Decades of research destroyed after freezer fails at Swedish university
Decades of research destroyed after freezer fails at Swedish university
www.theguardian.com
Decades of research destroyed after freezer fails at Swedish university
23 comments
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Because having remote monitoring for important assets is that hard.... x(
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You'd be surprised how many labs don't do temperature monitoring, let alone data analysis on that to try and predict when that asset will fail
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Not surprised at all. ;)
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University labs tend to be notoriously lax in comparison to commercial counterparts
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Not again!
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Most expensive hospital in the world everyone..
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🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: ::: spoiler Click here to see the summary Research samples collected over decades at a Swedish medical university were destroyed when a freezer malfunctioned during the Christmas holidays, the institute has said.
The samples were stored in tanks cooled with liquid nitrogen, at a temperature of -190C, at Karolinska Institutet (KI) in Stockholm.
Matti Sällberg, dean of KI’s southern campus, said on Monday: “It happened at possibly the absolute worst time imaginable in Sweden, just one day before Christmas Eve.”
“Those worst affected are those researching leukaemia, they have gathered samples from patients over as much as 30 years,” he added.
An internal investigation has been launched at the university and despite there being no indication of sabotage, the incident has also been reported to police.
Sällberg said: “Currently there is no indication that it was due to outside influence but the police report was done to cover all bases.”
Saved 54% of original text. :::
23 comments
This is odd. I run a similar but smaller facility in New Zealand (3 tanks). If the nitrogen supply fails we have about 18-20 days worth left in the tanks before they run dry. Even then I had a staff member checking every couple of days over Christmas anyway. I wrote an R script to analyse data from the tanks https://rhizobia.nz/r/N2-tanks.html to get a good idea of usage.
Just strange to me that a much more well funded organisation didn't do better.
I'm guessing the bureaucrats are very well funded.
That is weird. I don't think i've ever seen a sample dewar that couldn't last two weeks, most are fine for a month or more. How the hell are they designing their sample storage system, that it's only go of for four days? Are they insulating with Styrofoam?
Well, if reported to the police, foul play or neglect was involved.
The article says: "Currently there is no indication that it was due to outside influence but the police report was done to cover all bases."