Question: What is the most dangerous thing have you done.

Alex Batchelor answered on 11 Nov 2019:

At work its usually pretty safe, we follow a lot of rules to make sure we don’t hurt ourselves or the other people in the lab. We have a lot of safety gear, goggles, lab coats, gloves etc but we do work with some dangerous stuff at times.

Some dangerous things I work with

liquid nitrogen – thats about -200 degrees so you could really damage your skin if you spill it on yourself. And if you do spill it or it leaks it turns into nitrogen gas really quickly so you could suffocate if you don’t realise. But its fun to freeze stuff with it!

acids – again definitely not a good idea to get that on your skin! we actually have showers built into the labs where acid is used so if you spill it on yourself you can get it off quick!

Chemicals that can cause cancer – mostly these are only dangerous if you breath them in or eat them so washing hands or wearing a mask makes it safe but they still make me a bit nervous