The materials contained in the device had to be kept at 80 degrees Celsius below zero.
Photo: Alexander Koerner/Getty Images
A New York university is seeking $1 million in damages from a maintenance contractor whose employee mistakenly turned off a lab freezer, destroying 20 years of research.as reported by local media on Tuesday.
The events date back to the end of 2020, when a janitor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in the town of Troy (upstate New York), heard “nuisance alarms” coming out of the freezer and turned it off, despite a note asking not to touch it because it was pending repair, indicates CNN.
The university sued the janitor’s employer, Daigle Cleaning Systems, in Rensselaer County Supreme Court this month for negligence, arguing that that action irreparably damaged cell cultures, samples, and research related to biochemistry and solar energy.
In the document, the university indicated that the materials contained in the device had to be kept at 80 degrees Celsius below zero and a fluctuation of only three degrees would cause damage, so when the temperature rose to 78 degrees below zero due to its malfunction, the alarms went off.
However, it was the time of the pandemic and due to restrictions on activity, the manufacturer of the freezer could not come in to make emergency repairs quickly.
Before several days of waiting, the researcher responsible for the device placed a warning note in capital letters asking not to move or turn off the freezer despite the beeps, with instructions to silence it briefly, and a security lock on the plug.
The janitor, with apparent good intent, thought the power was not getting to the freezer, so he went to the fuse box and flipped the switch, doing the opposite of what he intended: shutting off the power, which raised the temperature to 32 degrees below zero, the document indicates, according to The Washington Post.
The destroyed research project, by Professor KV Lakshmi, dealt with photosynthesis and had “potential to be revolutionary” in solar technologyadd that medium.
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