Question: has an experiment ever gone really wrong

Zoe Vance answered on 16 Oct 2024:

I’m lucky because I’m a purely computational biologist; can’t poison myself or blow anything up even if something goes super wrong with what I’m doing! So I don’t know if I have an example of an experiment going really wrong in the way you’re probably thinking. But even in this line of work we have to be pretty careful and double check everything because our results/results from the software we write are sometimes used to make important decisions, or even just used to inform work other people are going to do. If there’s a major mistake in there that causes incorrect results it could lead to a lot of wasted effort and materials, or worst case scenario, to a wrong or late diagnosis of a patient.