Estimated value of the samples thought to be in the millions as incident reported to police
  • SamsonSeinfelder@feddit.de
    56·
    8 months ago

    “Those worst affected are those researching leukaemia, they have gathered samples from patients over as much as 30 years,” he added.

    • spinnetrouble@sh.itjust.works
      6·
      8 months ago

      I interned with a hematologist who was incredibly excited to show me a slide of hairy cell leukemia, the one case he’d seen in his career (like 20 years by then). That was just a microscope slide, I can’t begin to imagine how bad the loss of research samples would be on someone.

  • TacoButtPlug@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    28·
    8 months ago

    If they know there’s a four day runway in a worst case scenario then someone should be scheduled to be in the lab at least for day four to check in the morning and evening. If the contents are that valuable then someone should be there. Just my operations experience backed opinion. Also curious if anything was documented so at least the data is preserved. So many ops questions for a prestigious facility.

    • Shurimal@kbin.social
      18·
      8 months ago

      Should, yes.

      We lost a summer-long experiment back in the uni. Everyone knew someone should come in at least one time in an evening to check whether the mission-critical timer actually works. But no-one bothered to do it. Was a lot of head scratching before the heads of the experiment figured out why the data was all out of whack.

      • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
        22·
        8 months ago

        Why wasn’t there a monitor for the monitor.

        For reals though, don’t they usually split samples up to prevent just such an occurrence?

        • spinnetrouble@sh.itjust.works
          17·
          8 months ago

          The failure was in supplying nitrogen to an array of 16 freezers. Unless samples were split and stored in different arrays without the same coolant source, they’d still have lost everything.

          It would be easy enough to create multiple sample sets to be stored that way, but it’d add an extra variable researchers would need to account and test for in their work as well as reducing sample capacity by at least half. A place as mighty and prestigious as the Karolinska Institute probably has a ton of graduate researchers, too, and everybody knows those people just graduate and leave all their shit behind without clearing out old samples.

          The whole thing is heartbreaking.

      • SheeEttin@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        8 months ago

        I assume there was, as modern freezers have built-in alarms, but I don’t see any mention in the article.