I did not like this Far Side cartoon for obvious reasons.
This could do real harm, burning the victim’s neck, and if I caught anyone doing this they would be immediately expelled from the lab. Not funny.
Additionally, I have a personal memory of my first year in general chemistry. I had a lab partner who was a total klutz — I carried her through that lab, in spite of her inability to titrate anything. She was a danger with a pipette, and every week I’d go back to the dorm to discover that somehow the back of my pants and shirt had been spattered with acids — when I’d do my laundry I’d discover all these holes in my clothes, which was also not funny.
I’ve wondered for years if my lab partner really disliked me, or if she was trying to get my attention because she liked me, or she was just ridiculously incompetent in the lab. It happened so often that I suspect the first possibility.
There is the possibility that Gary Larson – not being a chemist – was confusing hydrochloric acid with some milder acid. We have all been there – I used to beleive lagomorphs were a subset of rodentia. And I did not know marsupials were mammals.
It depends on the strength. When pipetting by mouth was still normal I got a mouthful of 0.1M HCl when someone tapped me on the shoulder unexpectedly.
I should have added that I immediately washed out my mouth with water and had a rough feel to my teeth for a couple of days.
I should have added that I immediately washed out my mouth with water and had a rough feel to my teeth for a couple of days.
Sorry, I did it again!
I used to get silver nitrate stains on my hands. I recall my chemistry teacher in university mentioning that any clothing he wore to lecture on demo days would get small holes in it, even with his lab coat and safety protocols.
I was the klutz, but I only had one chemistry class in university. Going slow and focusing helped, and I was never so comfortable that I stopped doing that. In physics labs, I’d just make friends with the engineers so we could partner up: they appreciated someone who really knew her theory and the math, and I got someone with steady hands who liked running the equipment. (Apparently my final project for my circuits lab had the teacher still talking about it the year after — it was a cool project but I was NOT the one working the soldering iron for building the apparatus.)
I’ve seen worse. A lot worse.
Not immediately in person, but I knew people who were there.
Among them, two females attacked by radioactive isotopes.
They found out about it by walking past a Geiger counter and setting it off.
One was radioactive iodine, the other was a large dose of P32.
Then there was the attempted murder by acrylamide poisoning.
Acrylamide is a common laboratory chemical, used to make acrylamide gels for electrophoresis.
I’ll redact his name.
He had his problems but this poisoning by acrylamide was taking things way too far.
Isn’t the punch founded exactly on the extremity of the “prank?”
That’s a warning sign of a psychopath.
When I was studying petrology one of the practicals involved staining rock slices to distinguish between Potassium and Sodium and Calcium feldspars. This involved etching them with hydrofluoric acid. For safety we used latex surgical gloves underneath heavy vinyl gauntlets and only handled the slices with tongs. The acid was neutralised and everything multiply washed at the end of the practical. The last thing was to take off the latex gloves which by now were very sweaty. I washed the gloves then peeled them off my sweaty hands. As I did so a drop of sweat flicked off a glove and git the lecturer in the neck. He of course went into a mad panic and despite my reassurances threw himself under the lab shower. I actually spent several years using the acid for various tests and was rigidly cautious with it. The only near miss I had with it was when a geologist used some in the same fume cupboard and spilled some and walked off without telling anyone. Fortunately I was clued up enough to test the spill and realised what it was. The geologist was banned from the lab.
I once rested my arm in a tiny drop of acetic acid on a lab table. At glacial purity, it was enough to cause intense pain and raised quite a big blister. So “weaker” acids than HCl are still pretty dangerous. Now, a drop of HF acid on the skin would be a particularly unpleasant method of murder.
Given The Far Side’s penchant for morbid humor, I’m sure that Gary used HCl on purpose. I’m sure most people here remember the one where a scientist is looking under a microscope and saying “Hey, this is lemonade! Where’s my amoebic dysentery?” while another scientist is drinking something in the background.
In Biochem lab in the 1970s we used trichloroacetic acid to precipitate proteins. My jeans were full of tiny holes.
microraptor @ 12
I stand corrected!
HCl? bah. don’t get it in your eyes. rinse it off. sure, might make your skin red or put holes in your pants. walk it off.
HF though…that is scary. used it in a MBE lab to etch wafers and clean molybdenum sample holders. it doesn’t hurt when it gets on you, so you might not notice when it spills on you. gets absorbed into your skin, then starts to dissolve your bones and spreads and does other unpleasant stuff. and it doesn’t get “used up” meaning it will stop after it reacts completely. Just keeps dissolving. not pleasant. seek MEDICAL help immediately.
We also used Aqua Regia occasionally. That stuff looks scary when you make it. dissolves gold…
just remembered, when we etched InP wafers, we had to be careful because the reaction could produce phosgene gas.
then there was that time health and safety discovered a bottle of nerve agent while cleaning out the lab of a recently retired employee.
fun times.
@10: Interesting. In her final year of a EE degree, my wife took a course on silicon fab, which uses HF as an etchant. The protocol was not to wear gloves on the grounds that you needed to know if you got HF on your skin, which you wouldn’t know if you were sweating in your gloves and some HF leaked in. Practices may have changed in 45 years.
If you want scary acids, try oleum (fuming sulfuric acid). Spills are actually easy to handle as both the spill and the paper just disappears in a puff of smoke when you try to wipe it up :-O
HF is scary stuff. When I moved into an old lab at Temple U full of 50 years accumulated junk, I found a bottle of HF in the fume hood that was a creepy crystalling stalagmite, and another antique bottle of picric acid, all in the same cabinet. I didn’t touch them. I next found puddles — literal puddles — of mercury on the floor. I just called Health & Safety and a couple of guys showed up in hazmat suits and spent a week scouring the place out.
wasn’t Puddle of Mercury, Puddle of Mudd’s first band name?
I’ve had a lifelong essential tremor (not serious) that made my hands shake. I remember in high school, trying to light a bunsen burner, and the other kids were like, “Whoa whoa whoa!”
In college (microbio major), I had a job cleaning glassware for a laboratory and used to come home with burn spots all over my own corduroys.
I once spilled some coffee on my hand while doing a particle physics calculation.
I’ve gotten concentrated hydrochloric acid on my hands before. It was just a few drops, but I was nowhere near where I could wash it off (don’t ask). So I gathered up a bunch of saliva and rinsed it off with that- it was very sour.
A single drop of HCl, even concentrated, wouldn’t really hurt immediately. You’d get an irritated spot later. Concentrated nitric will hurt like hell in a minute or so if it’s not immediately washed off (and if it is immediately washed off, you still get to peel off the yellow stains- fun!).
I’ve never worked with HF. I’ve heard horror stories from a friend who supervised a geology lab, and watched a grad student reach into a beaker of HF with his bare hands to pull out a rock that was supposed to be dissolving. Ambulance was called and the student spent months in hospital.
When my students were doing titrations with silver nitrate or permanganate, I’d warn them about the stains, and joke that I’d be checking their hands the next day and docking marks for people with black/brown hands. I stopped that when I had a class that was half-full of international students from Nigeria.
@#20 Hillaryrettig1
I had a student with similar tremors, in a low-level lab when we were doing an experiment on combustion. The students would be lighting a lot of splints (to see if this gas would reignite them, or put them out, etc), but this one student could not light a match to save their life.
I lit a candle, put it on their bench, and told them to light their splints from that for the rest of the lab. They lit one splint, then reflexively blew out the candle because they were done with it for the moment.
Did you ever compare her to a pseudoscientist?
A colleague left about 25 mils of nitrogen tri-iodide in a small beaker in the fume hood overnight. It exploded and left the inside of the hood coated with glass fragments.
re PZ@18: In my eighth grade science class (1972), we found a 16-oz squeeze bottle full of mercury in the chemicals closet. On more than one occasion, we proceeded to squeeze some onto the tabletops and in our hands and play with it because it was fun. The teacher never cautioned us about it being harmful due to our bodies absorbing it. When we finished playing with it, we would put it back in the bottle. Over time, at least a third of that was lost, probably spread around on the floor. It wasn’t until I got to my first year of college chemistry lab where we performed an experiment using a J-tube and mercury to measure atmospheric pressure that I learned just how mercury should be handled. The professor stressed that any spilled mercury should be reported immediately, and they had strict protocols for cleaning it up. I am surprised that my buddies and I didn’t show some signs of mercury poisoning. Or for that matter, the whole class or anyone else who had classes in that room. My eighth grade science teacher was obviously a crap teacher.
That was me in chem lab. I kept dropping test tubes! So much so that I barged in on every extra lab that professor taught because there were only so many labs before the lab report was due, and I was determined to finish!
(Speaking of dangerous chemicals and such, you might be interested in my most recent blog post over at sciencefornonscientistsblog.wordpress.com . I got onto plastics recycling a few months ago, and it turns out there’s primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary recycling. Tertiary (chemical) recycling uses some pretty nasty chemicals, so I wondered what damage they could do to the environment and the humans that work with them. Moral of the story: Wear your PPE!)
NitricAcid@22–I have had direct experience with that! I used nitric acid to chemically scarify seeds with heavy seed coats in grad school. I got one small drop on my leg and spent the next 5 minutes with my leg in the sink flushing the skin until it stopped burning!
#21: Every discipline has their unique challenges.
I actually don’t have to deal much with dangerous chemistry — my lab is for living things, and dead things that were once living. I have had to clean up bloody animals and rotting corpses, but that’s more unpleasant than dangerous.
Now I have to deal with venom, I suppose, but I’ve never been bitten.
In grad school, we moved in to a lab space that had been officially unused for some time–it was formally held by a near-retirement faculty member and informally used as spillover by the neighboring labs. We didn’t want anything to do with the 1-gallon brown glass bottle labelled “Organic Waste,” so called the chemical disposal office like all of the presentations said we should. They grew increasingly angry at our staunch statements that we didn’t create it, we didn’t know what was in it, and we weren’t about to take responsibility for chasing the people who had previously used the space.
They came for it, but someone must have said something to my PI about his team’s irresponsibility since he came to ask me about why I wasn’t keeping proper track of my waste. Thankfully he knew the realities and was sympathetic to my explanation.
@23 NitricAcid – Cute story, and you were very kind. I still remember similar kindnesses from decades back, so perhaps they do, too.
@26: We were pretty casual about mercury in junior high school (c.1970). Broken thermometers, playing with drops of the stuff, whatever, and I don’t recall the teachers being that worried either. A bit shocking in retrospect.
@ stevewatson, #32: It wasn’t widely known back then how dangerous mercury is. We used to play with it as kids too.
Reminds me of my grammar school chemistry lab where a classmate was stopped and reprimanded for carrying a pipette of H2SO4 with his other hand underneath to catch the drops.
=8)-DX
I’ve always hated ‘practical’ jokes or ‘pranks’ as you mob call them.
I don’t react well to them, and of course I don’t participate in them.
(It’s a pathetic thing to do)
As an undergraduate chemistry student, I ignored the professor’s advice about wafting a bottle in front of your nose if you just HAVE to smell it. It was acetic anhydride, and my lungs locked up for 30 seconds.
@#31 It’s possible that they remember it as a kindness, but it’s also possible that I let my exasperation show, and that’s what they remember. My best isn’t always good enough.
If you want to see some scary lab stuff, watch the 1950’s and 1960’s Mr Wizard TV shows with kids in some dangerous situations. Don Herbert was, for the most part, careful and I don’t know of any really serious injuries. http://mrwizardstudios.com/index.htm There may be some episodes on youtube, too.
I had a lab mate in Organic Chemistry who loved to squirt acetone across the lab bench and light it on fire.
Of course, years later I did make a batch of Nitrogen Tri-Iodide. For fun. ‘Cause boom is fun?
HCl really isn’t that scary, the skin is pretty resistant to things that are just acids. I’ve gotten it on myself plenty of times, and one time I did make a point of finding out how long it would take for it to cause problems, and as I recall it took around 15-20 minutes for it to start itching enough that I felt it was time to finally wash it off, and even that didn’t leave any lasting sign after washing it off. So really, it’s only scary if you’re not in a position to wash it off, like if some psycho has you tied to a chair or something.
Wouldn’t the danger of HCl depend on its molarity?
Here’s my anecdote: Chem 12, 1975, Vancouver, BC. Our Chem teacher was a little, round, balding Bangladeshi named Mr. Jhooty, pronounced exactly as spelt. He was a really nice guy, and we all liked him. End of the grade 12 year, all tests are done, and Mr. Jhooty starts just talking to us as adults, and one of us asks, “Mr. Jhooty, what is your most embarrassing incident at school?” He chuckled and told the following story:
“A couple of years ago, I had a Grade 11 class, and we were using 1-molar HCL, a pretty strong acid. I gave everyone the safety talk, then passed around the agent. One of the girls got careless, swirled the liquid around and dumped a bunch on her jeans. They started smoking immediately, and she screamed and ran straight out the door into the hallway and I followed her at my top speed. Now, this classroom is right at the end of a long hallway with several classrooms on each side, with the girls washroom at the very end. I ran after her yelling, ‘Take your pants off! Take your pants off! Take your pants off right now!” And as we passed each classroom the doors on either side would open and shocked faces would appear. She finally reached the washroom and dashed inside, while I stood banging on the door, yelling at the top of my voice, “Take your pants off and hand them out to me!’ several times over. Eventually she tossed out her pants, eaten through in many places by the acid. We were both very nimble, about both the running and the pants-taking-off, and she had no skin burns, luckily.”
We all laughed together, him included.
50 years ago and more, I worked for a while as a school lab technician. At end of class, the kids (15 years old or so) queued up at the lab door, waiting for the bell to release them. The fume cupboard was next to the door, and that was where a lot of dangerous stuff was stored. The teacher had left it open. One Glickman type reached in, grabbed a dropperful of fuming nitric acid, and squirted it on the next kid.
Sorry Larson, definitely your off day.
#39 I also made a small amount of nitrogentriiodide on a filter paper in our lab. When dry, I touched it with a spatula and it went off like a firecracker. It was under a fume hood, but I was lucky not to get fired.
If you want to feel uncomfortable, read about the rocket-propelled Messerschmitt 163 Komet, and the dangers it posed for the pilots during take-off and landing.
Acids are ‘useful’ for the military as you do not need to keep the propellants at cryogenic temperatures but they are not really worth the hassle.
@#42 Hairhead.
Your teacher was clearly exaggerating. 1 M HCl isn’t going to cause anything to smoke. 12 M HCl would, but who is going to trust high school students with that stuff?
In chemistry lab in my first year, I burned my fingers in a new way every single week.
I took that as a sign that I should not continue my studies in chemistry.
There was the time in college my brother was clearing out a closet in an area that was being converted to a computer lab in a building from the 1950’s.That part of the building at one time held the isotope lab that was involved with the research reactor a few buildings over; the reactor was decomissioned some time earlier and at that time that space had been turned into an industrial process lab.
Found a tall metal jug with a screw-on lid. Heavy enough he assumed it was filled with oil for the milling machine that was in the process of being taken apart, so he took the lid off to see how full it was. He picked the lid up just enough to realize that the jug was at least mostly empty, thick walled, and based on the weight of the lid, made of a metal much heavier than steel. He put the lid back and everyone evacuated.
People in hazard suits eventually removed it; it was indeed leftover equipment from the isotope lab days. Radiation was so minimal it was likely that particular container had never been used, which is probably why it had been left behind. So, false alarm.