An Annoying Freezer Alarm
On how everyday technologies can make or break the backbone of scientific research
A janitor accidentally turned off a freezer, destroying over two decades of scientific research in one night.
Professor K.V. Lakshmi at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) studies photosynthesis. To do this research, she needs cells. A lot of cells.
These cells are stored in a freezer at -80ºC. A small fluctuation of 3ºC could destroy the cells. Thus, an alarm on the freezer sounded if the temperature rose or fell by 2ºC.
On September 14th, 2020, the alarm went off. The temperature in the freezer hit -78ºC. Lakshmi checked and determined her cells would be safe until a repair team could come by.
However, because of COVID, it would take a week for a repair team to make it to campus. Thus, Lakshmi and her team added a lock box around the freezer’s outlet, and they put a sign on the freezer door:
Three days later, on September 17th, a janitor was cleaning in the building when he heard — in his words — the “annoying alarms” beeping.
Hoping to stop the alarm, the janitor fiddled with the circuit breakers. He thought he was turning them “on,” but he mistakenly turned them off. He later said he was just trying to help.
The temperature rose to -32ºC.
The next day, when Lakshmi’s students walked into the lab, they saw what had happened. Most of the cells in the freezer were destroyed. More than 20 years of research melted away. Over $1 million worth of scientific research gone.
Our study of the world is shaped by technology. And, in some cases, our study of the world is only as good as that technology. If the tech fails, our studies fail.
Often, when we think about scientific technology, we think about “Big Science.” The Space Station. The Large Hadron Collider.
But so much of science is “small.” So much of science depends on everyday technologies.
For instance, consider the kitchen blender. A paper published earlier this month (July 2023) in Materials Science detailed how to modify a kitchen blender into “controllable laboratory mixers for mechanochemical synthesis of atomically thin materials.” The paper proposed using a blender to study two-dimensional materials like graphene (thin carbon sheets) that are useful in electronics design and pollution remediation.
Or, consider the toaster oven. Michelle Khine studies microfluidic devices, tiny silicon wafers with channels, pumps, and cellular growth chambers.
In 2006, she started a job at the University of California, Merced, a new UC campus that hadn’t finished building out its research spaces. Khine was impatient to start her work, but she needed to find a way to make tiny silicon wafers without her normal equipment. So, searching for a solution, “I remembered my favorite childhood toy, when I was six years old,” she said, referring to ‘Shrinky-Dinks,’ plastic sheets that students decorate and — when heated — shrink.
Khine pulled out her toaster oven and some Shrinky-Dinks. She used a regular office printer to copy a chip design onto a Shrinky-Dink. Then, she put it in the toaster oven, and it worked. She made a microfluidic device! She replaced tons of expensive equipment with a printer, a toaster, and a piece of plastic.
These everyday technologies — freezers, blenders, toasters — form the backbone of so much science. What, for you, might be a place to store ice cream or machine to make a smoothie is, for a scientist, a way to learn about the world. Scientific knowledge is built not only by ingenious people but also by the tools they use to discover that knowledge. Science, in other words, is technological.
Notes.
The RPI incident isn’t the first notable freezer malfunction in biology research. In 2012, a freezer malfunctioned at Harvard’s McLean hospital. Two alarm systems that were supposed to be triggered by a rise in temperature didn’t go off. This failure destroyed a third of the world’s largest donated brain tissue for autism research. 93 brains were damaged; 54 of those were dedicated to autism research. Geri Dawson, Chief Scientific Officer for Autism Speaks, said: “Although this event will affect the availability of tissue for future research, we cannot yet determine the level of impact.”
The RPI incident got lots of press coverage: CNN, The Hill, Yahoo News, The Guardian, Times Union, and Gizmodo, just to name a few.