What’s the most expensive piece of glassware you ever broke? Chemists share their stories

Everyone who’s ever worked in a lab knows the pain of when something goes horribly wrong. Using the wrong solvent? Check. Accidentally pouring your product painstakingly isolated over several weeks down the sink? Check. Tipping acid in the organic waste bin? Whoops. Inadvertently making an explosive? Yikes.

This week Keith Hornberger, a medicinal chemist at Columbia University in the US, related on X, formerly Twitter, that his son was left feeling a bit unhappy after he broke a beaker in a school chemistry lab. In an effort to cheer his son up and make him feel a bit better about his lab disaster he asked for scientists’ best stories of the biggest or most expensive piece of glassware they’d ever broken.