this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
134 points (99.3% liked)

Science

3191 readers
65 users here now

General discussions about "science" itself

Be sure to also check out these other Fediverse science communities:

https://lemmy.ml/c/science

https://beehaw.org/c/science

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] SaintWacko@midwest.social 21 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Wild that there wasn't any sort of automated monitoring

[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 27 points 9 months ago (4 children)
[–] SkyezOpen@lemmy.world 22 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] spinne@sh.itjust.works 17 points 9 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.

[–] RIPandTERROR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 9 months ago

The front fell off

[–] SaintWacko@midwest.social 3 points 9 months ago

Ah, I missed that. Well that sucks

[–] SheeEttin@programming.dev 2 points 9 months ago

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