The Duck of Sabotage: the early leader and call for more stories



Quack! Don't you want me?

 I recently initiated a contest to draw out the most egregious stories of laboratory sabotage that I could find. The rules were as follows:

• Submissions were to be put in the comments of the post or by private e-mail to chemjobber -at- gmail/dot/com
• Submission deadline: May 1
• Winner to be judged on most awful and true story of chemistry laboratory coworker sabotage that is best documented.
• "Friend of a friend" isn't enough. One degree of separation is allowed, but no further.
• No Sames/Sezen.
• Contest winner cannot be perpetrator of sabotage. Confirmation by asking detailed questions by private e-mail will happen.
• Winner to be determined by CJ and/or popular acclamation. (i.e. to be decided)
• Use good judgment; if it's not your story to tell, don't tell it.

The winner would be awarded this lovely ceramic duck (now complete with pink sailor hat), filled with 100 most excellent Chemjobber business cards and the finest hard candies in all the land. My goal was to show that lab sabotage is relatively rare (and to get rid of this silly duck.) I also think it's important to hear from people who this happened to; the thought of someone sabotaging lab experiments is quite disturbing.

Since the post went up on March 23, there have been a number of commenters who told stories of lab sabotage, including what I would consider two official entrants. (Thanks to Derek Lowe for linking.) Of the eight stories* that were told, 4 of them were not from chemists, but from biologists. I assume that this is a statistical anomaly, but I find it a notable artifact. Stories included:

• ac: "After killing a half dozen flasks of cells, the group in question decided to test all their media and fresh buffer solutions mixed up the night before, solutions that now had a pH somewhere in the 3.0 range. Seems someone had been going around to all the reagent bottles and dumping in a bunch of acid, or a bunch of base."
• Anon032320110914p: " At one point buffers and solutions were being contaminated with foul smelling solvents so quickly and ubiquitously that foul play was suspected. Eventually they caught the disgruntled postdoc with hidden cameras and building entry logs."
• qeztal: "One morning, a bunch of mice were found dead. Someone had put dry ice into their cages, which filled the cages with CO2 and asphyxiated them."
• Pharma Microbiologist: "Then it took just a short while of watching and making some tests to realize what was going on. (My collegue starting a "fake" PCR run and leaving the lab with just X in it, for example.) It became very obvious that X was the person resetting the PCR machine."

There were, unsurprisingly, two commenters who told stories of chemistry lab sabotage but (probably rightly so) refused to talk further about it:

• DrBlur: "Within the past year, a few of our close mutual friends, who were all working in the same group at the time, were having issues in their lab over a few years that went from minor (misplaced reagents, temperature fluctations during reactions) to major red flags (reagents contaminated/diluted on purpose, reagent bottles emptied and filled with solvent, etc). They became suspicious and set up hidden video cameras and caught the person in the group who was doing this multiple times over a couple of weeks, even deliberately setting up "dummy" reactions as bait."
• Been There Done That: "This isn't a joke CJ. As a victim of a saboteur, it was the worst episode during my time as a chemist. You deal with self doubt, paranoia and anger for a long time after experiencing something like this. The violation of the trust that exists in a lab is horrible. It really rocks your faith in other people."

For what it's worth, I don't think it's a joke. Proven lab saboteurs should be exposed for the cruel people they are and potentially barred from working in a laboratory ever again. While the prize is jokey, it's merely meant as a signal that I'm really interested in hearing what people have to say.

Finally, there were what I consider two official entrants, neither of whom have written in to further confirm or divulge details of their stories:

Anon032320110403p: I have better than a trifecta:

• Stolen intermediates later published without acknowledgment
• Oxidants added to reactions (like milkshaken described)
• Taking over the computer that you are working on using Carbon Copy and screwing up the formatting of your manuscript.
• Taking my group meeting presentation, going and starting his own lab, trying to scoop me with his superior manpower.

Anon032720110733a:

Leaving a huge HyperChem optimization to run overnight; coming in to find that [someone] had removed the dongle to 'teach me a lesson about leaving the computer unattended'. Does that count?

I'm going to say that Anon403p is the early leader over these past two weeks, but we've got at least 3 weeks to go. I'm going to post this on ChemReddit to see if I can get some more stories.

*Not counting the union/management battle one. That's a whole 'nother kettle of fish.