Day 3 in the Sheikh lab began with a bang, or should I say a splat? In the morning I watched Matt, one of the research technicians, complete a series of protocols to isolate RNA from a human tissue sample. However, on the way from the fume hood to the walk-in fridge, Matt dropped one of the samples and about half of it splattered out across the floor. We had to stop what we were doing and carefully clean up the mess with ethanol to take care of the potential safety hazard. Even though we laughed about the silly mistake, it brought up a good point: accidents happen all the time in the lab, and what’s most important is how you choose to deal with them. Even though Matt lost over half of the treated sample, he decided to continue processing it anyways, because any amount of tissue can provide helpful data. If you decide to throw out the sample after you’ve already done a lot of work with it, you’re just wasting resources. The spill also brought up the necessity of the taking careful notes during your experiment, so that when you get inconsistent or abnormal data, you can come up with an explanation for what might have happened. For example, once the isolation process was completed, the sample that spilled would have significantly less RNA in it, so in order to explain the results, you’d have to look back and remember that you lost half of the sample.
