No Merry Christmas for Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute: A failure in a cooling mechanism led to medical samples collected over decades becoming unusable over the holidays.
The monsters were stored with liquid nitrogen at a temperature of −190 °C. Sometime between December 22 and 23, the nitrogen supply to 16 cryogenic tanks was interrupted. Although these can last four days without new nitrogen, it was a full five days, rendering samples unusable.
Matti Sällberg, Dean of the Karolinska Institute, said:
According to media reports, the value of the lost samples is approximately 500 million crowns (about 40 million francs). According to Sällberg, there is no official estimate of the value, but he confirmed that it is in the millions. The damage is greatest when researching leukemia. Patient samples from 30 years of research were lost there.
The samples were used for scientific purposes only and their failure has no direct impact on the treatment of patients. However, they would still have been needed for future research.
The university reported the incident to the police, although internal investigations did not indicate sabotage.
The Karolinska Institute is known for the Nobel Assembly, which awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
(rbu)
source: watson
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