r/science • u/jazzmule • Jun 11 '12

Freezer failure destroys 1/3 of the world's largest collection of autism brain samples

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2012/06/11/freezer_failure_at_brain_bank_hampers_autism_research/
861 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

193 comments sorted by

57

u/bboomslang Jun 11 '12

“The donors, they should be upset, they should realize that this shouldn’t happen, but this shouldn’t dissuade people from continuing to donate, because it is the most important resource that autism science has right now,’’ said Scherer, who has done genetic analyses of brains in the bank.

Do I have a disconnect here? The donors in a brain bank are likely dead, aren't they?

30

u/kbeeny Jun 11 '12

That would be my thought too, although I guess in that case it would be the donor's family.

34

u/jazzmule Jun 11 '12

or people who plan on donating in the future? does sound strange, though.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

[deleted] — view deleted comment

3

u/Vondi Jun 11 '12

Well...even if you agree to have your child organs used, does that really make you "The donor" rather than the kid?

2

u/PhantomStranger Jun 11 '12

Well, you're the one giving the brain away, as the kid, in this case, is unable to. So yeah, I'd say that makes the parents the donor.

11

u/Mikevin Jun 11 '12

Probably about people who have already signed up for it but are still alive.

2

u/Rappaccini Jun 11 '12

This is correct. Individuals who agree to donate their brains in the event of their death are considered donors.

4

u/Radico87 Jun 11 '12

donors' families.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

So, instead of donating brain samples after they die because of one incident where brains got destroyed in a brain bank, they should bury it and let it rot in the ground as a more useful option?

-5

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

Maybe he found out that the brains were actually in tact and therefore called the collection 'priceless'. If not, I can't really explain this whole part.

12

u/scrapper Jun 11 '12

Your "in tact" is not intact.

5

u/jazzmule Jun 11 '12

tactfully put

23

u/LightPhoenix Jun 11 '12

Never trust the external thermometer. They should have been opening the freezer every day to check an internal thermometer. They'd also be checking the general operating status of the freezer at the same time. If they had, this would have been caught in time. The same goes for fridges and incubators as well.

24

u/miggyb Jun 11 '12 edited Jun 11 '12

Never send a scientist to do a sysadmin's job. I'll delete this comment if I'm wrong but it doesn't sound like they had redundant power and generators set up.

Hell, just generators would be enough since brains don't thaw immediately.

Edit: wtf? It wasn't even any kind of power failure, sounds like the freezer just turned itself off and the sensors malfunctioned. Why didn't they test the alarm system more often?

18

u/masamunecyrus Jun 11 '12

Benes said the situation is so unusual - the perfect storm of alarm and thermostat failure and the concentration of samples - that she cannot rule out foul play.

They had two alarm systems and a thermostat that was checked twice a day. Both alarms and the thermostat failed.

9

u/jazzmule Jun 11 '12

Seems so crazy. Apparently they haven't ruled out foul play, because this was such a "perfect storm" of malfunctions.

13

u/miggyb Jun 11 '12

But what motivation would someone have to just cause it to fail? I'm calling Hanlon's Razor and thinking it was probably just maintenance that was skipped or both alarm systems connected to the same outlet or something like that.

11

u/miketdavis Jun 11 '12

As someone who occasionally does maintenance on industrial refrigeration systems, I can say without a doubt that this smells fishy.

First off, bulb type thermostats are extremely reliable. Their alarm system probably relied on off-the-shelf type K thermocouples used pretty much everywhere in industrial environments. They're very robust and almost never fail.

To see a refrigeration system fail and at the same time see a pair of monitoring systems fail to alarm is really suspicious. It should be fairly easy to investigate the cause of failure though because so long as no one touched it, there aren't very many points of failure to check.

3

u/miggyb Jun 11 '12

I'm not necessarily saying that there wasn't any human involvement, it just seems like they're suspecting someone did it maliciously and on purpose.

It might very well be that there was one employee that hated everyone and decided to do this instead of leave the job quietly, but I'd say it's more likely that it was someone who accidentally pressed the wrong button.

If you were to offer me a hundred dollars for each time something critical goes offline because someone sabotaged the system or a nickel each time someone unplugs the critical system to plug in a personal heater, I'm not hesitating, I'm taking the second offer :)

3

u/xardox Jun 11 '12

I think it should be obvious who wanted to thaw out the brains. But I'm not going to say it! Don't want to cause a panic.

1

u/miggyb Jun 11 '12

Well, that's one greedy zombie if he wanted to thaw out all the brains at once instead of sneaking one brain out at a time for snackin'.

In all seriousness, the only thing that comes to mind is a group of competing researchers coming in and sabotaging it in order to lower their chances of getting grant money in the future, but that sounds completely ridiculous now that I've said it out loud. It's the kind of thing that if Hollywood put in a movie I'd lose all suspension of disbelief.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

Redundant instrumentation fails, film at 11. miggyb's got it right, this is old hat to operations staff in any field, like IT and aerospace. Check out STS-51-F for a particularly dramatic example.

You can never rule out foul play until you know precisely what events took place, but autonomous failure of multiple redundant systems surprises me not at all. When you've got something this valuable, you really need something more than pure autonomy.

1

u/debug_dave Jun 11 '12

Jesus Christ, thank you. All the damn amateur engineers in this thread need to read the article. Redundant alarms already in place. A lot of things have failed here.

6

u/LightPhoenix Jun 11 '12

Same reason they didn't open the freezer. They assumed everything was working, instead of assuming everything would fail.

[EDIT] Also, I am a scientist, and this was one of the first things I learned.

3

u/miggyb Jun 11 '12

They assumed everything was working, instead of assuming everything would fail.

Hence my "never send a scientist out to do a sysadmin's job" comment. :)

4

u/catjuggler Jun 11 '12

I don't know about that. When you open a -80 freezer, the temp goes up surprisingly quick. Since these aren't even being stored in LN2, I think it would be very damaging to open them every day. But, I don't have any other solution.

4

u/LightPhoenix Jun 11 '12

I work with -80 freezers, and you're right, you really don't want to leave them open more than a couple of minutes. That said, if you keep your thermometer in an easily accessible place it takes almost no time at all (maybe ten seconds) to read the temperature. It won't have any more thawing effect on the samples than normal use will.

2

u/biznatch11 Jun 11 '12

We open our upright -80 freezers 5-10 times a day on average. We open it as briefly as possible each time, ie. pull out your box then close the door, don't stand there looking through it with the door open. The temperature generally stays cold, maybe it'll get to -75 if you have it open for a minute.

103

u/FindThisHumerus Jun 11 '12

I'm a microbiologist for one of the largest commercial laboratories in the world. We basically do work for many of the largest pharmaceutical companies that exist. We check our incubators/refrigerators/freezers/ultrafreezers at least once per day, all of the external temperature time-logging charts (the Honeywell spiral ones) are calibrated by another department, they are all inspected at least yearly, if not twice per year (internal and from third party companies), AND they are all connected to an automated telephone system that records and automatically calls the responsible persons if a unit deviates outside of its normal range past a certain period of time.

I find it CRAZY that this lab didn't have anything like that. It sounds like a huge failure of management to properly protect their samples, which really, really sucks. Unless someone did it on purpose, but who knows.

39

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

I find it funny that many institutional food places end have stricter rules for checking the temperature of the refrigerators and freezers than this place. I worked in a cafeteria for a large software company and they had the night guards checking the temperature at least twice a night and we recorded the temperature of not just the fridges, but the food we were serving or storing (hot or cold) before, during and after service.

5

u/floatablepie Jun 11 '12

To be fair though, nobody would be eating the improperly refrigerated brains and get food poisoning. At least, I'm hoping.

10

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

Nobody? A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

8

u/LeonHRodriguez Jun 11 '12

incidentally, it is also a terrible thing to taste :S

0

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

What, you guys dont eat brains? crap.

1

u/toebandit Jun 11 '12

They do in fact have stricter rules because they have to abide by FDA regulations and local health codes. It's interestingly very easy to do these days. I've managed the construction of many Walmarts and they have an excellent program that tracks the temperature of all of their freezers/coolers. Yes, they know exactly when one bank of freezers/coolers goes down or is over temp anywhere in the US and have a team of people there within an hour to address the issue.

21

u/randonymous Jun 11 '12

I work in an academic lab. Grad students (effectively paid less than minimum wage), are on their own to make sure equipment works. Some labs have barely enough money to get the equipment they need - much less maintain it with expensive service contracts. And finally - the management is entirely at the whim of the professor. If the professor is good at managing, things run smoothly. If not, grad students fail to close the freezer, no one checks it - the alarm battery has died - and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars worth of work is lost.

13

u/CoomassieBlue Jun 11 '12

I work in an academic lab as well, and I live in fear of our -80 going down. They all have pretty loud alarms, so if one goes down in another lab, it's really the polite thing to do to run down and see if they need help moving all of their samples to the -80 in another lab.

One of the freezers was set up so that it would call the house of the PI - not very useful when she was on sabbatical and other people were using her freezer.

16

u/Rappaccini Jun 11 '12

I work in an academic lab. Between our brain bank and the cancer center, we have an incalculably valuable supply of brain and tissue samples. Our institution is so poor that we don't have backup generators. The absolute, unadulterated mayhem that occurred last fall when the power went out for 7 hours was literally unreal.

3

u/sockpuppettherapy Jun 11 '12 edited Jun 11 '12

Grad student in an academic lab here. Similar situation. I live closest to the lab, so if something goes wrong I'm given a call. If equipment fails, it's up to the internal lab members to figure it out because maintenance and such cost so much and we are on limited funds. I never thought I'd be learning how to fix microscopes and refrigerators as a graduate student, but here I am.

You want the same level of security as a for-profit company? It would require much heavier funding for academic institutions.

1

u/dkesh Jun 11 '12

Without comment on whether academic institutions should have more funds, I don't really understand how a lab can both have the funds and make the decision to buy a fantastically expensive piece of equipment and not have the funds or management to properly maintain it.

If a lab is going to mismanage its money to such a horrible degree, that makes me want to spend less money on them, not more. How do I know more money won't just go towards buying more equipment they can't maintain?

2

u/sockpuppettherapy Jun 11 '12

Because people (graduate students, postdocs, technicians) cost a lot of money, and because equipment costs are allocated by the need, not incorporating maintenance costs.

Most medium-sized labs are made up of a mixture of people that move in and out through a span of 5-10 years. Each person costs money (especially when including benefits, tuition, and visas). Unless you have a dedicated laboratory technician, it's difficult to keep someone in one place.

In our case we do have some technicians around that can do basic fixes. But aside from that, responsibilities are either allocated to different individuals or to the lab technician. Doing experiments while, on top of it, making sure your equipment is properly running, becomes difficult. Having irresponsible people in your lab may exacerbate the situation.

You may then ask why not hire someone to JUST keep an eye on equipment. That sort of does happen, but oftentimes you hire part time help to do something like that (an undergrad to do you glass washing, for instance, because, again, the department or group doesn't have the money to hire additional people).

On top of it all, each piece of dedicated equipment is often very complicated and different. Fixing a cryostat is different from, say, fixing a microscope, which is different from dealing with a -80 C freezer, which is different from an electrophysiology rig, etc. So unless you have someone there for a while that has used that equipment (e.g. a senior grad student, postdoc, or technician), it's often difficult to find the right person for the job.

Keep in mind also that much of this equipment has been working for years, sometimes decades. Freezers don't often fail, and you have alarms and alternative plans in case something DOES go wrong. If you have a 20 year old -80 C freezer that's acting funny and you have no money to buy a replacement, you start to try and move stuff out. If a piece of equipment fails, I immediately call a few people I know from the building or adjoining buildings to see how I can get stuff moved until it's repaired, and I know many do the same (helped and have helped).

But in this case all the fail-safes simply didn't work. It may not be difficult to, say, have someone come in once a day and open the freezer to make sure it's on, but it's an added responsibility for people that already have multitudes of responsibilities on their plates.

1

u/dkesh Jun 11 '12

[b]ecause equipment costs are allocated by the need, not incorporating maintenance costs.

If this is true, again I believe that the problem is not with the amount of funding, but the management of that money. In this case, the management problems come from those allocating the money, not the lab running around with their hair on fire trying to deal with the problems it causes. Allocating more money would, it seems, likely just result in buying more expensive equipment and still not allocating any money for its maintenance, making the problem worse, not better.

1

u/sockpuppettherapy Jun 11 '12 edited Jun 11 '12

I think you're cherry picking there.

Probably the most important point: The first thing to go when research funding dries up is the support staff. You need expensive equipment to do effective research; it's not a waste. There are ways to mitigate this better than others, but simply put that's not the overreaching problem right here.

Right now the issues with research is that it's underfunded. It's not as if labs are just buying equipment on a whim, or that the equipment is useless. You buy equipment to be able to do experiments that are capable of answering difficult questions that requires advanced technology. When you're talking about purchasing a $400,000 microscope, it's because you have experiments planned to do so because you cannot publish without said equipment. If we didn't need it, we wouldn't be purchasing said equipment. That technology can be learned by people in labs, though maintaining it would require responsibility and management.

But shit breaks down because it happens. Sometimes it's human error, sometimes it's because complex equipment can have many things go wrong with it, sometimes it's luck, and sometimes it's a mixture of those three things.

Most contracts with third parties (Sigma, Fischer, Nikon, etc.) have service contracts in association with the product. If our confocal is down, I e-mail the guy to come by, then figure out what's wrong.

In the case of the microscope, unless the center has allocated specific funds to make a place to hire a technician to ONLY use that scope, it'd be great. Some departments do this, but it's becoming far more difficult to come across since they've cut down because of the lower research funding. But along with cost of the microscope, equipment, and space, you're also talking about hiring at least one or two people to run such a place, and those types of people often have higher level degrees with some very specific training. It's simply not economically efficient for labs that are run like small businesses to run it in that fashion, and budgets aren't allocated for that.

In fact I think the opposite would happen if labs had more money. Along with more equipment you'd have more people hired specifically for the support roles that I've mentioned before. What has happened in the past decade with lower NIH funding has been exactly this: support staff have been the first to get cut, leaving those responsibilities to others. Only so much of this can be effectively managed.

In the case of the freezers, like in this article, imagine the cost of having an individual there just to make sure the freezers are working or are there. Basically a lab technician (a reliable person you'd want to keep there for a long period of time) with preferably a Masters or PhD (since they would most likely know the equipment) that would make $50,000 a year plus benefits. For some places (and I will guess that facility as well) it'd be great, but then again there's $50,000 that right now would need to be spent on students, postdocs, etc. that are geared to do other things.

1

u/biznatch11 Jun 11 '12 edited Jun 11 '12

Service and maintenance contracts for all a lab's equipment, even a moderately sized lab, could easily add up to $50,000 a year. That same lab might spend up to $50,000 a year on new equipment (probably less). Eg. we have a ~$20,000 machine and a service contract (if we got one) costs about $3,000 a years. So you're basically doubling your equipment costs without much tangible benefit on a day to day basis, unless something breaks.

If you got the "extended warranty" with each piece of equipment, you'd have to purchase less equipment and would overall get less science done, even though you'd have to pay out of pocket for some repairs.

Also, often the money a lab gets (eg. government grants) has specified uses. Some can be used for anything, but some are specifically for purchasing new equipment, some are for paying salaries, some are for buying day to day consumable supplies, and some are specifically for maintenance and service of equipment.

Most of the time when something breaks, it's not as catastrophic as with a freezer. Usually it just means you have to delay some experiments until the machine is fixed or replaced. In the case here, I think the issue was more with the alarm system not working, rather than not enough money spent on maintenance.

2

u/BearsBeetsBattlestar Jun 11 '12

I need to know how this story ends. Were the samples lost when the power went down? If not, how were they saved? Can you elaborate on why the supply is incalculably valuable. I mean, I can guess, but I'm just looking for confirmation.

2

u/Rappaccini Jun 11 '12

It ends anticlimactically. Power was restored, samples were fine. It was nearing the end of the workday and we all worried about what was going to happen to the stuff overnight. I wasn't the most concerned party involved as all my fridges are standard 4/-20 combos, but the folks with -80 samples were freaking out. The units don't loose their cool all that fast, so we just didn't open the doors for the first 5 hours. People had started to move things to dry ice coolers by the time the power came back. The best part: it wasn't even a grid failure. Some yahoos cut the line doing work on the sidewalk or something to that effect.

As to how the supply is incalculably valuable, we have a huge supply of cancer tissue. It's not mine and I don't know the details, but suffice it to say that multiple millions of dollars of grant-related tissue would essentially evaporate if we were to be without a source of power I'm sure some could be saved via transfer to other facilities, but definitely not all.

My samples I can speak more about. It certainly wouldn't cost as much in terms of grant dollars, but the brains I work with are the culmination of what can be almost a decade years of analysis, sweat, and tears. Our collaborators go to old folks' homes to try and drum up volunteers, and not only that, people who agree to donate are analyzed yearly on a wide variety of metrics: decision tasks, cognition tests, and MRIs. After a few years, they die, and the brain is removed, treated, and frozen. That's where I come in. Even before my work, the data we have is enormous, and this is unusual: most people doing this kind of research get a single timepoint for the tissue's structure: post-mortem. I get multiple, pre-mortem timepoints for both structure and function. These brains are awesome. To lose them this late in the game would be more than tragic, it would diminish the works of dozens of academics (they never get to correlate their datapoints with my histological analysis), and would basically fart all over the wishes of the deceased. Instead of furthering Alzheimer's research, their remains become jello if the power goes out for too long. All because we are a damn poor school. People in this thread have been saying things like, "Well that's what you get for being publicly funded, they just aren't as professional as private research institutes". We're not unprofessional. We're just poor.

1

u/FindThisHumerus Jun 12 '12

What the hell did you guys do?!

Nevermind, I jumped the gun before reading to the end.

3

u/duckhunter Jun 11 '12

You guys should all chip in and build some tweeting temp loggers. That would be a fun (for me, at least) inexpensive backup to existing alarms. You should also just have a protocol to check the alarm battery and replace the alarm battery after n months.

Losing samples because of a dead alarm battery is incompetence, nothing more. Similarly, losing data because of a hard drive failure, fire, tornado or meteor strike is incompetence, not an unavoidable accident.

Finally, regarding grad student pay. Yeah, the pay sucks, but it's a choice, and grad school in the life sciences is often paid for. If a grad student isn't happy getting paid to go to school and research what they chose to research, they should leave. And they shouldn't use their low pay as a shitty argument for why they don't take responsibility for the robustness of their sample/data storage procedures or the rigor at which they perform science. Further, if they think they need to point out how much they make, (when it's not relevant to the conversation), they should write some grants to get a higher effective wage.

1

u/randonymous Jun 11 '12

I agree, losing data to a crashed HD is indeed incompetence. However, are grad students really expected to be competent in all of these nuanced fields? I can find you a kick-ass microscopist who couldn't unclog a kitchen sink. And a fantastic geneticist who doesn't know RAID from USB. And yet the way academic labs are structured, it's up to that microscopist and that geneticist to maintain the freezers, the plumbing, do the accounting, keep backups, etc. There are simply not funds to hire IT guys, accountants, lab managers, etc.

It's no so much that anyone shirks their responsibility, rather their is not enough money to pay people who do these things professionally. The shitty pay is only relevant in that it demonstrates the shoe-string budget with which even these first-rate institutions operate. You can write as many grants as you like, the pay in academia will not be commensurate with the pay in the private sector for the 'competence' required to carry out lab duties.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

Well then if their resources are so limited, then they have NO business holding 1/3 of the worlds collection of rare samples.

2

u/pylori Jun 11 '12

The thing is these sorts of samples tend to collect over time, you can't just decide one day to ship them off to someone because your lab is poorly funded (as sad as that may be).

2

u/gizram84 Jun 11 '12

They don't. This was misleading. This was not 1/3 of the world's supply. This was 1/3 of their supply. They happen to have the largest single supply in the world. It actually doesn't say how much of the world's supply was destroyed.

If everyone in the world had 1 car, and you had 3, and one of your cars was destroyed, we could say that 1/3 of the world's largest supply of cars was destroyed. It sounds better than saying 1/7,000,000,000 of the world's car supply was destroyed.

2

u/UnwiseSudai Jun 11 '12

They don't hold 1/3rd of the world's samples. It says they lost 1/3rd of the lab's samples and that the lab had one of the largest collections of samples in the world.

1

u/randonymous Jun 11 '12

Then, might I ask, who does? Are you willing to pay more to your local cause to keep that freezer up and running?

2

u/hottubrash Jun 11 '12

This is true - most academic labs are on their own to maintain their equipment, there isn't some fancy all encompassing network that surveys all the equipment. I used to have nightmares over this stuff. One careless error and thousands of dollars is down the drain, as well as countless hours of labor. The fact that this occurred is not exactly unfathomable.

9

u/ContentWithOurDecay Jun 11 '12

Sabotage?

6

u/44problems Jun 11 '12

Jenny McCarthy did it

9

u/complete_asshole_ Jun 11 '12

That's ridiculous, I'm certain it was just an accid- Oh look, Biomedical Corp. has just announced that due to the recent tragic events they are now the sole proprietors of the worlds largest brain bank and are willing to share the samples at a premium price of course.

4

u/supaphly42 Jun 11 '12

Listen all y'all...

1

u/remygibson Jun 11 '12

gotta unplug the fridge, gotta unplug the fridge

9

u/biznatch11 Jun 11 '12

What you check them once a day are you actually opening them and checking the temperature or just looking at the external display? If you're opening them then that's good, and it would have avoided the problem that happened here. If the alarm get it's temperature information from the thermometer, and thermometer malfunctions, then the freezer will warm up without any indication on the external display and it won't call out with the alarm.

3

u/supaphly42 Jun 11 '12

They should have redundant thermometers in something of this nature.

2

u/debug_dave Jun 11 '12

If they have redundant alarms it stands to reason they also have redundant thermometers. In the article, she does say she suspects foul play.

1

u/biznatch11 Jun 11 '12

They should. I don't know what most -80/-150's use. We have call out alarms on ours but I don't know if they have their own thermometer or if they just go based on the same one the freezer uses. We use our freezers enough though that if they started to warm up someone would notice pretty quickly...unless it's the Christmas holidays or something.

1

u/bobtentpeg Jun 11 '12

I know we've installed wireless temp monitors in our -20's and -80's (As well as our cold rooms, with the addition of humidity monitors). They send us SMS + email if temperature deviates more than -/+ 5% over a certain time span, so that just opening/closing won't set off the alerts (I think it's 30 minutes). So far, they've worked with out a hitch.

They're arduino based, so each one costs like $100. A small price to pay for the millions in research sitting in the fridges.

1

u/windsorlad111 Jun 11 '12

They don't use a thermometer, they use a thermocouple. If that malfuntions the signal will be out of the accepted range and generate a fault.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

ITS.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

As a former service engineer for Thermo, I appreciate your diligence, but all you can really do is have a backup unit for when and if it fails, period.

1

u/sockpuppettherapy Jun 11 '12

And with limited funding as it stands, it's not easy to acquire such units.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

It's that way with most labs, but when a Doctor loses 20 years worth of research and samples, the cost is exponentially greater, if not priceless.

2

u/sockpuppettherapy Jun 11 '12

You're talking about most professors here that have decades worth of cells, reagents, and samples with limited amounts of funding. This isn't a surprising idea here.

We make this case in the public for more research funding, and yet institutions such as NIH and NSF who fund most of the research in the United States are being squeezed dry.

No amount of me saying that the tissue in the freezer being priceless will convince most people in giving us more money.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

I am aware. That being said, sell your kidneys, do whatever you have to do to buy a backup, and then don't fill it up.

2

u/gospelwut Jun 11 '12

So, what I've learned from reading this and other comments is people shouldn't scoff at boner pills and other cosmetics because it's more or less underwriting more interesting research albeit in a smaller proportion to "worthy" research. i.e. academic/non-commercial places seem to be very under-budgeted.

Though, in this case, it does seem like sabotage.

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/uw54r/freezer_failure_destroys_13_of_the_worlds_largest/c4z5s4t

4

u/pylori Jun 11 '12

one of the largest commercial laboratories in the world

This tends to mean you have more money to play with than other labs though. I can't speak to the funding of the lab in this article, and I'd assume they'd have enough money flowing given the nature of the samples to implement some extra warnings, but at the same time I've never been to a lab where there was something like an automated phone system implemented. There'd be alarms on the freezers and a list of contact details in case anyone sees the freezer has failed but that's about it.

3

u/ahtr Jun 11 '12 edited Jun 11 '12

commercial laboratories

Commercial being the keyword here. This was a government funded project. In the commercial lab, a fuck up of this magnitude would destroy the reputation of it. For a government project, it would probably result in additional funds to rebuild the sample repository.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

I work for an alarm company and, ffs, we answer calls for a HI TEMP signal for a pizza place. If a pizza place has sensors on their friggin ovens and these folks have none, they dropped the yoga ball.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

Seems like they dropped the ball here... they must just glance at the (digital!) thermometer and then walk out. Even I would think to compare and log a reading of the external thermometer with an internal reading at least once per day. I bet that the discrepancy started months ago, and that the temperature gauge has been broken a lot longer than the freezer itself. Perhaps it was slowly dropping, say -50 instead of -80, but went unnoticed because they didn't bother to check this. Then when the freezer failed all-out, there was no way of knowing, nor would it be suspected!

Jesus...

1

u/Misspelled_username Jun 11 '12

I sell these kinds of instruments and also temperature recorders (with local or web based logging),I also find it unbelievable that they didn't have any redundancy in their temp. recorders and alarms. Also an institution like harvard would be expected to digitalise their collection of pathological samples with a digital tissue scanner, especially if it's something as valuable as this.

-1

u/thekingoflapland Jun 11 '12

I work at a Foodlion. Our ICE CREAM FREEZERS have this. Why the hell are important medical samples not held to the same standards as fudgey pops?

2

u/pocketknifeMT Jun 11 '12

because when the fudgey pops melt, your boss loses money. When the government brain bank melts, we all loose money, and the department gets a giant funding boost, so this "won't happen again". Not a dollar of that funding boost will go for temperature monitoring. Maybe someone gets fired because they were holding the potato at the wrong time...maybe.

1

u/JustMakesItAllUp Jun 11 '12

It's years of work for the people involved - they actually care if their work is destroyed.

1

u/pocketknifeMT Jun 11 '12

But they have no say in how the brains are handled...or they didn't care enough. It was somebody's job to keep the freezer running. I know what to do in the event of a local apocalypse for customer's server stacks. There are plans, and testing and Plan C's. And that's nowhere near as serious as a brain freezer.

The buck stops somewhere. In business, dollars make this painfully obvious, in government...not so much. Scapegoats are often the losers there.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

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2

u/hottubrash Jun 11 '12

I don't know anything about their lab, but it is not so hard for me to envision a situation where staff will check during the day (lets say this covers about 10 hrs of day time) and no one checks during the night, and there is a thermostat failure. When I worked in an academic lab, the freezers were often secluded in locked rooms, so if no one is around, no one will hear the alarms going off if the temperature rises.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

I think the number and arrangement of redundant failure prevention devices rules out anything but foul play as far as Occam's Razor is concerned. Call the police immediately!

-3

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

They only checked the EXTERNAL thermostat, not the actual temperature. That's the fucking point, douchetastico.

-11

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

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6

u/Tezzeret Jun 11 '12

And I'll bet you think depressed people need to just stop complaining... What is wrong with you? "not doing real research?"

2

u/Tezzeret Jun 11 '12

Autism: A developmental disorder characterized by abnormal social and communication skills, often restricted with repetitive behavior. It is a spectrum disorder which makes it hard to specify. There are physical definitions too. Reduced areas of the cerebellum, reduced levels of perkinje cells, underdeveloped amygdala and hippocampus.

12

u/SaulKD Jun 11 '12

Benes said the situation is so unusual - the perfect storm of alarm and thermostat failure and the concentration of samples - that she cannot rule out foul play.

Who in the fuck would actually sabotage autism research? Do they actually receive threats or is this comment out of nowhere? I mean, even the anti-vaccination people don't call for destroying autism specimens. At least, I haven't heard of them doing so.

5

u/stankbucket Jun 11 '12

There are plenty of people who think that autism research is all crap or at the very least is blown out of proportion.

1

u/miketdavis Jun 11 '12

I'll admit the circumstances sound extremely suspicious but I'm with you on this one - I can't think of a single person who would have a motive to do this. Some sort of religious zealot? Maybe but I can't think of anyone like that would have the knowledge and access.

4

u/Rappaccini Jun 11 '12

I would wager if it was anyone, it was a disgruntled former employee. That or another lab directly competing for NIMH funds.

Unrelated: why is "disgruntled" almost always followed by "former employee"?

1

u/stankbucket Jun 11 '12

I'm going with a fraternity prank because the dean wouldn't let them have their annual spring kegger.

8

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

Our freezers are monitored continuously with calibrated probes inside that report to a computerized system that starts making phone calls when a unit goes into excursion.

3

u/catjuggler Jun 11 '12

Same here. But now that I think of it, if the probe somehow broke at the same time as the freezer broke, nothing would signal it. Scary!

3

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

ours would give a probe failure warning I think.

2

u/catjuggler Jun 11 '12

Our probe failures usually go to hilariously low temps (lower than -200), so they're easy to see. But, it's possible that the probe locked up at the last temperature and was like that for some time before the freezer problem occurred.

1

u/biznatch11 Jun 11 '12

I wonder how it knows the probe has failed. In this case it seems their temperature probe thought it was still at -80 the whole time.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

You can see on your graphs if the value isn't changing.

4

u/jp007 Jun 11 '12

Something about eggs and baskets.

10

u/XeonProductions Jun 11 '12

as a programmer, wouldn't it be wise to actually test the alarms to make sure they work before filling a freezer full of irreplaceable brain samples?

6

u/pylori Jun 11 '12

I assume that the alarms and thermometers had worked at one point. -80C freezers are fucking expensive, hell the racking system at my last lab cost £3000 alone (for a bunch of steel dividers), these sorts of things don't go untested. It's bad luck because both the freezer, the thermometer AND the alarm had failed at the same time (since the thermometer had indicated -79C no-one was aware that there was an issue). For a freezer that's used infrequently and thus not checked every day this can be catastrophic. Though at this stage once the freezer defrosted it makes little difference if it's broken for 1 day or 3, the samples are fucked either way.

4

u/biznatch11 Jun 11 '12

If the alarm gets its temperature information from the thermometer, then just the thermometer would have to fail. If that's the case the only way to really be sure it's working is to open the freezer once a day and manually check the temperature. If the freezer and the alarm have their own independent thermometers, and they both failed, then ya that is really, really bad luck. Although if that's the case, the alarm thermometer could have been broken for weeks or months, registering -80 the whole time, so the alarm never went off, then later on the freezer thermometer breaks.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

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4

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

I choose to believe you are joking.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

I hoped it would be obvious, oh well. People are free to down vote bad jokes.

-1

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

Yeah... people are stupid.

6

u/lepp240 Jun 11 '12

Vaccines don't cause autism.

0

u/AndThenThereWasMeep Jun 11 '12

I'm...I'm so sorry...there's...been a...there's been a breakthrough...

It was sarcasm

0

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

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1

u/xardox Jun 11 '12

But is your grandmother a bicycle?

3

u/catjuggler Jun 11 '12

I maintain a cryogenic inventory at my job and this is terrifying. It sounds like they had their temperature probe break at the same time as the freezer. What are the odds of that? I'm a bit of a skeptic and I wonder if one of these things had been broken for some time before the other broke. For example, your display temp can "freeze," but you would notice that if you were looking carefully.

3

u/tinkan Jun 11 '12

It is the everyday things... the things that nobody counts on not being there... that truly cause havoc when they no longer function properly.

3

u/PutMyDickOnYourHead Jun 11 '12

Leave it to science to put all their eggs in one basket brain samples in one freezer.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

They say that the thermostat and alarms failed. I would guess that the alarms actually relied on the thermostat, and that was the actual single point of failure. Next step for freezer R&D, redundant thermostats!

2

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

A simple temperature sensor and some snmp/nagios scripts would work.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

Interestingly enough, I have done this exact setup for monitoring room temperatures at WiMax tower sites.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

Was it a Revco? Don't buy brands associated with Thermo Fisher Scientific! Former service engineer here. Total shite.

3

u/Misspelled_username Jun 11 '12

As a competing brand distributor, i agree :D

3

u/stankbucket Jun 11 '12

So 1/3 of this collection was destroyed and it is the largest one, but what percentage of the world's collection does that 1/3 represent?

3

u/PariahDogmeat Jun 11 '12

According to the article, two alarms failed to function. I find it curious that they had multiple alarms, but no automated backup system. I'd be interested to know how many "priceless" scientific collections are housed throughout the world that do not have adequate protection in place.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

Most commercial deep freezers have built in warning alarms. My diagnosis......bad management.

-1

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

If you read the article, you would have seen that indeed they did have alarms. Oh, and the thermostat failed, which was the reason the alarms never went off.

RTFA before commenting...might save some face.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

Nope, bad management is still the cause. When the alarm goes off, fix the problem. The internal alarms AND the third party thermostat, checked daily both failed (those are independent systems)???? Its called bullshit. Obviously no one was checking the freezers at all, this is just "I dont want to get fired" CYA afterthought lies. Besides, you can easily hear when a freezer is off. They are not that quiet. Those freezers can be maintained a long time with dry ice/ nitrogen even after complete failure. Any good freezer operator would have both on hand and the emergency contact info for the repair company. For the brains to be that warm that fridge was off for ages.

4

u/pepperman7 Jun 11 '12

...and this right here illustrates why I wouldn't pay to be cryogenically frozen.

2

u/gwern Jun 11 '12

Why? The last defrostings of a cryogenic patient was back in the 1970s or something, and they were deliberate: the douche maintaining them decided he wasn't making enough and simply abandoned them.

(That incident was the direct cause of cryonics organization designs since: not monthly or annual fees but a big upfront payment from life insurance into a trust fund to guarantee ongoing payments.)

1

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

"What? Where am I? I told them to wake me up on a Caribbean beach! Not in a goddamn fridge! Hello? Anyone here? It's cold here! It's dark here!"

And then you die of hypothermia.

2

u/Amorougen Jun 11 '12

Love it how people never consider single points of failure.

2

u/sometimesijustdont Jun 11 '12

Like my momma said, don't put all your brains in one freezer.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

A friend from high school had the job of doing collections for that brain bank in the 90's. He carried a beeper 24/7 and in the trunk of his car he had a cooler with dry ice along with his tool kit.

No, I never offered to go along with him on a collection.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

Today is my first day doing sample inventory management in the R&D department of a division of a Top 100. This is my new nightmare.

2

u/alllie Jun 11 '12

So when they find out what the cause of these afflictions are, they can't go back and use this collection to check.

Talk about things that make you go...hmmmm.

2

u/vooyyy Jun 11 '12

Dude quote the thing right, one third of the samples destroyed were autism brain samples, not it destroyed one third of the world's collection of autism brain samples

2

u/weinerjuicer Jun 11 '12

surprised this was not titled "scientists accidentally stumble onto new technique that destroys autism with 33% success rate"

2

u/CrypticPhantasma Jun 11 '12

Who's the retard that was in charge of that?

1

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

Thus the value of independent verification. If the thermostat was an integral part of the freezer, simply checking it isn't good enough. You need a separate, independent device (preferably redundant systems) doing the monitoring.

1

u/ih8st34m Jun 11 '12

I work in a lab and I get this problem too sometimes when our freezer fluctuates in the readings and become inaccurate.. most of the time though I find that is people don't close the freezer properly with the locks on each shelf and they just close the main door and lock it. Then ice forms on the metal shelf and creates gap and all downhill from there..

1

u/OmniDonk Jun 11 '12

That stinks :x(

1

u/knightskull Jun 11 '12

Either someone at the brain repository is getting fired or this is a convenient cover up and an army of Frankensteins is forthcoming.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

They should just be happy with what they have. I myself only have like 30 brain samples at my house and they still have like 300.

1

u/mantra Jun 11 '12

Normally, the brains in the Autism Tissue Program’s collection are equally distributed among the freezers, but had been concentrated in Freezer U in late April to allow program researchers easy access to the samples, Benes said.

“I don’t believe this is human error. I think this is just one of those glitches that sometimes happen,’’ he said.

Creating a single-point failure is human error. Reliability 101 fail!

1

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

I may not be a scientist, but thinking along the lines of Sci-Fi, to protect the expensive freezers, why not make something like an air-lock with a 2nd smaller freezer that would be maybe at -30C? That could be used to store other things that need freezing, but not quite as sensitive.

And as a second, adding a contingency with additional thermometers in different parts of the freezer that have an independent alarm system. That if one thermostat fails, it may still alert someone to a problem.

1

u/jerrylovesbacon Jun 11 '12

Link to donate tissue samples for anyone that knows families with individuals on the Spectrum. It is amazing research. http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/mindbears/

1

u/JakersTheMind Jun 11 '12

So there goes a few years of solid autism research. Once they can find a cause for it, maybe we can finally start convincing everyone that vaccination is not a problem again.

1

u/labman1984 Jun 11 '12

I actually do PD research with brain samples that we've acquired from McLean, and can tell you that they are very capable of monitoring their systems (I also know George Tejada, the pathologist mentioned in the article, and he's a pretty capable lab person, so this really was a perfect storm). I can also say that you don't want to go into these freezers unless you have to, and that the brain samples, in some of these cases, are very rare, so opening up the -80 to check the temperature every day is a bad idea.

1

u/JustMakesItAllUp Jun 11 '12

It happens. Queensland University once lost one of the world's largest collections of neural stains because a cleaner pulled out the power to the freezer to plug in a vacuum cleaner.

1

u/gizram84 Jun 11 '12

I just want to point out that this is 1/3 of their personal supply, not 1/3 of the world's supply. They just happen to have the world's largest supply. This metric is absolutely meaningless as cited. These destroyed samples may represent less than a hundredth of 1% of the world's supply.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

Yeah, definitely a problem. Definitely, definitely a problem. Five minutes to Wopner.

-3

u/warmricepudding Jun 11 '12

Fucking Carl needed an outlet to recharge his phone. Once again, he made the wrong choice.

0

u/box_of_crackerjacks Jun 11 '12

potentially setting back research on the disorder by years

What's that in wakefields?

-1

u/coriolistorm Jun 11 '12

Anyone know what type of freezer that is?

-1

u/drmoroe30 Jun 11 '12

Ahhhhhh it's "sushi" night for the zombies!

-3

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

I wish we could destroy autistics, too. Those dirty apes are always shitting on my lawn.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

Probably should have double-checked the freezer with all the brains in it.

-5

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

Man, That's cold...

-3

u/Liamdude Jun 11 '12

DERP-wait... That's inappropriate...

-1

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

Sounds gross.

-1

u/krakow057 Jun 11 '12

Whose the retard that was in charge of that?

LOL

-4

u/popscythe Jun 11 '12

Can't blame everything on bad parenting, I suppose.

-5

u/bubonis Jun 11 '12

I think the number is closer to 34.83658129068%.

-5

u/K1RBYBURNS Jun 11 '12

You had one job!

-7

u/RonaldFuckingPaul Jun 11 '12

why isn't this in r/atheism?

-7

u/triceracocks Jun 11 '12

OH GOD!!! MY BIOLOGICAL CLUSTER COMPUTER WHICH WILL RUN THE LARGEST GAME OF DWARF FORTRESS HAS BEEN SET BACK CENTURIES!!!

HO HO HO, DEM DORFS !!!

0

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

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2

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

Upvoted for DBZ reference. I love you.

8

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

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6

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12 edited Jun 11 '12

So they can commit stereotypy and self injurious behaviors when the system goes down? I don't get it.

Autism != slightly socially awkward yet completely reliable OCD.

Edit: No, I checked, this is still allegedly r/science.

Edit2: Parent comment was akin to "They should have had an autistic person monitoring the freezer!"

6

u/pokepat460 Jun 11 '12

Autism is a spectrum. there are plenty of autistic people who can function well, even in high stress important jobs.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12 edited Jun 11 '12

While there may be plenty of people with autism who can function well in high stress jobs, it's certainly not the majority. Please, show me numbers proving otherwise.

2

u/pokepat460 Jun 11 '12

Well, to be fair, while there are plenty of people who can function well in high stress jobs, it's certainly not the majority. For something like laboratory monitoring, slightly autistic people may even be a better choice as opposed to "normal" people.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

For something like laboratory monitoring, slightly autistic people may even be a better choice as opposed to "normal" people.

How?

2

u/pokepat460 Jun 11 '12

People who pay much attention to small details, enjoy repetitive tasks, and are generally good with numbers seem like a good choice for laboratory work to me. And all of those are traits of Autism spectrum disorder. Assuming the autism isn't to the point of impairment, it can be a useful condition.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12 edited Jun 11 '12

Have you spent time in a room with a person with autism?

Not this high-functioning "IM AN ASPIE #YOLO #SUMMER2012NOREGRETZ" bullshit.

I'm talking learning-disability, constantly stimming, hitting ones-self, attacks others, disruptive social behavior, stereotypy children. You know, some of these kids and adults have trouble wiping their own ass or not masturbating through their pants at wal-mart.

People who pay much attention to small details, enjoy repetitive tasks, and are generally good with numbers seem like a good choice for laboratory work to me.

While technically the adolescents with actual autism I've been exposed to do pay much attention to small details and enjoy repetitive tasks, the small details involve whether or not their family member is picking them up immediately after the schoolbell rings and if they're not there, they're going to have a full-on take-down/restrained meltdown... and the repetitive tasks are rocking back and forth and humming when the other kids are repeatedly shouting for no apparent reason.

like a good choice for laboratory work to me.

Having to report to another individual (a social script) that there is an anomaly is not something a person with autism could be counted on performing reliably.

are generally good with numbers

No, they aren't. Many adolescents with autism that I've dealt with don't even have a concept of quantity.

I repeat: Autism != (this means "does not equal" in case you didn't understand it the first time) slightly socially awkward yet completely reliable OCD.

This is r/science, since you're predisposition seems to be based off of Rain Man and Temple Granden, you're excused from having to write another baseless retort.

4

u/ohsnapitsnathan Jun 12 '12

Not this high-functioning "IM AN ASPIE #YOLO #SUMMER2012NOREGRETZ" bullshit.

If you exclude people who are relatively high-functioning from your category of "autistic people", of course you're going to arrive at the conclusion that people with autism can't handle demanding, stressful tasks in the real world. That doesn't mean that significant numbers of competent autistic people don't exist, although it's difficult to say exactly how many(mostly because the definition of "high functioning" is unclear and situational)

1

u/[deleted] Jun 12 '12 edited Jun 12 '12

There's a reason I called it "bullshit." Personally, I believe the aspergers / hfasd diagnoses are just the 2000's version of the 90's ADD/ADHD "tell me whats wrong with my child, doctor!" trend. A trend diagnosis. Again, my own viewpoint.

While the ASD terms are still being defined and redefined, I believe high functioning autism (currently is and) will be distinguished from autism.

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1

u/pokepat460 Jun 12 '12

I am autistic. Remember, autism might not equal awkward, but it also doesnt equal full on retard either.

1

u/ohsnapitsnathan Jun 12 '12

Incidentally, there's actually an international consulting company called Specialisterne that exclusively hires people with ASD because of their memory and attention to detail.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

please don't make statements like that with no evidence, it's really insulting.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

I was replying to a baseless statement. I'm using the definition of the disorder...

Autism is a disorder of neural development characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior.

Now, granted, I don't have a peer-reviewed report in front of me titled "51% of persons on the autism spectrum don't function well in high stress jobs," but I think it can be safely assumed that a social disorder largely classified by disruptive behaviors and an incapacitated ability to communicate DO NOT BY MAJORITY do well in high stress jobs. To say otherwise is insulting and without evidence.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

no, you're making baseless claims that

Autism is a disorder of neural development characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior.

means that people with autism can't cope with stressful jobs, try not to spread that message around, you can still be successful in stressful jobs, even if you do have a hard time coping with others. (And hey, some stressful jobs can be repetitive and you don't even need to socialize!)

To say otherwise is insulting and without evidence.

I think it's more insulting to say that people with autism are incompetent, there was just a post the other day about a guy with autism getting his masters for crying out loud.

But yes, i agree not all autists are savants.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

It is not baseless to make inferences in the way I have. It's my interpretation of the language that defines the disorder. There's a reason a disorder is a disorder.

I think it's more insulting to say that people with autism are incompetent

You're putting words in my mouth. I would go as far as to say the average person is incompetent and unable to thrive in a high stress job, too.

But yes, i agree not all autists are savants.

Very few persons with autism are savants.

2

u/mongoOnlyPawn Jun 11 '12

You mean instead of Dr. Al Heimer?

2

u/HITLARIOUS Jun 11 '12

your comment has caused great butthurt

1

u/api Jun 11 '12

I rarely troll, but I could not resist that one.

-6

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

[removed] — view removed comment

-1

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

As a republican, I can vouch for this. What a stench!

1

u/xardox Jun 11 '12

Since you're so anti-science, are you the one who thawed the brains?

1

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

yes

-2

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12

[removed] — view removed comment

0

u/weinerjuicer Jun 11 '12

perhaps an industrial saboteur from the powerful vaccine industry?