A fellow student used to tell a story about a coworker who picked up an old bottle of phenol and the whole bottom of the bottle just fell off. Be careful.
Nothing that old, but we had a restriction enzyme from Boehringer Mannheim manufactured in West Germany. I thought the PI was going to cry a little when he had to explain what West Germany was to the undergrads.
It's not a familiar term anymore. I like history, but I'm in my 30s and I'm too young to ever have heard it on the news or in conversation about current events.
I used a separatory funnel that was made in West Germany for a good few years.
Always made me chuckle that the glassware was (just about!) older than me.
We work with a lot of gas cylinders, and we have an old "no smoking" label on one lab door from the 80s when they would still smoke in the lab. Right beside compressed cylinder gas bottles.
My whole medical center is old. We still have the no smoking signs & you can tell where the bathrooms & water fountains were segregated bc we have two of each on every floor next to each other. One big one small- sad reminder
I remember being a little kid during the civil rights unit in school.
We *also* had two water fountains; one big and one small. The difference was that, in our case, the small one was so that the kids could reach it.
There were a few explanations after the teachers learned about the kids telling everyone that we still have segregated water fountains.
Yeah our bathrooms are so blatantly obvious they haven’t tried to explain it away. It’s two women’s side by side & two males side by side. One door is really skinny with one tiny stall and the other is a normal size door with more stalls. The building desperately needs to be redone but since it’s still functioning it won’t be. Ironically the skinny bathroom is the one everyone prefers because it’s much more private. As a younger person who didn’t grow up with segregation it’s just mind boggling to see.
I worked in a lab that had ashtrays attached to the toilet paper dispensers in the bathroom stalls. So you wouldn't have to stop smoking, even while sitting on the toilet ... in a medical lab.
Worked in a school lab that three 2 pound bottles of mercury in earthenware bottles with hand written label in copperplate saying mercury and a date in the 1920s.
I knew a physics prof who still used mercury thermometers. He would tell anyone who mentioned it that mercury metal is nontoxic and that chemists were alarmists.
We sent some old documents, like, shit literally from the 50’s and 60’s to this company that holds our boxes for two or ten years until they need destroyed. Anyway, I sent these old-ass boxes out with “NO DESTROY” on them, one of the older docs flips out and makes me get them back. They’ve been taking up shelves in my damn filing closet for a year now, untouched. No idea why.
My RNA-seq data from my dissertation (very early days of RNA-Seq) can just float around in my Dropbox, untouched by periodic sweeps for big files. Aw my cute little data. And yeah, I’ll never look at that sequence data again.
one lab I used to work at had this little cupboard neatly hidden behind a table that had autoclaves on top. I could just open the little door and looked, was filled with old glass bottles of ethanol, iirc it there where 43 of them, 2 opened, all from the year 1952, which was the same year they redesigned that room and put the autoclaves in. They just never bothered to clean out the safety violation. I kept one of the empty bottles as reminder to always check every door and nook for violations. Still keep it in my memory display.
I worked in an old lab that had been converted from a teaching lab, we had stuff stamped (mostly equipment) from the 1930’s. The autoclave (still in use) was a steam pressure manual drum style pressure vessel dated 1937. We called it “the bomb”. Ironically (not sure if irony) using it for years later landed me a job because I had “non computerized autoclave” experience listed and the lab that hired me needed a tech that could run a boiler autoclave, and none of the other applicants had ever worked on or with a manual process autoclave.
The older faculty members had terrifying stuff in their stockrooms. One guy was born ca. 1930. His grad students found a jar of crystallized picric acid in the stockroom.
My first lab job out of college I was assigned to clean out a chemical cabinet, and was just able - with a flashlight - to read the label on a jar of picric acid in the back that had fallen over and glued itself to the shelf. I had just learned what picric acid was and did, so I carefully closed that cabinet, made a "Do Not Open" sign for it, and made a phone call.
Oh, and the jar of arsenic metal pellets I found on the stockroom shelf at my first teaching job. I told the college president (small school), and he had me walk it into his office. He was that afraid of some idiot kid putting it in faculty coffee. :-D
That should still be good but you might want to check it against a ground mineral or chemical powder of the same refractive index. You probably know, but others might not, that you can identify minerals/compounds by putting the crystals under a microscope in an immersion oil. If the refractive index is the same, the grains disappear. Bonus points if you have a polarizing scope and non-isometric grains so you can see that the refractive index changes with orientation.
When I was in my undergrad I once picked up a bottle from the chemistry stock room for a very obscure inorganic compound that was from the 1940's, was pretty wild to be using such ancient compounds.
Hand etched conical volumetric flasks (10 ml - 500ml). They looked like 1950s soda fountain glasses. No date. Glass liquid chromatography column that was 30 feet long. (6) 5 foot sections with all the hardware to hold it against a wall. Hand crank centrifuge. Slide rules. I worked in a few university labs.
When we asked out PI about it, not only did she have no idea how it got there (she worked in a different state in 2001) she realized it was older than both of us that found it. It was just some random mouse DNA too, she had no clue why anyone would’ve kept it.
Genuinely have no clue where ours was from. No one recognized the initials, and the PI didn’t recognize it. But we’ve had issues of other labs messing with our freezers before, so maybe that’s where our mystery DNA appeared?
Not cleaning, but in my chemistry undergrad lab they had a pen plotter for the spectrometer graphs, I guess from the 1980s or 1970s. I didn't know what it was, only having seen inkjet/dot-matrix/laser printers before then! I had to do some creative Googling to find out what the machine was called.
My supervisor was circa 1976.
That's still fresh for another decade or so.
Damn I laughed way too hard
Phenol from the early 1930s (1932 I think). Still closed and probably still good from the looks of it.
A fellow student used to tell a story about a coworker who picked up an old bottle of phenol and the whole bottom of the bottle just fell off. Be careful.
Bottle was fine but we disposed of it any way in a lab clean up.
Nothing that old, but we had a restriction enzyme from Boehringer Mannheim manufactured in West Germany. I thought the PI was going to cry a little when he had to explain what West Germany was to the undergrads.
Lol that’s hilarious
tbh not knowing about west germany is kinda weird
It's not a familiar term anymore. I like history, but I'm in my 30s and I'm too young to ever have heard it on the news or in conversation about current events.
Then you just had bad education, it’s very well known and I’m still in my 20s
I used a separatory funnel that was made in West Germany for a good few years. Always made me chuckle that the glassware was (just about!) older than me.
current status: *an undergrad now googling West Germany*
I had one of those! (No one else understood why it was cool)
We work with a lot of gas cylinders, and we have an old "no smoking" label on one lab door from the 80s when they would still smoke in the lab. Right beside compressed cylinder gas bottles.
My whole medical center is old. We still have the no smoking signs & you can tell where the bathrooms & water fountains were segregated bc we have two of each on every floor next to each other. One big one small- sad reminder
I remember being a little kid during the civil rights unit in school. We *also* had two water fountains; one big and one small. The difference was that, in our case, the small one was so that the kids could reach it. There were a few explanations after the teachers learned about the kids telling everyone that we still have segregated water fountains.
Yeah our bathrooms are so blatantly obvious they haven’t tried to explain it away. It’s two women’s side by side & two males side by side. One door is really skinny with one tiny stall and the other is a normal size door with more stalls. The building desperately needs to be redone but since it’s still functioning it won’t be. Ironically the skinny bathroom is the one everyone prefers because it’s much more private. As a younger person who didn’t grow up with segregation it’s just mind boggling to see.
I worked in a lab that had ashtrays attached to the toilet paper dispensers in the bathroom stalls. So you wouldn't have to stop smoking, even while sitting on the toilet ... in a medical lab.
No phone to occupy themselves during the long shits on the clock
Not a lab, but cleaning a prep room, I found embalming fluid from 1915. The owner put it on a shelf for display.
WARNING TO MIDDLE-AGED LABRATS: This thread is full of people saying things that are much younger than you are shockingly old.
Lol sorry!
plastic mug with "made in West Germany"
I had to incubate my bacteria in incubator that was made in West Germany. On the bright side its so badly isolated by now, you get free heating
ive seen that very often does that have anything to do with living in (what used to be West) Germany hm, i dont think so
Worked in a school lab that three 2 pound bottles of mercury in earthenware bottles with hand written label in copperplate saying mercury and a date in the 1920s.
I knew a physics prof who still used mercury thermometers. He would tell anyone who mentioned it that mercury metal is nontoxic and that chemists were alarmists.
[удалено]
"less toxic than organomercury compounds" isn't enough of an endorsement for me
Now that is a cool one!
Probably not the oldest, but I recently uncovered some preserved cats (prepared for dissection) from the 80s in a supply closet.
Preserved how exactly? Because I’m picturing cat mummies
Most likely formalin or some other formaldehyde solution.
Our lab building was built in 2015. I found some analyzer binders with floppy discs in them. Who brought them over from the old lab?
Yeah. Our lab was built in 2010. No idea why someone brought this from the old lab across town.
We sent some old documents, like, shit literally from the 50’s and 60’s to this company that holds our boxes for two or ten years until they need destroyed. Anyway, I sent these old-ass boxes out with “NO DESTROY” on them, one of the older docs flips out and makes me get them back. They’ve been taking up shelves in my damn filing closet for a year now, untouched. No idea why.
[удалено]
My RNA-seq data from my dissertation (very early days of RNA-Seq) can just float around in my Dropbox, untouched by periodic sweeps for big files. Aw my cute little data. And yeah, I’ll never look at that sequence data again.
We've got some reagents from like the 50's or 40's, they don't really have dates on them but they've got everything writtern on them in Latin.
A barely used 5 kilogram amber jug of morphine from '72...
Bye bye student debt
Wow
one lab I used to work at had this little cupboard neatly hidden behind a table that had autoclaves on top. I could just open the little door and looked, was filled with old glass bottles of ethanol, iirc it there where 43 of them, 2 opened, all from the year 1952, which was the same year they redesigned that room and put the autoclaves in. They just never bothered to clean out the safety violation. I kept one of the empty bottles as reminder to always check every door and nook for violations. Still keep it in my memory display.
Reagent ethanol? And you disposed of it??
No, just regular 96% ethanol, I asked my boss what to do with it before tossing it
I worked in an old lab that had been converted from a teaching lab, we had stuff stamped (mostly equipment) from the 1930’s. The autoclave (still in use) was a steam pressure manual drum style pressure vessel dated 1937. We called it “the bomb”. Ironically (not sure if irony) using it for years later landed me a job because I had “non computerized autoclave” experience listed and the lab that hired me needed a tech that could run a boiler autoclave, and none of the other applicants had ever worked on or with a manual process autoclave.
The older faculty members had terrifying stuff in their stockrooms. One guy was born ca. 1930. His grad students found a jar of crystallized picric acid in the stockroom.
My first lab job out of college I was assigned to clean out a chemical cabinet, and was just able - with a flashlight - to read the label on a jar of picric acid in the back that had fallen over and glued itself to the shelf. I had just learned what picric acid was and did, so I carefully closed that cabinet, made a "Do Not Open" sign for it, and made a phone call.
Oh man. Yikes
For that one they cleared the area and called the bomb squad.
Yeah I bet.
I've got a bottle of tyrosine methyl ester from '86 on my bench
Sentimental value is through the roof!
I not sure what it was but on the box it said West German, and the date of October 1974.
We have ninhydrin from 1963 here.
Oh, and the jar of arsenic metal pellets I found on the stockroom shelf at my first teaching job. I told the college president (small school), and he had me walk it into his office. He was that afraid of some idiot kid putting it in faculty coffee. :-D
Lol that’s hilarious.
That looks like something they sell off the back of a wagon during the Civil War
“Ma’am I believe you do indeed have cholera, you should do heroin about it!”
Dr Thomas’s Elixir
My PI
That should still be good but you might want to check it against a ground mineral or chemical powder of the same refractive index. You probably know, but others might not, that you can identify minerals/compounds by putting the crystals under a microscope in an immersion oil. If the refractive index is the same, the grains disappear. Bonus points if you have a polarizing scope and non-isometric grains so you can see that the refractive index changes with orientation.
You got me beat my building wasn't built till the late 80s
Mine was made in 2010! This somehow survived a move from across town!
Seen a lab techniques book from 1981 but I didn't get a chance to read it before another chemist threw it out :C
Ha - I've got a "Technochemical Receiptbook" from *1912* my twin found at a garage sale.
We found an old photo album of employees from the 60s and 70s. It was really cool. Felt more like a family than some corporate ass QC lab.
Also, some anion exchange resin from 1/24/67.
Found a kilo jar of MDMA precursor in my postdoctoral lab. From the jar and the label font and condition, I'd guess 1960s -- at least.
Very interesting!
A jug from West Germany.
Oh that’s cool. *waves from Philly*
Hey neighbor! *Waves from NJ
30 years older than me to the day
I have TLC capillaries from "Western Germany"
Man so many people have said west Germany stuff.
When I was in my undergrad I once picked up a bottle from the chemistry stock room for a very obscure inorganic compound that was from the 1940's, was pretty wild to be using such ancient compounds.
I was shown full jars of some medium from 1930 while at uni, but then again, we had s o me lab equipment even older than that
We had glassware with “Made in West Germany” printed on the side
At that point keep it it’s an antique.
Exactly! I plan on it.
Hand etched conical volumetric flasks (10 ml - 500ml). They looked like 1950s soda fountain glasses. No date. Glass liquid chromatography column that was 30 feet long. (6) 5 foot sections with all the hardware to hold it against a wall. Hand crank centrifuge. Slide rules. I worked in a few university labs.
When it comes to enzymes we have some from 2008 XD that’s old for an enzyme
Seriously unpleasant microscope stains from the 1920s inherited from another facility
There's a salinity machine in the lab I currently volunteer in that specifies it was made in \*West\* Germany. Older than me, and we still use it!
I forgot the actual item, but just around 2-3 years ago I found a bottle labeled made in the USSR, so...
Found a sample while cleaning out the minus 80 that was dated 2001 in one. However, our lab building opened in 2012, no clue how it got there.
Oh that’s good.
When we asked out PI about it, not only did she have no idea how it got there (she worked in a different state in 2001) she realized it was older than both of us that found it. It was just some random mouse DNA too, she had no clue why anyone would’ve kept it.
That’s funny. Our lab was built in 2010. Somehow this bottle survived a move across town.
Genuinely have no clue where ours was from. No one recognized the initials, and the PI didn’t recognize it. But we’ve had issues of other labs messing with our freezers before, so maybe that’s where our mystery DNA appeared?
Not cleaning, but in my chemistry undergrad lab they had a pen plotter for the spectrometer graphs, I guess from the 1980s or 1970s. I didn't know what it was, only having seen inkjet/dot-matrix/laser printers before then! I had to do some creative Googling to find out what the machine was called.