chloroform and you
Last week one of the techs here dropped a bottle of chloroform on the floor. She's a ditz and asked me if she should do anything. I told her it was quite volatile and would disappear on its own quite well but that she might want to stand somewhere else--she was standing in the puddle of chloroform--or she might find herself passing out soon. I'm not sure why she was juggling the bottle in the first place. It's true that chloroform used to be a standard molecule in the molecular biologist's toolset but easy to use kits have largely replaced chloroform. We used to use it all the time to do DNA extractions. If you're interested, a DNA extraction is when you take a bunch of cells (from tissue culture flasks, blood, ground up tissue, etc), disrupt the cell membranes so that the DNA is released, and then collect the DNA. The problem is that DNA is a very long molecule and very sticky so you tend to get a ball of "gunk" which isn't usable. That's where th...