Have you ever been so fed-up with colleagues at work that you considered poisoning them?

Hopefully not, but at least one lab researcher can claim to have been stressed to the point of insanity. A postdoc in the urology department at the University of California, San Francisco, was arrested last week and charged this week for attempted murder, after he slipped a chemical buffering agent designed to control acid levels in lab solutions into a colleague's drink.

The postdoc, Benchun Liu, admitted to police that he had tried to poison his colleague in the lab, Mei Cao, twice before admitting to Cao what he'd done.

"If he hadn't have told her, we would have had no idea he was doing this," UCSF police captain Paul Berlin told the San Francisco Chronicle. Apparently Cao had noticed in each case that her water had turned blue, but drank it anyway. Cao said she had no adverse reactions but was taken to the hospital to get checked out. She's been released with no complications.

Liu won't give any reason for the attempted poisoning except that he was stressed out. "He won't give us a motive, but just keeps saying he's 'stressed out,' over and over," Berlin told the Chronicle.

I guess the stress of life in a research lab can be too much to bear for some. The lab's PI, Laurence Baskin, who studies cell signaling and bladder development, has refused comment. He's probably too busy checking all of his water bottles for a suspicious blue tint.