Like a full freezer in a house without electricity. Except that in the cold room at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm there were not fish fingers and soup ready, but decades of research lost due to a malfunction over the Christmas holidays. The cooling tanks at the institute, known for hosting the association that annually nominates Nobel Prize winners in medicine, can maintain a temperature of up to -190 degrees Celsius for four days in emergency situations. But 16 of them, on the night between December 22 and 23, stopped being supplied with the liquid nitrogen used to cool them, and they continued to heat for five consecutive days. too many. Thus, the samples collected by the institute over years and years are now being destroyed.

Compensation in millions of euros

The economic damages resulting from the defect, according to the first estimates reported by The Guardian newspaper, amount to about 37 million euros. The head of the institute, Matti Sahlberg, said that the matter happened at the worst possible time, explaining that those most affected by the problem were the researchers conducting projects on leukemia, who had been collecting samples in the cold room for thirty years. Police are investigating the causes of the radiator outage, which do not currently appear to be related to external factors or acts of sabotage. “There were ongoing studies and others that could not be carried out, but no patient would be at risk due to the loss of samples collected solely for use in research,” Sahlberg emphasizes.

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