? What are the small ones? They’re not moving and the medium is clear. Any input is very much appreciated.

Hi everyone,

I'm installing an electric furnace inside a glovebox for research experiments. The furnace will operate at temperatures up to 700°C.

I need help selecting the correct wire inside the glovebox, specifically to connect the furnace's electrical terminals to the internal side of a Kurt J. Lesker power feedthrough.

Could anyone recommend what type of wire would be suitable for this setup?

I've also attached some photos for reference.

Thanks in advance!

Y’all, I just wanna graduate, and these BMDMs are making it very difficult for me. Here’s the situation:

I need a non-enzymatic (no trypsin, no Accutase) GENTLE method (so, likely no scraping) to remove BMDMs from a flat-bottom 96-well plate… while the plate is either on ice or at 4 degrees. I have tried non-tissue culture treated plates but my IL-4-polarized (“M2-like”) BMDMs still hang on like it’s their one job.

I have a 10 mM EDTA recipe (see image) that works like a dream at 37 degrees, but for this experiment I can’t have them warmer than 4 degrees. I don’t know how long I can reasonably keep them in the fridge. 1 hour? 2 hours? The longer I leave them in the fridge, the more rounding I see, but I don’t know what is experimentally acceptable. I plan to run flow as my readout.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks Reddit!

I did this experiment over a few months ago in which I had to treat every row in a 24 well plate differently over 6 days.

Now I can’t sleep because I remembered one day I accidentally flipped the plate and I caught myself after taking out the culture medium of the first well (thankfully, before I treated anything).

I was sooooo tired and burnt out but it’s basically all I have for my thesis. I ran two plates on two different occasions; I assume that in the first case I didn’t make any other mistakes because when I did I obviously caught myself. In the second plate, though, I don’t remember doing that which can only mean I did everything by the book or didnt realize anything was amiss. Someone was “with me” in the lab but not really paying attention.

Help - what’s the probability I made a mistake? I have OCD so this is actually keeping me up at night. What if I mistakenly committed fraud? The results look incredible and I’m scared they’re just “fake” :(

Hello everyone,

I’m interested in learning more about analytical approaches used in peptide research.

For those working in analytical chemistry or laboratory research, which methods do you consider most informative when evaluating peptide purity and identity?

I’m particularly interested in how different methods complement one another, how analytical limitations are reported, and what information is useful when reviewing a certificate of analysis.

I’d appreciate any peer-reviewed references or methodological resources. Thank you!

Hi everyone. I have an interesting situation regarding a manuscript I am working on and I wanted to get some second opinions before I revisit the discussion with my PI.

Background - The project was done during my PI's postdoc years ago. He'll obviously be the senior author. A Grad student who helped on the project did the data analysis and was supposed to write the manuscript. Ultimately though, the student graduated, working on/off the manuscript for a couple of years, then decided they no longer wanted to continue writing/working on it. They finished the data analysis (it was done incorrectly) and wrote a sort of introduction, methods, and results.

That's where I come in. My PI originally asked me to redo the data analysis and to help finish up the manuscript by editing the methods, rewriting the results, and writing the discussion. At the time we agreed upon 3rd author (1st was still the Grad student, 2nd was someone who did a lot of the heavy lifting when executing the project).

Now, it has turned into me redoing the data analysis (very time consuming), rewriting the entire manuscript (every section), generating the figures, and dealing with any eventual revisions needed.

My question is: Is it appropriate for me to push for first author or co-first author on this paper? Generally I feel like it would be a no brainer, but with 1) me not being originally involved and 2) the original 1st author doing the data analysis and writing part of the paper (even though both endeavors were not finished or done correctly and are being redone), I am just unsure.

I am going to discuss this with my PI at our upcoming meeting, but I wanted to see what other people think and see if I'm being unreasonable before I go pushing.

Any advice helps, thanks!

Hi, I’m a master’s student. I need a help. I’m confusing about cell conditions. What is that? I cultured old Shsy-5y cells yesterday. Today, I controlled then I saw that. I suspect contamination, but I couldn't figure out what the structures resembling blebs on the cells actually are. Do you have any idea what they might be?
they are inverted mic pictures.

entry level lab roles in the UK are hard to find because most postings say "scientist" and want a phd or 5 years. this list only has entry level R&D: placement years, graduate programmes, associate scientist, lab technician and research roles.

https://github.com/mehek-builds/UK-Entry-Level-Pharma-Biotech-RD-Jobs

- 31 roles at 12 employers (GSK, Lonza, Pfizer, Moderna, Vertex, Roche, Labcorp, Elanco, IQVIA, Avantor)

- placement years, graduate programmes, associate scientist and lab roles, discovery and chemistry

- 12 posted in the last week

pulled from employers' own careers pages. senior, principal and manager titles are left out. rebuilt every monday.

comment which area you're looking for and i'll send you a list for it.

When I say “create”, I mean go to the lefty tool section of
the site and add items one by one to create a dream lefty tool kit. FST has kits only for righties between $1200-1700. My diy kit came out to about that much , but time wasted being indecisive over which tools to include that will cover various procedures