When lab safety procedures aren't followed, people can get hurt or worse. Lab equipment and chemicals that are improperly handled can result in personal injury and even death.
At the age of 12, my parents gave me a chemistry set for Christmas, and experimentation soon became a consuming passion in my life.
Mark Horowitz and I built it onto an optical bench in the lab. We spent and eight-hour span putting this optical light path together.
At first, I was able to use a Bunsen burner attached to my mother's gas stove, but the use of the kitchen as a laboratory came to an abrupt end when a minor explosion involving hydrogen sulphide spattered the newly painted decor and changed the colour from blue to dirty green!
It is a dire need for our young scientists to be proficient in running and using their lab equipment rather than depending on their assistants or workers. Once they learn how to use every lab equipment, their scientific career is likely to progress smoothly.
I have a Ph.D. in cell biology. And that's really manual labor. I mean, experimental science, you do it with your hands. So it's very different. You're out there in a lab, cleaning test tubes, and it just wasn't that fascinating.
I was also interested in chemistry, but my parents were not willing to buy me a chemistry set.
It was a perfectly normal gerbil. It appeared to be living in an exciting construction of cylinders, spheres and treadmills, such as the Spanish Inquisition would have devised if they'd had access to a plastics molding press.
No crime lab in the world looks like the 'CSI' ones because there's simply not the money for all those fancy machines.
When I grew up, scientists were anti-social people who worked in basements and wore coats and worked with bunson burners, and now they're in our technology every day, and our technology has almost become fashion accessories.
You can model experiments on computers now and then execute them, and you don't actually need a fully stocked lab.
I dropped chemistry. I practically blew up the lab in college.
I also became interested in chemistry and gradually accumulated enough test tubes and other glassware to do chemical experiments, using small quantities of chemicals purchased from a pharmacy supply house.
It must be admitted that science has its castes. The man whose chief apparatus is the differential equation looks down upon one who uses a galvanometer, and he in turn upon those who putter about with sticky and smelly things in test tubes.
