There are several things that can make up a scientists worst nightmare, ranging from lack of funding for your research, being “scooped” (someone else publishes the same thing you’ve been working on before you can, so your research is no longer novel), and a myriad of factors within your experiments. So far, the worst that has happened to me is an undergraduate student in the lab accidently contaminating the cancer cells I was working on – I didn’t know the contamination had happened and the cells don’t show any signs that there is a problem for several weeks, so I put the cells in some mice for a 12-20 week long experiment, then found out about the problem. There was no way to tell if the cells that went into the mice were contaminated, so I had to wait out the whole course of the experiment before finding out that it didn’t work. I then had to repeat the experiment, which took an additional 24 weeks (about 6 months!), and this was the last experiment I needed for my MSc thesis, so I finished 6 months later than I wanted, 1 week before my PhD program started across the country, and I had to give up the month-long trip to Europe I had been planning and saving up for over the previous year.
All of this pales in comparison to what happened recently
at Harvard’s brain bank – 147 brains were lost when a freezer failed, and a
third of those brains were donated from deceased people that had autism. This
was one of only a few repositories in the US that distributes autism brain
tissue to researchers around the world. A significant source of brain tissue is
no longer available, which can hinder all sorts of future research into autism.
A bunch of things just seemed to happen all at once to cause this loss to
occur. Normally the brains are spread among a bunch of different freezers, but
they had been consolidated into one freezer for a visit from the Autism Tissue
Program. The freezer went down and the two sensors that monitor temperature and
send out an alarm also went down. From the sounds of it, no one knew anything
was wrong until the freezer (normal temperature -80C) was opened and it didn’t
feel cold inside. The odds of all these things failing during the time so many
brains were in one freezer seems highly unlikely, and an investigation is being
undertaken.
Something like this is always a fear for a scientist,
particularly when you have “precious” samples (especially from human donors,
more so when the samples can only be obtained after death) because it can take
a lot of time to replace what was lost. If your research relies on these
samples, months of time could be lost before enough samples are obtained to
resume experiments.
When I was working on my MSc thesis I was always worried
about my computer crashing, or losing my USB key, or something, so I had my
thesis and all my data backed-up in different locations, and I practically
slept with my laptop so I could easily grab it and run if there was a fire. I
don’t worry too much about incubators, fridges and freezers in the lab right
now, mostly because I don’t have anything that can’t be replaced if something
happened. My biggest worry in the lab is that someone will use my sterile water
and that will contaminate my experiment, which isn’t a big deal now, but will
be a huge issue if I’m working with mice. Soon I will constantly worry about
the BLT mice – they are so costly and one small thing could completely destroy
months of work.
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