This unexpected mishap made Brian Bennion reconsider his interest in benchwork.
In the late 1990s, during my second year as a graduate student at the University of Washington, I was preparing to take over an experimental and computational protein mutation project from a senior student.
We were studying how cytochrome b5—an effector protein that interacts with cytochrome P450—acted with other molecular partners through mutations on the protein’s surface. One Friday afternoon, she tasked me with growing cells to produce these mutated proteins.
I had a trio of three-liter Erlenmeyer flasks filled with substrate, ready to go into the shaking incubator. My student mentor already left for the weekend, and the last step was to add the appropriate antibiotic to prevent unwanted contamination. To my dismay, I quickly realized that we didn’t have enough to administer a full dose of the antibiotic to each flask. I decided to split and dilute the dose and left for the weekend.
When I returned to the campus on Monday, I noticed a strange smell throughout the connected buildings. By the time I reached the lab, my nose had dulled the scent. I checked my cultures, but I didn’t notice anything amiss. I planned to harvest the cells after a group meeting, but midway through the meeting with my student mentor and faculty advisor, there was a knock at the door. Two Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) staff announced, “Hey, you guys are doing something really nasty. We need to find it. We think it’s your cultures.”
It turned out that my cultures were indeed the culprit. EHS moved the flasks into a fume hood and determined that nothing truly toxic was involved; it was just a fungal contamination that produced a foul, rotten-popcorn-like butyrate odor. Thankfully, the smell cleared within a few hours. This mishap also earned me the department’s award for the most egregious mistake of the year—a melted Nalgene bottle that everyone who had committed a similar offense had to sign. Though, it worked out in the end as the project was eventually repeated successfully.
About six months later, I had to choose my next career step. I had already considered moving away from benchwork, and the smelly-cultures episode became the final nail in the coffin for me. I ultimately joined the computational lab of Valerie Daggett. Ironically, after grad school, my former student mentor from the cytochrome b5 project later helped me land a computational chemistry role at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. More than two decades later, I’m still happily doing computational chemistry, with my only hands-on chemistry now confined to the kitchen.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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