It strikes me that a great number of ‘laboratory incidents’ are just a failure of containment… and that most lab experiments are about keeping things that want to get away from you.

I was even involved in one such incident…

Way back in my undergraduate days I spent quite a lot of time coated up and messing around with petri dishes. All manner of nasties in an aseptic environment… except that wasn’t really the case. Whenever you see scientists represented on television, or in the films, they’ve always got a pristine lab coat, but the reality is that most scientists are way too busy to wash themselves, let alone their work-wear.

And so my lab coat played host to a small microcosm of bacteria and fungi, though nothing visible.

There is an unspoken rule about microbiology, which is this; you will probably make yourself ill at some point, probably though your own stupidity, but you will either get better at avoiding it or you’ll build a tolerance.

I was immune to my own lab coat… unlike, say, the rest of the campus.

But how did the horrible little germs on my lab coat get out there and infect so many people?

I can tell you how. At the time of the incident, a friend was staying with us whilst she was in town. She had managed to get a job working at a convenience store on campus. The sort that serves roast chicken to students that find toasting bread difficult.

She too had specific work-wear – a white coat.

Now, lab coats fasten up the side, rather than at the front, with a significant overlap. But that didn’t stop my friend from picking up my lab coat and wearing it to work. She apparently had people comment that her coat looked odd, but thought nothing of it…

I arrived in my lab later that day, noticed my lab coat wasn’t in my bag and just picked up a spare and thought nothing of it.

Within a week the ‘rivers of puke’ incident happened.

I have no hard evidence, I didn’t confess to my hunch, but I’m pretty sure I know what happened there.

No one died.

It was about this time that I also attended a lecture by one of the creators of one of the contraceptive pills. He told a story about containment too.

The process used to isolate the chemical they were after was a form of repeated purification, where they would remove one impurity each time… leading to two beakers, one with the chemical they wanted and one full of the thing they were removing.

Apparently, at first, this wasn’t a problem. Although they were dealing with colourless liquids the volumes of the liquid in each beaker were very different. They could always throw away the larger one. However, by the end of the experiment the two beakers had roughly the same amount in each.

That’s when his incident happened. He threw the wrong clear, colourless liquid down the sink.

He also realised what he had done. It turned out that it was both quicker and cheaper to shut down the entire plumbing system of the lab and re-purify the contents than it was to start all over again.

That one nearly got away… containment.

Science, when it can, prefers to run wild, and the scientists themselves are nothing but zoo-keepers in fancy lab coats.