Posted on 06/26/2023 7:18:46 AM PDT by ChicagoConservative27
It could be the plot of a dark comedy if it weren’t a science tragedy.
A janitor working in a laboratory who was annoyed by an incessant beep reportedly flipped a switch that killed the noise — but also shut off a storage freezer, destroying decades of scientific work, according to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute lab in Troy.
The cleaner’s alleged carelessness cost the lab at least $1 million in damages, a lawsuit the university filed against its third-party cleaning service charges.
“People’s behavior and negligence caused all this,” Michael Ginsberg, RPI’s attorney, told the Times Union in Albany. “Unfortunately, they wiped out 25 years of research.”
The super-cold freezer the custodial worker allegedly shut down held cell cultures, samples, and other elements stored at minus-112 degrees Fahrenheit, the Times Union said.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
“The cleaning company had a $1.4 million contract to clean the RPI facilities during the 2020 fall semester.”
For the sake of an annoyed, but stupid, janitor. Had.
What is insane is that if all this work was so valuable, that the University didn’t have alarms for the freezer.
Power outages happen, so I would have expected an independent monitoring system would alert key personnel if the temp rose above a set point.
What surprises me is that this hasn’t happened before. Maybe it was caught before it was too late in other instances, but I can definitely see this happening.
They could have made a grad-student clean the lab for the same price.
Perhaps the annoying beep was an alarm.
Me thinks there’s more to this story.
I agree with that.
So there was a third-party cleaning service.
I suppose that at one time the university had custodians on staff who did the cleaning. Those folks might clean the same rooms for a decade. They usually knew what to do and what not do.
But it’s much cheaper to hire an outside company. Well, you get what you pay for.
How about $1. If it was so important, it would have had backup and more robust alarm reporting. My guess is the school is happy to have this gone, happy to have someone to blame for it going away.
I wonder what was in that freezer.
If it were biological material, he may have done the world a favor.
The janitor’s name wasn’t Joe or Hunter, was it?
25 years of work is priced at a mere 1M$? was this the work of 1 grad student who’s advisor kept asking for ‘1 more thing?’
This is not that unusual. Labs and researchers always complain about this sort of thing. Always moaning about the inadequacy of their facilities. Then when we propose projects to fix it they never find them. Yet they always say how much money is at risk...why not take 3% of the supposed at risk revenue and fix the facility problems? Stop relying on 25 year old, neglected equipment. Doctors are not that smart
Government grant gone.
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