Story time! Courtesy of my 7th–grade Biotech teacher:
Many years ago, he was working in a bio lab where they were studying the effects of drugs on the brain. Specifically, they were trying to isolate the specific paths and locations in the brain that these drugs would build up in the highest concentrations. That year, they were studying cocaine.
Of course, you couldn’t be experimenting with cocaine on humans, because that would lead to everybody having too good a time, I guess, and the federal government wouldn’t stand for it. As such, they were injecting cocaine into rats. Now, giving these little guys the time of their lives was still not the purpose of the research, so they needed a way to easily find out where the cocaine was going in the rats’ brains. As such, they tagged the cocaine. In order to ensure the tagging didn’t affect the binding and distribution in the body, however, they had to tag it, not with a dye, but by making it radioactive, at which point they could use whatever Magical Machine™ to take a 3D scan of their heads and find the radiation (though It’s possible he was simply leaving out the bit where they dissected the rat brains to find where they were radioactive, which I now think far more likely)
Unfortunately, aside from getting these rats literally blitzed out of their minds on a one-way-trip to the land of cheese and honey, no super-rats were created by what otherwise sounds like a plot straight out of an offbeat MCU movie.
No, the practical upshot of this was that it was some poor sod’s job to actually mix radioactive cocaine into solution for injection. Since they needed to do it a LOT, they needed a lot of solution. So, in their infinite wisdom, they had the following setup:
- a refrigerator, where they kept the saline and radioactive cocaine (and whatever else they were using to make the solution)
- immediately to the right of the fridge, a fume hood, where they would actually do the mixing.
- atop the fridge, two unlabelled beakers: in one, the saline, ready for mixing, in the other, the radioactive cocaine solution, prepared and ready for injection.
This was the point at which an entire crate of lab rats was toppled, releasing all of them onto the floor…
Of course, the entire lab is suddenly in chaos. One person is trying to use a net they had prepared for such an occasion to catch the rats that are running around the desk area, while two more are trying to tag-team a rat that ran behind a bookshelf. My teacher, though, is chasing a rat. A rat that is running straight for the cozy space under the fridge. With all the alacrity of a wastrel postgraduate who has never heard the term “dexterity” outside the context of tabletop games, he runs headlong into the fridge, and suddenly feels a splash on his head and the shattering of glass.
While it didn’t take too long for them to pull out the Geiger counter and determine that he was not going to get a supervillain backstory (with the high of his life and cancer on the side), you can bet they labeled those beakers after that, and kept them in the fume hood.
And that, dear friends, is how we learned about Lab Safety in my school!
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Best we can do is the original formula Coca-cola with red wine, cocaine, and caffeine.
It’s the pause that refreshes.