When there's nothing left to burn, you have to set your radioactive acrylamide electrophoresis apparatus on fire!

**Note: this is photographic re-enactment, and does not represent the actual event described.

"During my Master's research a few years ago, I was running many acrylamide gels, to examine small differences in sequence length of some DNA markers. To visualize the results on X-ray film, I was labelling the DNA fragments with radioactive 32P. The gels themselves are made of a lovely mixture of acrylamide, urea, and formamide. Urea isn't so bad, but formamide is toxic and flammable, and acrylamide is my favourite chemical because it's a known neurotoxin and suspected carcinogen, which translates to "the brain lesions kill you before the cancer has a chance to metastasize". When running, the gels, loaded with radioactive material, run at about 2000 volts for a couple of hours.

One day I came into the lab, set up everything as usual, then departed to do something else while the gel was running. I came back to an empty lab to find smoke emerging from the electrode terminals on the top of the gel rig. Buffer and some gel material had leaked out, reducing the electrical contact area to a tiny droplet of buffer, which overheated and started the plastic structure smoldering.

Cleaning up that mess was almost as much fun as the time my thermal cycler crapped out all of its coolant fluid (ethylene glycol) onto the bench top while running radio-labelled PCR."

Radioactive footprints

"A grad student in a lab down the hall attempted to snap freeze a tube containing radioactive protein. Some of the liquid nitrogen leaked into the tube, and it exploded. Shortly thereafter, a series of radioactive footprints (from at least two people) was discovered that trailed down the hall and into a common room. The entire hallway and freezer area for ten labs were blocked for days while cleanup crews worked. Months later, this single spot of radiation remains, somehow impervious to countoff."

I hope the lab coat was clean...

"My labmate was in lab one weekend and thought the Geiger counter was acting funny, so he called EH&S (Office of Environment, Health, and Safety) to see if he could get a replacement, forgetting that on the weekends, calls to EH&S are automatically rerouted to the police. He told them, "Yeah, I think the Geiger counter we have is broken and I just wanted to do a sweep of the area to make sure there weren't any spills..." And they were all, "We're coming in!" They stormed the building in hazmat suits and made him take off all his clothes to check for contamination. They wouldn't let people onto the floor. By the time I came in, there were 2 police cars, 1 firetruck, and an ambulance COMPLETE WITH PARAMEDICS STANDING AT THE READY WITH A STRETCHER outside. A hazmat suited guy finally let me into lab and there was my labmate, rocking back and forth in the corner... wearing nothing but a lab coat."