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 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.