Lab Week Trivia
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8correct to beat the crowd
50 free Lab Week trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
These lab week trivia questions were written for Medical Laboratory Professionals Week, the last full week of April, when hospital and clinic labs celebrate the scientists, technologists and phlebotomists behind roughly 70 percent of clinical decisions. The quiz covers every bench: blood banking (Landsteiner, ABO and Rh, universal donors), hematology (the CBC, hematocrit, Wright's stain, the Coulter counter, sed rate), microbiology (Gram stain, agar, Petri dishes, blood cultures, MRSA), chemistry and immunology (HbA1c, troponin, ELISA, PCR) and the history of the lab from Leeuwenhoek and Hooke to HeLa cells and CLIA. It opens with a few questions about Lab Week itself. About a third of the questions are easy for anyone who has worked in or around a lab, a third are medium, and the rest will separate the specialists from the generalists. Use it for a break-room quiz, a Lab Week competition between departments, or a student review. Every answer has been checked against an encyclopaedic or professional-society source and each question links to the page that confirms it.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Medical Laboratory Professionals Week is held in the last full week of which month each year?
April
April. The week exists to show the public the people behind their test results, and a coalition of national laboratory organisations now runs it together.
Q 02Lab Week was launched in 1975 by the American Society for Medical Technology, known today by which initials?
ASCLS
ASCLS, the American Society for Clinical Laboratory Science. It called the celebration National Medical Laboratory Week, a name Canada's lab week still carries though the American one has since been renamed.
Q 03Which laboratory machine sterilises instruments and culture media with pressurised steam?
An autoclave
An autoclave. Under pressure, steam gets far hotter than boiling water, hot enough to kill bacterial spores; Charles Chamberland, a colleague of Pasteur, devised it in 1879.
Q 04Which Chicago-based pathology body, founded in 1922, certifies laboratory professionals through its Board of Certification?
ASCP
ASCP, the American Society for Clinical Pathology. Lab staff who pass its Board of Certification exams add the letters to their titles, as in MLS(ASCP).
Q 05Who identified the main human blood groups in 1901 and won the 1930 Nobel Prize for it?
Karl Landsteiner
Karl Landsteiner showed that blood from different people can clump when mixed, which explained why transfusions had so often killed and made it possible to match donor to patient.
Q 06Which blood type is often called the 'universal donor' for red cell transfusions?
O negative
O negative red cells carry none of the A, B or Rh markers that a recipient's immune system might attack, so hospitals reach for them in emergencies when there is no time to test a patient's type.
Q 07Which human blood group system was the first to be discovered, in 1901?
ABO
ABO. By mid-2025 the international list had grown to 48 blood group systems, but this first one is still the most important to match before a transfusion.
Q 08In the Rh system, which single antigen determines whether someone is 'Rh positive' or 'Rh negative'?
D
D. Someone without it can make antibodies after meeting D-positive blood, which is why D-negative mothers are offered anti-D injections to protect a later baby.
Q 09Carriers of which rare blood group, lacking even type O's H antigen, can receive blood only from one another?
Bombay phenotype
Bombay phenotype, first described in 1952 in the Indian city now called Mumbai. Routine typing reads it as group O, yet ordinary O blood can set off a dangerous reaction.
Q 10In a medical laboratory, what does the abbreviation CBC stand for?
Complete blood count
Complete blood count. A single small tube yields the numbers of red cells, white cells and platelets, which is why it is so often part of a routine check-up.
Q 11Hematocrit measures what?
The volume percentage of red cells in blood
The volume percentage of red cells in blood. Dehydration is the commonest reason for a high reading: no extra cells have been made, there is simply less plasma to dilute them.
Q 12Wright's stain, used on blood smears, mixes methylene blue with which red dye?
Eosin
Eosin. It colours red cells and certain granules pink while the blue dye picks out nuclei, and the white cells whose granules it stains brightest are the eosinophils.
Q 13Platelets are fragments of cytoplasm shed by which bone-marrow cells?
Megakaryocytes
Q 21In a Gram stain, what is the primary stain that gram-positive bacteria retain?
Crystal violet
Crystal violet. Iodine fixes the dye in the thick walls of gram-positive cells, while an alcohol rinse washes it straight out of thin-walled gram-negatives.
Q 22Fanny Hesse, who used it in her kitchen jellies, suggested which gelling agent to replace gelatin for growing bacteria?
Agar
Agar. It stays firm in warmth that turns gelatin to liquid, so her husband's laboratory could at last grow separate colonies of bacteria on a solid surface.
Q 23The newborn heel-prick blood test was first developed, in the early 1960s, to screen babies for which inherited condition?
Phenylketonuria
Megakaryocytes. Platelets have no nucleus of their own and are found only in mammals; birds and amphibians make do with whole cells called thrombocytes.
Q 14Which blood test, read in millimetres after one hour, measures how fast red cells sink in an upright tube?
ESR
ESR, the erythrocyte sedimentation rate. Inflammation makes red cells stick together in clumps that sink faster, so a high reading warns of trouble without saying where it is.
Q 15The machines that tally blood cells automatically work on a principle discovered by whom in the 1940s?
Wallace Coulter
Wallace Coulter found that each cell passing through a tiny opening briefly changes an electric current, so a machine could tally thousands of cells in the time a technician managed a few by eye.
Q 16Prothrombin time (PT/INR) is used to monitor patients taking which anticoagulant?
Warfarin
Warfarin. It was first sold as a rat poison and takes its name from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which backed the work; only later did doctors use small doses to prevent clots.
Q 17Serum differs from plasma in lacking what?
Clotting factors
Clotting factors. Serum is the liquid left once blood has clotted, so fibrinogen and its partners stay behind in the clot; plasma is drawn from blood that was never allowed to clot.
Q 18The blood-collection tube that fills itself by vacuum is sold by Becton Dickinson under which brand name?
Vacutainer
Vacutainer. Because the vacuum is set in the factory, each tube draws just the right amount of blood for the additive inside, and the colour of its stopper tells staff which additive that is.
Q 19What is a person who draws blood for a living called?
A phlebotomist
A phlebotomist. The word is built from ancient roots meaning 'vein' and 'cutting', and for centuries it meant bloodletting as a cure rather than drawing a sample for the lab.
Q 20After the alcohol rinse and counterstain of a Gram stain, gram-negative bacteria end up which colour?
Pink or red
Pink or red. Their thin walls let the rinse wash out the first dye, so only the counterstain shows; the Danish physician Hans Christian Gram devised the method in 1884.
Phenylketonuria, or PKU. A baby found to have it is put on a special low-protein diet straight away, which prevents the brain damage the condition would otherwise cause.
Q 24Who identified the bacteria behind both tuberculosis and cholera in the 1880s, helping to found modern bacteriology?
Robert Koch
Robert Koch. He also set out the tests still used to prove that a particular microbe causes a particular disease, known as Koch's postulates, and won a Nobel Prize in 1905.
Q 25A standard set of blood cultures consists of two bottles for which two kinds of organism?
Aerobic and anaerobic
Aerobic and anaerobic. One bottle suits organisms that need oxygen and the other those that cannot grow in it, so whichever kind has reached the bloodstream gets a chance to multiply.
Q 26MRSA is a strain of Staphylococcus aureus resistant to which family of antibiotics?
Beta-lactams
Beta-lactams. The family includes the penicillins and their relatives, and a single acquired gene, mecA, gives the bacterium a wall-building protein that almost none of them can block.
Q 27Which self-taught Dutch draper is known as the 'Father of Microbiology' for his 1670s microscope work?
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek ground his own single-lens microscopes as a hobby and was the first to see bacteria, which he described in letters to London's Royal Society as 'animalcules'.
Q 28Who coined the word 'cell' in his 1665 book Micrographia?
Robert Hooke
Robert Hooke. He was looking at a thin slice of cork, whose rows of tiny empty boxes he described as 'much like a honey-comb'.
Q 29Who invented the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, while working at Cetus Corporation in the 1980s?
Kary Mullis
Kary Mullis. His method turns a trace of DNA into vast numbers of copies within hours, which transformed medical testing and forensic science and won him a share of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Q 30Taq polymerase, which made PCR practical, comes from a bacterium first found where?
Hot springs
Hot springs. Thermus aquaticus was found in the steaming pools of Yellowstone in the 1960s, and its polymerase withstands the near-boiling heat that every PCR cycle requires.