Yesterday I was staining TB inside macrophages with a fluorescent dye called Auramine. The counter-stain (this un-stains everything BUT the TB) for Auramine contains 10% Hydrochloric Acid (HCl). I was reminded of a funny story from back in the day… I hope you’ll enjoy it.
I can’t remember if it was my 2nd or 3rd semester of Chemistry at SDSU but I remember the day with perfect clarity. We were doing a “Bomb Calorimetry” lab experiment. Basically, a bomb calorimeter measures the heat given off in combustion of hydrocarbons in any particular sample. Well, we were measuring the heat given off by the combustion of 10M HCl and zinc. (For those of you who don’t know, 10M HCl is STRONG!!! In lab, I normally use 1M or 0.5M HCl). I was in charge measuring the volume of the acid. Melanie, my lab partner (and model med-school-bound student) was in charge of measuring out the zinc. I did my job perfectly but unfortunately Melanie had made a mistake. She missed a decimal point and had added ten times more zinc than she was supposed to. Unbeknownst to us, we mixed the HCl and the zinc together and watched the temperature rise on the thermometer (combustion is measured by the amount of heat given off). I was impressed. This experiment was really working… the temperature was getting very hot, very quickly. We were sitting watching the thermometer and the stopwatch very closely when all of a sudden, HCl started spewing out of the bomb calorimeter. Oh crap. This is when we realized that something must be wrong. Fortunately, we were all wearing goggles and lab coats… and- I still got an A in the class. Those were good times…
1 comment:
yo - I did a very similar thing, only more on purpose and with Manganese (Mn, I think) and probably HCl. It was pretty sweet
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