Congratulations to our winners of the Kirby lab Lab Mistake of the Year for 2022! We had 9 strong contenders submitted this year, with both our runner-up and our 1st place winner making lab history.
The runner up, lab manager Bryon Smith, makes history as the first staff member of the lab to win a prize in this competition since we founded it in 2018. Bryon won because he gave some mouse breeders to another lab member, forgot he gave them to that person and then later euthanized those animals, to the surprise of the person who thought they would be using them.
The 1st place winner makes history in that they are the first winner to come from another lab. The name here has been changed to protect the innocent. Let’s call them Jax. Jax wins for using a kit in our lab (which they had permission to do), but using it in such a way that they used 3x as much as they needed and somehow misplacing several pieces of this kit.
Always remember our Lab Mistake motto: “If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not doing science!” We celebrate our mistakes to normalize them and get us all more comfortable with the awkward, error-prone process of being researchers.