Question: worst lab injury?

Matthew Selwood answered on 13 Mar 2019:

Luckily this one wasn’t me. So for experiments we have a huge metal chamber (2m x 2m x 1m) to shoot the laser into. It has to be at vacuum to fire the laser, and when we need to go back in there to change our equipment we pump gas in, then open the doors and do our stuff. Well, the dial which says how much gas was in the chamber was faulty, and no one had noticed… So when we thought it was nearly at normal atmospheric pressure, it was over 10 times that :/ The windows on the chamber exploded outwards, and a colleague was doing some work next to one of them. By the luck of the God’s, we had a beam block outside the window (a thin piece of aluminium, bolted to the door, to stop stray laser light) which stopped the broken glass reaching his heart and vital organs, but his arms and waist were all cut up… He was damned lucky, and it could have been a lot lot worse