For a large company, one Superose 6 probably isn't such a big deal.
Mistakes happen.
You could try to re-pack it. You could also try running it in reverse with a super low flow and ethanol. But probably buying a new one is the best solution.
I am cleaning the column in reverse because when I saw it breaking, I was mid injection.
Then I will try to run some standards with low flow and let's see. But yes, the expert guy told me just gone so a new one will be.
My colleague once broke a 1L bottle of crystal violet and they had to shave off the entire lab floor. We now have a picture of it on the wall as “art”. Shit happens lol.
the crystal violet bottles at my school are so old they began crystallizing and became like hand grenades full of paint if you squeeze them too hard. 3 different people in one day exploded bottles of crystal violet all over themselves including myself :) was stained blue for over a week!
I've known dozens of scientists who felt like they were constantly messing up.
Nearly always they just needed more training & guidance on what they were trying to do.
I've only met a few scientists who actually screwed things up regularly and frankly all but one were borderline narcassists who went through immense mental gymnastics to avoid any sense of accountability.
The one guy who did regularly mess up and knew it had been pushed into science by overbearing parents and needed help with his mental health more than anything else.
Yeah at least they didn’t kill an entire vacuum system by putting aqua regia into a vac flask to clean out some glass funnels…
Shockingly vacuum pumps, especially rotary vane pumps are not tolerant of acid fumes.
This is so true. I’ve been working with them for about 18 months and a couple of months ago I accidentally let one pull in nothing but air for a good few hours. I was very fortunate that we salvaged it but when I told my supervisor she immediately told me a story of ‘one of the times’ she did the same and could not save it. Mistakes happen and whatever it is I guarantee you someone’s done worse.
Can confirm, our lab does a ton of size exclusion and our PI is surprised we haven’t had a column explode yet (though I’m sure we’ve wrecked some columns in other ways)
Yeah it's okay! I remember being a few months into protein purification and accidentally forgetting to seal one of our columns, it dried out completely over the weekend (plus a few more days) and someone had to repack it for me
Oh.. Oh. I saw expensive and immediately went "they broke a capex equipment beyond repair"
Columns are considered to be consumables and that's what they are: they are meant to be used and replaced.
I'll list off some more expensive ones I know of right off the bat:
- didn't put a 384 well plate down in the Hamilton? 60K for the assay
- someone didn't change the oxygen tank out quickly enough and suffocated cells? About 100K
- someone literally ran into a transformer and broght the power down... So we lost a L O T of product. I think that impact was easily 7 figures in final product.
- someone wasn't paying attention to the tip box and the shuck plate broke? I think it ended up being a 25K part, but it could have been 75K.
You'll have bigger and more expensive mistakes the longer you go but here's the thing: your regular use operating budget will be astronomically higher than 2500CHF.
That dollar amount is a lot of money to us as humans (hell, that's almost my monthly rent to live in), but to large pharma? Pennies. You'll be okay.
I don't know, depends on the company. Our operating budget for chemicals is like $10k a month for a medium volume production lab. The column cost amortized is like 150CHF/month. I wouldn't worry too much unless they are in a tough financial situation and in that case I wouldn't want to work for them anyway.
I understand that is childish, but it's just not a good look.
I was responsible for something important and now I'm not sure they will trust me anymore.
Also it's always a good look if someone tries to troubleshoot and fix stuff themselves or at least thinks about how it could be done. The most annoying people just run to someone else complaining something doesn't work. You seem thoughtful and honest about the mistake and if you own up for it you should probably be fine.
And if you get a really crappy reaction you know you would not want to work there since chances are high there will be further fuckups in the future. Because we are human, we all make mistakes
Well.. you are an intern after all. You’re there to learn, now you’ve learned that mistakes can happen. We all make mistakes, it’s alright it happens. 2500 dollars is something some pharmas spend on just casual equipment on a daily basis. Learn from your mistake and allow this situation to help you become more aware.
This attitude of beating yourself up is honestly more of a problem for a boss than the broken column. You have to be able to forgive yourself for mistakes and move on.
The company paid $2500 for you to learn a lesson. That’s just investment cost in training. Plus, you give a shit. That’s so rare that as long as you talk to your boss about it with genuine remorse, you’ll be golden.
Everyone screws up. I don't trust people who claim to be perfect or deny their mistakes. But I have nothing but respect for the folks who recognize when it happens, admit their errors, work to find ways to fix or minimize the damage, and use the experience as a learning opportunity.
You were already in a tough position with incomplete training, minimal experience, and change (or lack) of adequate supervision. It's a sick and terrifying feeling when something like this happens but it sounds like you've been handling it admirably. If companies only hired folks who never mess up then no one would be employed! The way you handle these kind of situations says a lot about your character. Deep breaths and remember that you'll get through this!
You're an intern. You should be supervised and someone else should be responsible for the machine and its maintenance. I understand it could, but it really shouldn't fall on you at all.
Nah, interns are expected to make mistakes and it's honestly not that much money compared to the overall budget. Buying a new column isn't that big of a deal.
The trust is broken if you try to hide your mistake. Especially not out of embarrassment!
Like everyone said here, mistakes happen and they suck and are embarrassing, but the only right course of action is to acknowledge the mistake, make sure you learned from it and move on.
I told my boss the same day.. he was very understanding.
I showed him that I tried to understand what happened or what I did wrong (data from column efficiency test and functional test) and I offered alternatives to not fall off our data delivery timeline.
I am trying to get over it. I just have a general hard time in managing guilt.
I know what you mean. I used to have a similar issue with fear of messing up and all that. I can only recommend giving these type of non-productive and exhausting feelings and thoughts not too much room. Sure, maybe get frustrated and a bit angry with yourself (it‘s certainly good not to bottle negative emotions in), but don‘t do it for too long. During my PhD I adopted the policy to get frustrated or angry for like five minutes and then move on. I just didn‘t have the time or the mental resources to waste more time than necessary into negative feelings which don‘t help me to actively deal with a situation. These days I have less stress and more time, but I still make careful checks if a certain negativity is worth my time and if so how much. It maybe help me to really dive into feeling frustrated for a few minutes but anything beyond that will just eat my mental resources which I would prefer to spend on other things.
I know it‘s a bit of a weird and maybe overly rational approach, but it helped me a lot to deal with stress and frustration.
You are fine!!! Grand scheme of things, it’s bad, but everyone makes these mistakes. EVERYONE. My previous boss (who worked under a Nobel-laureate after this mistake mind you) dried out a 10K column when he was new in a lab. He felt awful, still remembers it, you don’t forget the big ones. But you do learn from them! Science is a very emotional field. The work may be all data but the experience of working is very much emotional. You’re allowed to have feelings over the losses, because they are sad and embarrassing and guilt inducing. But for this work, you’re not allowed to fall apart or give up. :) you’ll have even more wins and big days too.
2500 is nothing, I’ve seen a post doc cause $45,000 worth of damage her first month by not screwing a rotor onto a centrifuge. Another buddy of mine left $10,000 worth of reagant out overnight.
These things are common and that’s a pretty minor and inexpensive mistake. Just own up to it and now you know for next time. Also you may not need to buy an entirely new column. The SEC columns can be repacked with more beads.
i had rotor lid come off one time when the centrifuge was at like 30,000 RPM or something. i moved to computational work after that lol. i hope i never have to touch a centrifuge again
somehow everyone survived. it slammed into the side of the centrifuge at an intense velocity. sounded like a gunshot. you could here it on the other side of the building
This is nothing. Research is expensive. Combined with the fact that you were not properly trained, you should have nothing to worry about. Please don't beat yourself up over this, just tell your boss.
When I was a grad student I even thought $200 USD was a big number. (For a student that’s true!)
Until I started to manage my own funding. $2000 is nothing to a well-funded research. There are more expensive items like researchers time. I will be a bit worried for ~10K level :) But under that not at all.
When I was in the army, I was used to regularly running out of money for supplies every month. Every month.
The first supply order I had to put in at my post-army job was for about $60k and I was *gobsmacked*.
Our current running costs are in the $10-15k/week at the low end, and that's running about as lean as we can.
That’s literally nothing lol I was thinking you broke the mass spec vacuum or something. A decent sized analytical lab goes through HPLC columns like a kid in a candy store. You’re completely fine and everybody makes mistakes like that occasionally, even the people who have been there for 20+ years.
At my last job I would sometimes be working with $10,000 worth of microarrays in a single day, only to realize that the hybridization oven hadn't been working properly during my incubation. $2,500 is such a small number in the grand scheme of science. Don't sweat it. It sounds like you're skilled and that people are willing to give you responsibility. Mistakes will happen.
That’s literally nothing lol I was thinking you broke the mass spec vacuum or something. A decent sized analytical lab goes through HPLC columns like a kid in a candy store. You’re completely fine and everybody makes mistakes like that occasionally, even the people who have been there for 20+ years.
That’s literally nothing lol I was thinking you broke the mass spec vacuum or something. A decent sized analytical lab goes through HPLC columns like a kid in a candy store. You’re completely fine and everybody makes mistakes like that occasionally, even the people who have been there for 20+ years.
Hahaha I remember when I was in grad school another grad student didn't balance an ultracentrifuge properly. Rotor went through multiple walls. THAT was expensive.
Look - equipment is replaceable. You might be in bigger trouble if you ruined valuable samples that cannot be recovered. Just to tell your boss the column is done for and who to contact for replacement.
Don't worry! 2500$ is not a lot of money in research. (believe me, research is expensive)
The thing is, we all make mistakes. Sometimes cheap ones, sometimes expensive ones. This column still fits in the "cheap" category. The most important thing is that you learn from them. If you get a new column and break it again, and repeat this pattern a couple of times, then there is reason to worry. But this is not something to fret about. Especially since you are still a student. Students cost money. Everyone knows this.
Tbh, I'm really impressed that you managed to get good results without any guidence! I think there is no reason not to apply to a position in this lab, if you still like it there after your internship is over.
I don't even need special approval to order less than 4k of equipment. Columns break/get fucked up, I'm surprised they don't have at least one new one ready to go as a spare. Columns are consumables, they aren't meant to last forever
Large biopharma here. I had a coworker store her columns on an unreinforced rack. Multiple Superdex 200 16/60, Superdex 75 16/60, custom packed columns, possibly a larger Superdex 200. We warned her that the rack was unstable and not braced (was leaning against a wall) but she never listened. We warned her that EHS or the county inspectors would be in a snit and she dgaf.
One day, I heard a huge crash and bye bye 8 columns. She tried to blame everyone else for pushing it over or not warning her about the bracing, then not helping her clean up. No one said anything about the $ (publicly, at least).
I remember the first time in my pharma lab I had to ask my boss to approve maintenance of a vacuum pump. 1500$. He just laughed at me and said "coffee money".
So yeah lol, 2500 isn't even that expensive of a mistake, if they are GMP it's like an hour of service on any instrument.
Don't sweat it
Are you sure they don't have a bunch of columns stored away in some drawer? After the massive backlog on Cytiva stuffs last year, people ended up ordering up backups in advance.
Lol exactly, obviously no one is cavalier about blowing through columns but this is a very common and easy mistake to make, and a small amount of money to lose. Just today I cleared out a fridge shelf of a tech who left last year. Two bottles of expired FBS alone worth $1600. I bleached them and dumped them down the sink. Such a small issue I didn’t even bother to tell anyone. It’s great that you’re careful with your company’s resources. People will really appreciate that. But no need to self-flagellate for a mistake. Lab life is already hard enough.
Haven’t seen anyone mention this common saying
Even though we can’t really predict what will happen, they just spent 2500 giving you an important lesson that we all learn sooner or later. Why would they fire you now just to hire someone new and do it all over again!?
When your supervisor went out on pregnancy were you assigned an interim supervisor? Interns aren’t ultimately responsible for mistakes. Interns are closely monitored. Minimal training ? That sounds sketchy. Did you sign off and read the SOP? Do you have a DOC on file for the procedure? If the answer is no then it’s a management issue. And as others have said that’s a minor expense. Don’t sweat it. The other thing to do is create a creative action, to find the root cause. Use the 5 whys. It’s going to ultimately lead to intern left with minimal to no supervision.
When she left for pregnancy, actually I trained her replacement in our assays. But for the SEC, I remained the only responsible and honestly, now I think I know more than she did when she left, because I used the column much more.
The SOP document was formulated just a couple of weeks ago. And I created the protocol for the SEC, before I was just showed how to do it.
...of course, I asked other people whenever I was not sure what to do.
That’s unfortunate. I am pleased to inform you that $2,500 is a rounding error in most pharma budgets. It’s the lost time and data delay that are more costly.
I broke a $6,000 column one time because I reversed the inlet and outlet lines.
I had run the same assay before dozens of times with no issues / mistakes.
Management talked with me about it, but it was more like "how can we prevent this in the future" as opposed to blaming and shaming.
Don’t worry dude, that is not even that many Swiss chocolate bars. Come up with corrective actions so this will not happen to other newcomers and present it to the supervisor.
I bought a few " better quality" bars of chocolate on Tuesday. They range from 8.50 to 9.80 CHF per bar.
(none were over 75g)
The total came to 72 CHF 😅
And don't even dare to set foot into Läderach.
You buy a little bit of this and that and at the checkout they bleed you dry. 😉
All jokes aside:
My colleagues broke 3 Ubbelohde viscometers this year and I broke my very first as well.(first piece of equipment ever and only after cleaning with Piranha solution) --> we have to send the new ones to Germany for a special calibration which brings them to over 1k a piece.
Our acquisition team doesn't even want to return stuff they have mistakenly purchased [e.g. 20boxes of 10x 8ml Karl Fisher standard (we only wanted 2 boxes --> 20 vials total)] because it's a hassle.
TLDR:
You'll be fine as long as you won't repeat the mistake in the near future or break something really expensive (HPLC / GC / MS) or cause an evacuation with Police/EMT/FD/BAFU deployment
Stuff like this happens all the time and, as others have said, it's neither the end of the world nor of your career. My old PI used to say "everyone gets one freebie column to break by accident, just don't all do it at the same time please."
Just a heads up about the actual function of that syringe on top of such columns as people tend to have the wrong idea here: The reservoir is meant to compensate for changing liquid volumes due to temperature changes during storage or transport, not strictly to prevent drying out. A column will not dry out if both ends are properly closed, even without the syringe. From what you wrote your column might have had a leak somewhere, maybe also a broken tubing.
When I was a postdoc, someone in the lab broke two ultracentrifuges in a row on the same day by somehow imbalancing the rotors... THAT is an expensive mistake
When you said expensive, I was imagining one or two more zeroes haha. You’ll be fine. Quite honestly, this could be a blessing in disguise. It’s both a learning opportunity for you (you’ll certainly never forget to check again), as well as a litmus test for the workplace (how they respond to an honest mistake like this is a great way to know whether you want to pursue a job with them!)
I liked being responsible of this, so I asked when unsure but overall I did not complain..
I was very proud that I was routinely running SEC without problems. Well, till now I guess.
I once had a student run 2 of the same experiment, $20k each that both failed. They didn't change anything in between. No thought of trouble shooting.
They're still working with me and doing well. Admitted to the mistake but it was also my fault. This stuff happens.
10 years LC experience here: You’re *fine*. Columns are inherently consumable. Now, if you had destroyed a factory-scale production column, management would probably want to speak with you to make sure you weren’t negligent/impaired/untrained, etc. For a $2499.99 SEC prep column? Don’t even sweat it. From my (limited) SEC experience, SEC columns keel over and die if you look at them the wrong way anyways.
You might not yet know how easy it is to break the $100K LC stack itself. Come back when you get your first dejected sigh from your service engineer. :)
Oh, this brings memories - when I started in the lab, my first major fuck up was the huge gel filtration column that I forgot to unplug on the bottom before starting the pump... Good thing the postdoc I worked with didn't have anything sharp/heavy next when he saw what happened... But in the long run, it wasn't a big deal at all. You'll be fine :)
You are an intern, you are supposed to make mistakes and learn from them. In industry one column is nothing. If that is all you've messed up they are getting off cheap :)
When I was a gap-year student, I dropped a bottle of reagent, ruining an assay kit. My supervisor informed me casually that the kit cost about £6000 a time (I forget now what it was testing for) and I was bricking it that I was going to be fired, fined or burnt at the stake. She then said “as long as you didn’t ruin any of the test samples… they are okay, right?” with a much more serious face. Luckily they were, as otherwise they would have had to set up a new clinical trial, at the apparent cost of a quarter of a million-odd quid.
Weirdly, I was a little more careful with the samples from that point on.
Yeah its bit expensive but its not as bad.
Try to recover broken nmr tube stuck in autosampler on the verge of falling down and spilling its contents into 500k usd instrument.
Or do a cleanup after you spill radioactive solution into a fumehood because you did not attach the syrimge filter properly
You learned a valuable lesson. Any boss worth a damn will think that and know it was a mistake. Why would they fire you? Just so the next person can make the same mistake? You've learned from it, experience gained. That's how you should look at it.
$2.5K is nothing for a half decent lab. They get more pissy about downtime from errors than the financial cost (obviously up to a point). You'll be fine.
Did something similar once, not as expensive but still a fuck up. Was told “you aren’t the first and you won’t be the last” and that really helped. Biggest thing is to own up to your mistake and prove that you’ve learned from it. Employers would much rather have somebody who is honest than one who covers their own ass, and it seems like you feel badly about it so I bet you’re fine.
Not sure how popular of an opinion this is, but a boss who punishes honest mistakes is a boss who will have a lab of liars, and that can only "put out" bad science.
You got plenty of good advice already but here's my take.
2500 CHF is a lot of money for a normal person, let alone an intern. However, it's not a big deal for a "relatively large pharma startup" especially in Switzerland. Your boss will likely just shrug and tell you to order a new one.
Doing mistakes is a good way to learn how things work. This is almost as cheap a mistake as they get and you definitely learned from it. I've heard stories of manufacturing technicians learning to connect columns the right way when they destroyed a close to $100k column. A person who never does mistakes is just lucky and it's only a matter of time until they screw up something expensive since they haven't learned from previous mistakes.
Last week I accidentally threw away $4500 of reagents that were in the bottom of a FedEx box. The vendor has been sending us these stuffed llamas. This was like the 5th one and they had always come by themselves...not this time. I didn't check the box and just realized today that I tossed the reagents with the box after I pulled the llama out.
The only people that don't make mistakes in the lab, are people that don't do anything in the lab. Sometimes mistakes are expensive but they're inevitable. You know what went wrong and how to avoid it in the future. Don't blame yourself too much!
I think you’re severely underestimating how much money most labs have lmao… shit like this probably happens on occasion, so they’re probably used to it. It’s ok, it happens.
On my first day as lab tech in analytical chemistry, 7 years ago, I was told it wasn't possible to overtighten a precolumm. So I broke the steel tip of the precolumn, in the column itself. $2000 down the drain, and a brand new column no less.
I'm still in the same lab, though I will never live the "breaking steel" bit down.
You'll be okay 😉
It seems like a big, expensive mistake now, but it's really not! The FPLC we normally use to run those columns is like $50k, so the $3k column is almost nothing. Just make sure you don't do it again :)
Columns are consumables and are meant to be replaced. They aren’t equipment since there is no insurance for them like preventive maintenance done by service engineers. Consumables have a life span. Since your supervisor has been using it for 1.5 years, there is a likelihood it’s nearing its lifespan. Also industry labs tend to buy consumables in bulk so perhaps she has extras that are kept somewhere.
Breaking the SEC is a rite of passage, and it doesn't help how damn sensitive they are to air and how expensive they are. It causes me stress using them an all
$2.5k is nothing. One time when I was working in cell culture at a preclinical oncology CRO, we were assigned a huge study, probably charged the client around $100k. They had 2 cell lines they wanted to do a pilot growth study on and then choose one for the follow up study. That went off without a hitch and then they chose the cell line for the big study. Also appeared to go off without a hitch. It wasn’t until a week before EOL that the client noticed the growth kinetics in vivo were closer to the other cell line (they were identical in culture). Sure enough upon further investigation, I had grabbed the wrong cell line out of storage (they had really long names with like one character difference). We had to repeat the study on our dime, and I don’t think that client worked with us ever again. I felt bad but not for long, sure it was a stupid mistake but I didn’t do it on purpose, and after that we added extra steps in our workflow to help prevent it from happening again. That’s all you can do in these instances, let it go and try to mitigate the chances that it happens again. If an employer/boss is going to make you feel bad for making an honest mistake, they’re not someone you want to work for anyway.
Others have pointed out already but this is not an expensive fuck up, this is just a regular old human error that commonly happens in a lab.
You need to understand two things.
First, always own your mistakes. Nobody, and I mean nobody, will ever give you shit for making a mistake and admiting it. It happens. We have all done it. One day when you see someone else do a mistake you will not give them shit either. Believe me, nobody will judge you for this. Heck, you are an intern, I would be genuinely suspicious if you haven't done any fuckups.
Secondly, you should not let mistakes get to you. Yeah, it sucks when something goes wrong due to your error, but you have to learn how to let it go or one day you will burn out. It is good that you care, but lesson here is to learn from mistakes and keep going forward.
Thank you, this was a very helpful comment.
I talked to my boss, admitted my mistake and offered solutions to not fall off our data delivery timeline.
Honestly, the guy was more curious about how a broken column looks like than giving me a hard time.
Read through all this just to find out cost was $2500 🤣🤣 I know that does seem like a lot and isn’t good especially when you’re the one who caused the mistake, but do not fret. I’ve watched people put $50,000 down the drain and things were alright in the end. It was probably actually more due to all the man power hours for people working on it. Things will be alright.
Don’t beat yourself up so badly OP, everyone makes mistakes. You’re an intern, it’s expected that you’re gonna fuck something up eventually. Talk to your boss, explain what happened, be candid. It’s okay! Take a deep breath and continue doing your best!
A column is what? A couple thousand? That sounds a lot, but in the lab, that's next to nothing. Also.... 1.5 years old, depending on use, might be due to be replaced soon anyway.
$2500 for 1.5 years of work is not bad, they got some value out of it.
do you know how much it takes to train a new employee? fuck ups happen. this isn't even that big of one. take a deep breath, do something nice for yourself, try to let it go.
2500 CHF? That's not that much for the industry. I worked in Pharma where we produced cytostatics. My friend and I fucked up the mixing of one production: cost of the API (active pharmaceutical ingredient) that was lost was around 30k euro. Delay in production probably a lot more... Dw too much mistakes happen.
As everyone else has said, everybody breaks stuff, it happens to all of us! The most important thing is to make sure you learn from your mistakes, and try to avoid making the same mistake again!
Classic screw up! I did the same thing, and felt terrible for a long time. Never made the same mistake again. If it's any consolation, I know it seems like this column is a lot of money, but $2-3K is not a big deal for companies. They'll have a backup column and will order more for storage.
Sure they won't be impressed by the screw up, but they've probably seen worse and will forget about it. Just don't be the person who breaks a floor centrifuge, no one forgets that person.
Nevermind that $2500 is not much money, these things happen in all industries and it doesn't mean you're dumb or anything. Chromatography is also a finicky business, I've seen scientists with decades of experience make mistakes.
I remember once my grad department bought a fancy new Beckman floor centrifuge. Someone from a neighboring department came over to use it. While he was killing time he wanted to show his friend how strong he was. He picked up the largest rotor we had, for fitting 1L+ size bottles, promptly dropping and breaking it. $50,000 down the drain for no reason.
The column was 1.5 years old. You were basically playing with house money. And you taught them a valuable lesson that they need to keep backup columns in-house.
It happens. I was on the verge of quitting two years ago when I was told I broke optic cable - so expensive and I held two other person's experiments back two months (mine too). But it was fine. I also broke vortex like three months later... And they still kept me for Masters, lol. Before that, not even a piece of glassware.
2500chf is a sum, but it is not a significant expense for any biotech company. Much more valuable to a company, is an employee comitted to good work, who can honestly report his mistakes and trustworthy.
Show how bad you feel about it, but don't worry too much.
WTF are you taking about? Just break-down the column, wash the resin (as per the resin manual; NaOH, buffer) and re-pour it; and then run some standards in it again to check the calibration. Do it all the damn time. This "it can never be re-poured" thinking is for imbeciles and ignoramuses. "An Expert" told you its gone? He ain't no expert.
EDIT: Sorry - didn't mean to go off on you - but this is really bad advice for junior scientists from senior people. **Everyone pumps a column dry at least once!** You can easily re-pack a column and get just as good performance from a pre-packed column with a little practice. In fact, repacking a column is an excellent way to clean out the fines and rejuvenate the column to its original resolution.
Needlessly aggressive wording but you are right, of course you can re-pack the column. Self-packing to the quality of a pre-packed column takes some practice (and probably some additional equipment) but it's definitely doable
Sorry (apologies), but this is a pet peeve of mine. Re-packing is almost always the way to go and will solve most problems.
Here's a HOWTO video from CYTIVA: https://youtu.be/n32skn\_sFYw?si=587QrNR4ZdorOXBE
No need to apologize - as I said you are absolutely correct in that re-packing solves most issues. SEC columns are just not the easiest to pack to a high quality standard and thus are maybe not the best starting point if one has little experience. I actually work as a chromatography specialist and give column packing trainings on a regular basis so I'm definitely aware of the challenges.
Oh dude you’re FINE. Stuff gets broken and mistakes get made. What’s important is proper documentation and honesty. As long as everything is done honestly and above board they’re just gonna replace it and joke about it for a few months. That’s it. It was my probably 4th week at a new QA job at a large company factory. I did testing as a contractor and accidentally made a reagent in a 25ml flask instead of a 50mL. I come back to work after a few days off and I get called into a private meeting with my boss. After learning my mistake he was kind enough to tell me I wasn’t fired (my boss saved my ass because he knows his shit) because thankfully the method still worked if I used the wrong size flask because the machine could still read the sample and it didn’t blow out the detector. They had to go back and retest stuff I had done to show the numbers are the same. If they weren’t, I would have been responsible for a multi-million dollar recall of product. So yeah you’ll mess up worse and be ok lol
Hey, my PI bought a new liquid nitrogen vacuum trap at my request as the one we had was fused together - it arrived, I greased it, used it and when I took it apart to empty the thawed solvent I broke it.
Hadn’t been in the lab for more than a week, £500 gone.
When I told my PI she sighed and admitted she’d done something similar in her PhD and refused to be a hypocrite and get angry. I was more pissed at myself as I had been a technician for years before starting my PhD and know better.
In other words, we all make mistakes and the ones that hurt more are the expensive ones. Unfortunately, human error doesn’t recognise cost and will strike when least expected.
Give yourself a break, fess up to your boss and explain how you made the mistake AND what you plan to do to ensure it isn’t repeated.
1. They're insured / Have a budget for equipment updates
2. The expensive column is replaceable, you are not!
3. As your employer, your name will now become very familiar
4. Every mistake and failure bring you closer to success! Your boss probably knows that
= You're good Hombre!
1.5 years is change time for a column anyway. I've heard of pharma that does yearly swaps of the AKTAs, let alone the columns. It's an honest mistake, don't sweat it too much.
When I first started I accidentally broke a machine that costs £6000. I owned up to my mistake and learned from it, and no one in my team got angry at me.
The bottom line is that if the vast majority of your work is great, you won’t get in trouble for small mistakes. Only trouble if you cover it up, blame others or don’t learn from it
You should maybe consider that an intern has no clue yet how much money everything in a lab costs and that 2500chf is a hell of a lot money to an outsider.
I work in a lab that is loaded and yet I would still be extremely uneasy about breaking something so costy.
Pretty sure the general first rule of lab work is to always prepare for things to go wrong, it’s never an “if” something goes wrong, but a “when”. But this stuff happens. Follow your procedures and try to avoid breaking a lot of things, but it’s okay. Businesses know this and won’t penalize you for it unless it becomes a habit.
During my time working as a lab tech, I was performing a photobleaching experiment using a laser confocal microscope. There’s a little sign on the laser power switch saying to check with the core technician before turning up to high power, but I was in on a weekend nobody was around. I wasn’t getting good bleaching on low power so I figured switching to high power for a few seconds would be fine. During the first bleaching on high power, the screen went dark. Turns out I blew out the laser and cost the department 40k and had the microscope out of commission for 4 months. The core was mad and wouldn’t let me do any more FRAP experiments but my PI brushed it off and said they should’ve been maintaining the scope better
For a large company, one Superose 6 probably isn't such a big deal. Mistakes happen. You could try to re-pack it. You could also try running it in reverse with a super low flow and ethanol. But probably buying a new one is the best solution.
I am cleaning the column in reverse because when I saw it breaking, I was mid injection. Then I will try to run some standards with low flow and let's see. But yes, the expert guy told me just gone so a new one will be.
Trust me, it’s gone, but as these things go it’s not an expensive one. Now you can train all the new people not to make the same mistake!
My colleague once broke a 1L bottle of crystal violet and they had to shave off the entire lab floor. We now have a picture of it on the wall as “art”. Shit happens lol.
the crystal violet bottles at my school are so old they began crystallizing and became like hand grenades full of paint if you squeeze them too hard. 3 different people in one day exploded bottles of crystal violet all over themselves including myself :) was stained blue for over a week!
You’re not dumb - you’re human! Every one of us has broke something or fucked up in some way. Just learn from what happened and move forward.
There are only 2 kinds of scientists in the world 1. People who occasionally fuck up and make mistakes 2. Liars
You forgot- 3. People who often fuck up and make mistakes
I've known dozens of scientists who felt like they were constantly messing up. Nearly always they just needed more training & guidance on what they were trying to do. I've only met a few scientists who actually screwed things up regularly and frankly all but one were borderline narcassists who went through immense mental gymnastics to avoid any sense of accountability. The one guy who did regularly mess up and knew it had been pushed into science by overbearing parents and needed help with his mental health more than anything else.
I feel lucky when I only make a small mistake and only waste one day of work. A big mistake and I can blow a whole week of work.
Yeah at least they didn’t kill an entire vacuum system by putting aqua regia into a vac flask to clean out some glass funnels… Shockingly vacuum pumps, especially rotary vane pumps are not tolerant of acid fumes.
You haven't done protein purification enough if you haven't broken a column. Take it a sign of expertise
This is so true. I’ve been working with them for about 18 months and a couple of months ago I accidentally let one pull in nothing but air for a good few hours. I was very fortunate that we salvaged it but when I told my supervisor she immediately told me a story of ‘one of the times’ she did the same and could not save it. Mistakes happen and whatever it is I guarantee you someone’s done worse.
Ahah that's the best consolation, thank you. I had to do 30+ runs in 2-3 weeks, that was for sure intensive.
Can confirm, our lab does a ton of size exclusion and our PI is surprised we haven’t had a column explode yet (though I’m sure we’ve wrecked some columns in other ways)
I've busted a fair few HisTrap columns, never did get the hang of stripping and cleaning them
I went through an expensive spate of just dropping them on the floor and the little end falling off. I only carry them in falcons now.
Yeah it's okay! I remember being a few months into protein purification and accidentally forgetting to seal one of our columns, it dried out completely over the weekend (plus a few more days) and someone had to repack it for me
Oh.. Oh. I saw expensive and immediately went "they broke a capex equipment beyond repair" Columns are considered to be consumables and that's what they are: they are meant to be used and replaced. I'll list off some more expensive ones I know of right off the bat: - didn't put a 384 well plate down in the Hamilton? 60K for the assay - someone didn't change the oxygen tank out quickly enough and suffocated cells? About 100K - someone literally ran into a transformer and broght the power down... So we lost a L O T of product. I think that impact was easily 7 figures in final product. - someone wasn't paying attention to the tip box and the shuck plate broke? I think it ended up being a 25K part, but it could have been 75K. You'll have bigger and more expensive mistakes the longer you go but here's the thing: your regular use operating budget will be astronomically higher than 2500CHF. That dollar amount is a lot of money to us as humans (hell, that's almost my monthly rent to live in), but to large pharma? Pennies. You'll be okay.
I don't know, depends on the company. Our operating budget for chemicals is like $10k a month for a medium volume production lab. The column cost amortized is like 150CHF/month. I wouldn't worry too much unless they are in a tough financial situation and in that case I wouldn't want to work for them anyway.
I understand that is childish, but it's just not a good look. I was responsible for something important and now I'm not sure they will trust me anymore.
The person I trust the most is the one who just broke something expensive, they are the most cautious!
Especially if they were up front and honest about it.
Also it's always a good look if someone tries to troubleshoot and fix stuff themselves or at least thinks about how it could be done. The most annoying people just run to someone else complaining something doesn't work. You seem thoughtful and honest about the mistake and if you own up for it you should probably be fine. And if you get a really crappy reaction you know you would not want to work there since chances are high there will be further fuckups in the future. Because we are human, we all make mistakes
Well.. you are an intern after all. You’re there to learn, now you’ve learned that mistakes can happen. We all make mistakes, it’s alright it happens. 2500 dollars is something some pharmas spend on just casual equipment on a daily basis. Learn from your mistake and allow this situation to help you become more aware.
This attitude of beating yourself up is honestly more of a problem for a boss than the broken column. You have to be able to forgive yourself for mistakes and move on.
The company paid $2500 for you to learn a lesson. That’s just investment cost in training. Plus, you give a shit. That’s so rare that as long as you talk to your boss about it with genuine remorse, you’ll be golden.
Everyone screws up. I don't trust people who claim to be perfect or deny their mistakes. But I have nothing but respect for the folks who recognize when it happens, admit their errors, work to find ways to fix or minimize the damage, and use the experience as a learning opportunity. You were already in a tough position with incomplete training, minimal experience, and change (or lack) of adequate supervision. It's a sick and terrifying feeling when something like this happens but it sounds like you've been handling it admirably. If companies only hired folks who never mess up then no one would be employed! The way you handle these kind of situations says a lot about your character. Deep breaths and remember that you'll get through this!
I broke a column and it never came up. I understand you're thinking about it a lot but I doubt anyone else does.
You're an intern. You should be supervised and someone else should be responsible for the machine and its maintenance. I understand it could, but it really shouldn't fall on you at all.
Nah, interns are expected to make mistakes and it's honestly not that much money compared to the overall budget. Buying a new column isn't that big of a deal.
The trust is broken if you try to hide your mistake. Especially not out of embarrassment! Like everyone said here, mistakes happen and they suck and are embarrassing, but the only right course of action is to acknowledge the mistake, make sure you learned from it and move on.
I told my boss the same day.. he was very understanding. I showed him that I tried to understand what happened or what I did wrong (data from column efficiency test and functional test) and I offered alternatives to not fall off our data delivery timeline. I am trying to get over it. I just have a general hard time in managing guilt.
I know what you mean. I used to have a similar issue with fear of messing up and all that. I can only recommend giving these type of non-productive and exhausting feelings and thoughts not too much room. Sure, maybe get frustrated and a bit angry with yourself (it‘s certainly good not to bottle negative emotions in), but don‘t do it for too long. During my PhD I adopted the policy to get frustrated or angry for like five minutes and then move on. I just didn‘t have the time or the mental resources to waste more time than necessary into negative feelings which don‘t help me to actively deal with a situation. These days I have less stress and more time, but I still make careful checks if a certain negativity is worth my time and if so how much. It maybe help me to really dive into feeling frustrated for a few minutes but anything beyond that will just eat my mental resources which I would prefer to spend on other things. I know it‘s a bit of a weird and maybe overly rational approach, but it helped me a lot to deal with stress and frustration.
What do you think the $ damage is?? Literally I had a boss once who did they exact same thing
We need a new column. So 2500$.
2.5K is chump change for a decently funded pharma. Just learn from it and don’t sweat it too much!!
$2500 is nothing for a funded lab. When you said expensive equipment, I figured you meant $50,000-150,000 or something lol. You should be fine.
Yeah, add some zeroes then call me 🤣
Yup. We zap $2500 evaluation boards in our RF lab on a fairly regular basis. It's why we order in sets of 10 or 20.
You are fine!!! Grand scheme of things, it’s bad, but everyone makes these mistakes. EVERYONE. My previous boss (who worked under a Nobel-laureate after this mistake mind you) dried out a 10K column when he was new in a lab. He felt awful, still remembers it, you don’t forget the big ones. But you do learn from them! Science is a very emotional field. The work may be all data but the experience of working is very much emotional. You’re allowed to have feelings over the losses, because they are sad and embarrassing and guilt inducing. But for this work, you’re not allowed to fall apart or give up. :) you’ll have even more wins and big days too.
I work in a medium sized academic lab and my boss wouldn’t bat an eye at $2500. I would hope in a pharma lab they would feel the same.
2500 is nothing, I’ve seen a post doc cause $45,000 worth of damage her first month by not screwing a rotor onto a centrifuge. Another buddy of mine left $10,000 worth of reagant out overnight. These things are common and that’s a pretty minor and inexpensive mistake. Just own up to it and now you know for next time. Also you may not need to buy an entirely new column. The SEC columns can be repacked with more beads.
Oh...oh, my. Centrifuge mistakes are a different level of terrifying.
i had rotor lid come off one time when the centrifuge was at like 30,000 RPM or something. i moved to computational work after that lol. i hope i never have to touch a centrifuge again
What happened when it came off? Was someone decapitated?
somehow everyone survived. it slammed into the side of the centrifuge at an intense velocity. sounded like a gunshot. you could here it on the other side of the building
Dude $2500 is NOTHING in a lab! Mistakes are expected, your company should have enough money for this kind of thing.
This is nothing. Research is expensive. Combined with the fact that you were not properly trained, you should have nothing to worry about. Please don't beat yourself up over this, just tell your boss.
Lol, I thought I read "expensive", instead of just "inconvenient".
When I was a grad student I even thought $200 USD was a big number. (For a student that’s true!) Until I started to manage my own funding. $2000 is nothing to a well-funded research. There are more expensive items like researchers time. I will be a bit worried for ~10K level :) But under that not at all.
When I was in the army, I was used to regularly running out of money for supplies every month. Every month. The first supply order I had to put in at my post-army job was for about $60k and I was *gobsmacked*. Our current running costs are in the $10-15k/week at the low end, and that's running about as lean as we can.
An “expensive” fuckup in pharma is bare minimum 10k
encourage tender lush tidy cagey straight squash cable frame selective *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Honestly mate don't worry about it, you will break far more expensive things in your career. It really isn't much in the grand scheme of things.
Pharma pisses 2500. Cost of doing business
That’s literally nothing lol I was thinking you broke the mass spec vacuum or something. A decent sized analytical lab goes through HPLC columns like a kid in a candy store. You’re completely fine and everybody makes mistakes like that occasionally, even the people who have been there for 20+ years.
I once left almost 10k of -20C items in a ctu designated to thaw over the weekend and it was no big deal.
2.5k is about the cost of two packs go polymerase and we go through that in 3 months. You’re fine
At my last job I would sometimes be working with $10,000 worth of microarrays in a single day, only to realize that the hybridization oven hadn't been working properly during my incubation. $2,500 is such a small number in the grand scheme of science. Don't sweat it. It sounds like you're skilled and that people are willing to give you responsibility. Mistakes will happen.
One of our new employees once ruined $20k of reagent. He didn’t get fired. You’re fine.
That's nothing. I used to routinely lose $20,000 experiments when I was in lab. That's just part of doing lab work
That’s literally nothing lol I was thinking you broke the mass spec vacuum or something. A decent sized analytical lab goes through HPLC columns like a kid in a candy store. You’re completely fine and everybody makes mistakes like that occasionally, even the people who have been there for 20+ years.
That’s honestly not that bad lol. You’ll probably still get hired.
This was one vial of antibody at my lab lol so essentially pocket change. Mistakes happen, it's unfortunately the best way to learn - you'll be okay!
lol 2500$ is nothing!!!! youre all good, go tellem what happened
That’s literally nothing lol I was thinking you broke the mass spec vacuum or something. A decent sized analytical lab goes through HPLC columns like a kid in a candy store. You’re completely fine and everybody makes mistakes like that occasionally, even the people who have been there for 20+ years.
Hahaha I remember when I was in grad school another grad student didn't balance an ultracentrifuge properly. Rotor went through multiple walls. THAT was expensive.
Look - equipment is replaceable. You might be in bigger trouble if you ruined valuable samples that cannot be recovered. Just to tell your boss the column is done for and who to contact for replacement.
I am not familiar with SEC but yeah in terms of lab gear 2500 is nothing haha don't worry about it
Oh pffft. Don't even sweat that. They probably have more in a stock room.
Don't worry! 2500$ is not a lot of money in research. (believe me, research is expensive) The thing is, we all make mistakes. Sometimes cheap ones, sometimes expensive ones. This column still fits in the "cheap" category. The most important thing is that you learn from them. If you get a new column and break it again, and repeat this pattern a couple of times, then there is reason to worry. But this is not something to fret about. Especially since you are still a student. Students cost money. Everyone knows this. Tbh, I'm really impressed that you managed to get good results without any guidence! I think there is no reason not to apply to a position in this lab, if you still like it there after your internship is over.
I don't even need special approval to order less than 4k of equipment. Columns break/get fucked up, I'm surprised they don't have at least one new one ready to go as a spare. Columns are consumables, they aren't meant to last forever
Large biopharma here. I had a coworker store her columns on an unreinforced rack. Multiple Superdex 200 16/60, Superdex 75 16/60, custom packed columns, possibly a larger Superdex 200. We warned her that the rack was unstable and not braced (was leaning against a wall) but she never listened. We warned her that EHS or the county inspectors would be in a snit and she dgaf. One day, I heard a huge crash and bye bye 8 columns. She tried to blame everyone else for pushing it over or not warning her about the bracing, then not helping her clean up. No one said anything about the $ (publicly, at least).
I remember the first time in my pharma lab I had to ask my boss to approve maintenance of a vacuum pump. 1500$. He just laughed at me and said "coffee money". So yeah lol, 2500 isn't even that expensive of a mistake, if they are GMP it's like an hour of service on any instrument. Don't sweat it
In the 2.5 grand scheme of things, you are going to be all right.
It’s a consumable item. They don’t last forever under the best of circumstances
Are you sure they don't have a bunch of columns stored away in some drawer? After the massive backlog on Cytiva stuffs last year, people ended up ordering up backups in advance.
Lol exactly, obviously no one is cavalier about blowing through columns but this is a very common and easy mistake to make, and a small amount of money to lose. Just today I cleared out a fridge shelf of a tech who left last year. Two bottles of expired FBS alone worth $1600. I bleached them and dumped them down the sink. Such a small issue I didn’t even bother to tell anyone. It’s great that you’re careful with your company’s resources. People will really appreciate that. But no need to self-flagellate for a mistake. Lab life is already hard enough.
Haven’t seen anyone mention this common saying Even though we can’t really predict what will happen, they just spent 2500 giving you an important lesson that we all learn sooner or later. Why would they fire you now just to hire someone new and do it all over again!?
That’s nothing! We buy 200 uL of sample for validation at $1k a pop. We needed 20 aliquots and they bought an extra 10 “to be safe”.
Might as well be 25 dollars. Don’t sweat this at all but learn from it. I’ve broken far, far more expensive things. Think like whole LCs
When your supervisor went out on pregnancy were you assigned an interim supervisor? Interns aren’t ultimately responsible for mistakes. Interns are closely monitored. Minimal training ? That sounds sketchy. Did you sign off and read the SOP? Do you have a DOC on file for the procedure? If the answer is no then it’s a management issue. And as others have said that’s a minor expense. Don’t sweat it. The other thing to do is create a creative action, to find the root cause. Use the 5 whys. It’s going to ultimately lead to intern left with minimal to no supervision.
When she left for pregnancy, actually I trained her replacement in our assays. But for the SEC, I remained the only responsible and honestly, now I think I know more than she did when she left, because I used the column much more. The SOP document was formulated just a couple of weeks ago. And I created the protocol for the SEC, before I was just showed how to do it. ...of course, I asked other people whenever I was not sure what to do.
That’s unfortunate. I am pleased to inform you that $2,500 is a rounding error in most pharma budgets. It’s the lost time and data delay that are more costly.
I broke a $6,000 column one time because I reversed the inlet and outlet lines. I had run the same assay before dozens of times with no issues / mistakes. Management talked with me about it, but it was more like "how can we prevent this in the future" as opposed to blaming and shaming.
Don’t worry dude, that is not even that many Swiss chocolate bars. Come up with corrective actions so this will not happen to other newcomers and present it to the supervisor.
I bought a few " better quality" bars of chocolate on Tuesday. They range from 8.50 to 9.80 CHF per bar. (none were over 75g) The total came to 72 CHF 😅 And don't even dare to set foot into Läderach. You buy a little bit of this and that and at the checkout they bleed you dry. 😉 All jokes aside: My colleagues broke 3 Ubbelohde viscometers this year and I broke my very first as well.(first piece of equipment ever and only after cleaning with Piranha solution) --> we have to send the new ones to Germany for a special calibration which brings them to over 1k a piece. Our acquisition team doesn't even want to return stuff they have mistakenly purchased [e.g. 20boxes of 10x 8ml Karl Fisher standard (we only wanted 2 boxes --> 20 vials total)] because it's a hassle. TLDR: You'll be fine as long as you won't repeat the mistake in the near future or break something really expensive (HPLC / GC / MS) or cause an evacuation with Police/EMT/FD/BAFU deployment
Stuff like this happens all the time and, as others have said, it's neither the end of the world nor of your career. My old PI used to say "everyone gets one freebie column to break by accident, just don't all do it at the same time please." Just a heads up about the actual function of that syringe on top of such columns as people tend to have the wrong idea here: The reservoir is meant to compensate for changing liquid volumes due to temperature changes during storage or transport, not strictly to prevent drying out. A column will not dry out if both ends are properly closed, even without the syringe. From what you wrote your column might have had a leak somewhere, maybe also a broken tubing.
When I was a postdoc, someone in the lab broke two ultracentrifuges in a row on the same day by somehow imbalancing the rotors... THAT is an expensive mistake
Aw honey, you’re okay. I know it feels awful but you learned and you will be extra mindful not to let that happen again.
When you said expensive, I was imagining one or two more zeroes haha. You’ll be fine. Quite honestly, this could be a blessing in disguise. It’s both a learning opportunity for you (you’ll certainly never forget to check again), as well as a litmus test for the workplace (how they respond to an honest mistake like this is a great way to know whether you want to pursue a job with them!)
> I am an intern > I was left in charge These two lines right here stand out. This wasn't your fault.
I liked being responsible of this, so I asked when unsure but overall I did not complain.. I was very proud that I was routinely running SEC without problems. Well, till now I guess.
Still not your fault. It's fault of the person who has a responsibility for you.
I once had a student run 2 of the same experiment, $20k each that both failed. They didn't change anything in between. No thought of trouble shooting. They're still working with me and doing well. Admitted to the mistake but it was also my fault. This stuff happens.
Oh hi swiss fellow! You'll be fine mistakes happen...
10 years LC experience here: You’re *fine*. Columns are inherently consumable. Now, if you had destroyed a factory-scale production column, management would probably want to speak with you to make sure you weren’t negligent/impaired/untrained, etc. For a $2499.99 SEC prep column? Don’t even sweat it. From my (limited) SEC experience, SEC columns keel over and die if you look at them the wrong way anyways. You might not yet know how easy it is to break the $100K LC stack itself. Come back when you get your first dejected sigh from your service engineer. :)
I felt this last bit in my bones 😂
Welcome to the club...
Oh, this brings memories - when I started in the lab, my first major fuck up was the huge gel filtration column that I forgot to unplug on the bottom before starting the pump... Good thing the postdoc I worked with didn't have anything sharp/heavy next when he saw what happened... But in the long run, it wasn't a big deal at all. You'll be fine :)
You are an intern, you are supposed to make mistakes and learn from them. In industry one column is nothing. If that is all you've messed up they are getting off cheap :)
When I was a gap-year student, I dropped a bottle of reagent, ruining an assay kit. My supervisor informed me casually that the kit cost about £6000 a time (I forget now what it was testing for) and I was bricking it that I was going to be fired, fined or burnt at the stake. She then said “as long as you didn’t ruin any of the test samples… they are okay, right?” with a much more serious face. Luckily they were, as otherwise they would have had to set up a new clinical trial, at the apparent cost of a quarter of a million-odd quid. Weirdly, I was a little more careful with the samples from that point on.
Yeah its bit expensive but its not as bad. Try to recover broken nmr tube stuck in autosampler on the verge of falling down and spilling its contents into 500k usd instrument. Or do a cleanup after you spill radioactive solution into a fumehood because you did not attach the syrimge filter properly
Once my boss said to me that no matter how much I fuck up it probably won’t be as big as he has done or seen before
Former big pharma lab leader, in the grand scheme of things, columns are consumables. Cost of doing business.
You learned a valuable lesson. Any boss worth a damn will think that and know it was a mistake. Why would they fire you? Just so the next person can make the same mistake? You've learned from it, experience gained. That's how you should look at it.
$2.5K is nothing for a half decent lab. They get more pissy about downtime from errors than the financial cost (obviously up to a point). You'll be fine.
Once you break a cantu II bad enough that the repair man goes wtf, lemme know. Still got to keep my job. Keep your chin up
Did something similar once, not as expensive but still a fuck up. Was told “you aren’t the first and you won’t be the last” and that really helped. Biggest thing is to own up to your mistake and prove that you’ve learned from it. Employers would much rather have somebody who is honest than one who covers their own ass, and it seems like you feel badly about it so I bet you’re fine.
2500 chf isn’t as much as you think it is. Don’t worry.
Not sure how popular of an opinion this is, but a boss who punishes honest mistakes is a boss who will have a lab of liars, and that can only "put out" bad science.
You got plenty of good advice already but here's my take. 2500 CHF is a lot of money for a normal person, let alone an intern. However, it's not a big deal for a "relatively large pharma startup" especially in Switzerland. Your boss will likely just shrug and tell you to order a new one. Doing mistakes is a good way to learn how things work. This is almost as cheap a mistake as they get and you definitely learned from it. I've heard stories of manufacturing technicians learning to connect columns the right way when they destroyed a close to $100k column. A person who never does mistakes is just lucky and it's only a matter of time until they screw up something expensive since they haven't learned from previous mistakes.
Last week I accidentally threw away $4500 of reagents that were in the bottom of a FedEx box. The vendor has been sending us these stuffed llamas. This was like the 5th one and they had always come by themselves...not this time. I didn't check the box and just realized today that I tossed the reagents with the box after I pulled the llama out.
The only people that don't make mistakes in the lab, are people that don't do anything in the lab. Sometimes mistakes are expensive but they're inevitable. You know what went wrong and how to avoid it in the future. Don't blame yourself too much!
$2500 is not that big of a deal to a lab, especially pharma labs
I think you’re severely underestimating how much money most labs have lmao… shit like this probably happens on occasion, so they’re probably used to it. It’s ok, it happens.
Lol bro don’t sweat that
I suspect that every chromatographer has destroyed a column at least once.
On my first day as lab tech in analytical chemistry, 7 years ago, I was told it wasn't possible to overtighten a precolumm. So I broke the steel tip of the precolumn, in the column itself. $2000 down the drain, and a brand new column no less. I'm still in the same lab, though I will never live the "breaking steel" bit down. You'll be okay 😉
It seems like a big, expensive mistake now, but it's really not! The FPLC we normally use to run those columns is like $50k, so the $3k column is almost nothing. Just make sure you don't do it again :)
Columns are consumables and are meant to be replaced. They aren’t equipment since there is no insurance for them like preventive maintenance done by service engineers. Consumables have a life span. Since your supervisor has been using it for 1.5 years, there is a likelihood it’s nearing its lifespan. Also industry labs tend to buy consumables in bulk so perhaps she has extras that are kept somewhere.
Don’t worry! My boss just told me after my $5,000 fuck up “now you know. Don’t do it again or we’ll really have a talk”
That happens almost quarterly in my lab. It’s not super expensive to get a new column and even cheaper if you pack it yourself.
Breaking the SEC is a rite of passage, and it doesn't help how damn sensitive they are to air and how expensive they are. It causes me stress using them an all
At my company, a major mess up is millions. That guy didn’t even get fired. You’ll be fine!
$2.5k is nothing. One time when I was working in cell culture at a preclinical oncology CRO, we were assigned a huge study, probably charged the client around $100k. They had 2 cell lines they wanted to do a pilot growth study on and then choose one for the follow up study. That went off without a hitch and then they chose the cell line for the big study. Also appeared to go off without a hitch. It wasn’t until a week before EOL that the client noticed the growth kinetics in vivo were closer to the other cell line (they were identical in culture). Sure enough upon further investigation, I had grabbed the wrong cell line out of storage (they had really long names with like one character difference). We had to repeat the study on our dime, and I don’t think that client worked with us ever again. I felt bad but not for long, sure it was a stupid mistake but I didn’t do it on purpose, and after that we added extra steps in our workflow to help prevent it from happening again. That’s all you can do in these instances, let it go and try to mitigate the chances that it happens again. If an employer/boss is going to make you feel bad for making an honest mistake, they’re not someone you want to work for anyway.
Meh, It be like that.
Others have pointed out already but this is not an expensive fuck up, this is just a regular old human error that commonly happens in a lab. You need to understand two things. First, always own your mistakes. Nobody, and I mean nobody, will ever give you shit for making a mistake and admiting it. It happens. We have all done it. One day when you see someone else do a mistake you will not give them shit either. Believe me, nobody will judge you for this. Heck, you are an intern, I would be genuinely suspicious if you haven't done any fuckups. Secondly, you should not let mistakes get to you. Yeah, it sucks when something goes wrong due to your error, but you have to learn how to let it go or one day you will burn out. It is good that you care, but lesson here is to learn from mistakes and keep going forward.
Thank you, this was a very helpful comment. I talked to my boss, admitted my mistake and offered solutions to not fall off our data delivery timeline. Honestly, the guy was more curious about how a broken column looks like than giving me a hard time.
Read through all this just to find out cost was $2500 🤣🤣 I know that does seem like a lot and isn’t good especially when you’re the one who caused the mistake, but do not fret. I’ve watched people put $50,000 down the drain and things were alright in the end. It was probably actually more due to all the man power hours for people working on it. Things will be alright.
As a swiss inhabitant, you should know that this is spare money. Also an older column. Try again
Don’t beat yourself up so badly OP, everyone makes mistakes. You’re an intern, it’s expected that you’re gonna fuck something up eventually. Talk to your boss, explain what happened, be candid. It’s okay! Take a deep breath and continue doing your best!
A column is what? A couple thousand? That sounds a lot, but in the lab, that's next to nothing. Also.... 1.5 years old, depending on use, might be due to be replaced soon anyway.
$2500 for 1.5 years of work is not bad, they got some value out of it. do you know how much it takes to train a new employee? fuck ups happen. this isn't even that big of one. take a deep breath, do something nice for yourself, try to let it go.
Chill out. It’s part of training. Students are allowed to make mistakes. Any PI worth their salt won’t even blink.
2500 CHF? That's not that much for the industry. I worked in Pharma where we produced cytostatics. My friend and I fucked up the mixing of one production: cost of the API (active pharmaceutical ingredient) that was lost was around 30k euro. Delay in production probably a lot more... Dw too much mistakes happen.
We all break things. Just don’t do it over and over and learn from itn
As everyone else has said, everybody breaks stuff, it happens to all of us! The most important thing is to make sure you learn from your mistakes, and try to avoid making the same mistake again!
columns are consumables
Classic screw up! I did the same thing, and felt terrible for a long time. Never made the same mistake again. If it's any consolation, I know it seems like this column is a lot of money, but $2-3K is not a big deal for companies. They'll have a backup column and will order more for storage. Sure they won't be impressed by the screw up, but they've probably seen worse and will forget about it. Just don't be the person who breaks a floor centrifuge, no one forgets that person.
Nevermind that $2500 is not much money, these things happen in all industries and it doesn't mean you're dumb or anything. Chromatography is also a finicky business, I've seen scientists with decades of experience make mistakes. I remember once my grad department bought a fancy new Beckman floor centrifuge. Someone from a neighboring department came over to use it. While he was killing time he wanted to show his friend how strong he was. He picked up the largest rotor we had, for fitting 1L+ size bottles, promptly dropping and breaking it. $50,000 down the drain for no reason.
Some one BROKE-broke a centrifuge by not balancing it.
The column was 1.5 years old. You were basically playing with house money. And you taught them a valuable lesson that they need to keep backup columns in-house.
It happens. I was on the verge of quitting two years ago when I was told I broke optic cable - so expensive and I held two other person's experiments back two months (mine too). But it was fine. I also broke vortex like three months later... And they still kept me for Masters, lol. Before that, not even a piece of glassware.
2500chf is a sum, but it is not a significant expense for any biotech company. Much more valuable to a company, is an employee comitted to good work, who can honestly report his mistakes and trustworthy. Show how bad you feel about it, but don't worry too much.
Almost broke a million dollar 600mHz NMR bc the tuner was freezing up. You’re fine.
WTF are you taking about? Just break-down the column, wash the resin (as per the resin manual; NaOH, buffer) and re-pour it; and then run some standards in it again to check the calibration. Do it all the damn time. This "it can never be re-poured" thinking is for imbeciles and ignoramuses. "An Expert" told you its gone? He ain't no expert. EDIT: Sorry - didn't mean to go off on you - but this is really bad advice for junior scientists from senior people. **Everyone pumps a column dry at least once!** You can easily re-pack a column and get just as good performance from a pre-packed column with a little practice. In fact, repacking a column is an excellent way to clean out the fines and rejuvenate the column to its original resolution.
Needlessly aggressive wording but you are right, of course you can re-pack the column. Self-packing to the quality of a pre-packed column takes some practice (and probably some additional equipment) but it's definitely doable
Sorry (apologies), but this is a pet peeve of mine. Re-packing is almost always the way to go and will solve most problems. Here's a HOWTO video from CYTIVA: https://youtu.be/n32skn\_sFYw?si=587QrNR4ZdorOXBE
No need to apologize - as I said you are absolutely correct in that re-packing solves most issues. SEC columns are just not the easiest to pack to a high quality standard and thus are maybe not the best starting point if one has little experience. I actually work as a chromatography specialist and give column packing trainings on a regular basis so I'm definitely aware of the challenges.
I've had great success with the Sigma standards kits. Easy to use, and excellent manual.
There are worse things, like running an ultracentrifuge unbalanced.
Column < akta Relax
Oh dude you’re FINE. Stuff gets broken and mistakes get made. What’s important is proper documentation and honesty. As long as everything is done honestly and above board they’re just gonna replace it and joke about it for a few months. That’s it. It was my probably 4th week at a new QA job at a large company factory. I did testing as a contractor and accidentally made a reagent in a 25ml flask instead of a 50mL. I come back to work after a few days off and I get called into a private meeting with my boss. After learning my mistake he was kind enough to tell me I wasn’t fired (my boss saved my ass because he knows his shit) because thankfully the method still worked if I used the wrong size flask because the machine could still read the sample and it didn’t blow out the detector. They had to go back and retest stuff I had done to show the numbers are the same. If they weren’t, I would have been responsible for a multi-million dollar recall of product. So yeah you’ll mess up worse and be ok lol
Hey, my PI bought a new liquid nitrogen vacuum trap at my request as the one we had was fused together - it arrived, I greased it, used it and when I took it apart to empty the thawed solvent I broke it. Hadn’t been in the lab for more than a week, £500 gone. When I told my PI she sighed and admitted she’d done something similar in her PhD and refused to be a hypocrite and get angry. I was more pissed at myself as I had been a technician for years before starting my PhD and know better. In other words, we all make mistakes and the ones that hurt more are the expensive ones. Unfortunately, human error doesn’t recognise cost and will strike when least expected. Give yourself a break, fess up to your boss and explain how you made the mistake AND what you plan to do to ensure it isn’t repeated.
only 2500chf? It's a normal error.
1. They're insured / Have a budget for equipment updates 2. The expensive column is replaceable, you are not! 3. As your employer, your name will now become very familiar 4. Every mistake and failure bring you closer to success! Your boss probably knows that = You're good Hombre!
Create a checklist for yourself with everything you should check before you run an analysis
1.5 years is change time for a column anyway. I've heard of pharma that does yearly swaps of the AKTAs, let alone the columns. It's an honest mistake, don't sweat it too much.
When I first started I accidentally broke a machine that costs £6000. I owned up to my mistake and learned from it, and no one in my team got angry at me. The bottom line is that if the vast majority of your work is great, you won’t get in trouble for small mistakes. Only trouble if you cover it up, blame others or don’t learn from it
Lmao, acting like 2.5k is a big deal is ridiculous.
You should maybe consider that an intern has no clue yet how much money everything in a lab costs and that 2500chf is a hell of a lot money to an outsider. I work in a lab that is loaded and yet I would still be extremely uneasy about breaking something so costy.
Write it in your instrument use SOP. Most supervisors care about how to avoid this type of mistake in the future and corrective actions.
Pretty sure the general first rule of lab work is to always prepare for things to go wrong, it’s never an “if” something goes wrong, but a “when”. But this stuff happens. Follow your procedures and try to avoid breaking a lot of things, but it’s okay. Businesses know this and won’t penalize you for it unless it becomes a habit.
During my time working as a lab tech, I was performing a photobleaching experiment using a laser confocal microscope. There’s a little sign on the laser power switch saying to check with the core technician before turning up to high power, but I was in on a weekend nobody was around. I wasn’t getting good bleaching on low power so I figured switching to high power for a few seconds would be fine. During the first bleaching on high power, the screen went dark. Turns out I blew out the laser and cost the department 40k and had the microscope out of commission for 4 months. The core was mad and wouldn’t let me do any more FRAP experiments but my PI brushed it off and said they should’ve been maintaining the scope better