I knew a guy who used to steal reagents from lab back in high school. It would be stuff like magnesium strips so he could ignite home-made thermite- nothing big. I myself have taken something from the lab before, but by accident. It was one of the few days I was wearing a lab coat and I had taken a few of the disposable Pastuer glass pipettes in back home with me in one of the pockets. Thankfully they didn't break when I bunched it up in the bottom of my bag, which is some kind of miracle.I actually want to buy a series of erlenmeyers diminishing in size down to a 25 mL one and set them up on a shelf at home matryoshka style. It's still not illegal to own erlenmeyers in Georgia, though you need a permit to buy them in Texas (everything is more ridiculous in Texas).
We had an incident at my university last year where a student was stealing chemicals from research labs (apparently over the course of a few weeks). It was only discovered when his wife called the police after finding his stash of chemicals at home. Among the chemicals was a large amount of KCN (and a bunch of other stuff).
ReplyDeleteAlso apparently during the investigation of his house, someone affiliated with the police wanted to test an unknown powder, which turned out to be some of the KCN, by putting acid on it (acid + KCN = /facepalm). Thankfully someone who knew what they were doing stopped them before they gassed everyone at the scene.
"his wife called the police after finding his stash of chemicals at home."
ReplyDeleteWhat a killjoy!
I don't remember stealing anything from the lab. Although I have to confess I once pocketed two slim blank lab notebooks that were supposed to be used only for lab records.