Sweden
Decades of biological research material has been lost at a Swedish university due to defective freezers.
At the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, research samples were stored in tanks cooled with liquid nitrogen. They were stored at a temperature of -190 degrees Celsius. Somewhere between December 22 and 23, things went wrong. The automatic supply of liquid nitrogen to 16 of the 19 cryogenic tanks was interrupted. They can normally operate for four days without additional nitrogen, but the outage lasted five days.
Result: the temperature in the tanks rose and a large amount of biological research material was destroyed.
“It happened possibly at the worst possible time in Sweden, a day before Christmas Eve,” said Matti Sällberg, dean of the university’s southern campus. It is possible that some of the lost material can still be saved. But according to Sällberg, the damage can easily amount to millions, local media speak of 45 million euros.
“Those who research leukemia are the hardest hit, they have been collecting samples from patients for the past thirty years,” says Sällberg. He emphasizes that the incident has no impact on the treatment of patients.
Research
The cause is still not clear. An internal investigation is underway at the university. The police have been informed. “I would like to emphasize that there is no evidence of sabotage,” Elizabeth Raschperger, director of the affected department, said in a statement. According to her, the alarm system also did not work properly.
The Karolinska Institutet is one of the most renowned medical universities in the world. The steel was stored in the campus’s Neo building, where experimental biomedical research is conducted.
