Here's a story that'll frost your test tubes. The lab had been operational
for several years when the technician decided that they were going to need
to be able to put more than two sample boxes in the lab's -70 C freezer.
Unfortunately, this was going to mean cutting through several feet of ice.
As well, there was the serious danger of drowning as the ice began to melt
into the lab. Thus, equipped with a hair dryer, hipwaders and aqualung,
the technician pulled the plug from the outlet and went to lunch while
waiting for the ice to begin to melt. (As an aside, please note the use of
the hair dryer... this is how men defrost a freezer, unlike many women I
have known who attack the ice with a knife or screwdriver, often leading to
punctured freon tanks and larger ozone holes.)
Returning from lunch, the technician spent the first half hour apologizing
profusely to the graduate student whose sequencing gel he had turned off
when he pulled the plug for the power pack instead of the one for the
freezer. After that, he pulled the correct plug and spent the next several
hours with the hair dryer pointed into the freezer and carefully pulling
small glaciers from the shelves and sides of the freezer. As he proceeded
deeper and deeper into the various icy strata, the history of the lab began
to unfold. Within the first foot, he began to uncover the now-soggy
cardboard storage boxes of the recently graduated students, unearthing
(de-icing?) a couple of years worth of work and a number of plasmid vectors
which the lab had given up on finding and had long ago reordered from the
supplier. An hour or so into the work, he began to scrape the second foot
of ice away and saw initial signs of a large package under the ice, but the
frosting of the ice prevented him from immediately determining what it
was. In the meantime though, he was able to free up some radiolabeled ATP
which was now colder than it's environment and there was a vial of
C14-labelled amino-acids which must have been a remnant of an early life
and defied dating even with the most modern techniques. Another layer
down, and on his third sink of ice, the technician got closer to the
unidentified object locked in its frosty grave. On the way, he then began
to pull out more sample boxes of people whose names the could't recognize
and small brown vials containing enzymes with a best before date which
predated him... not the date of his hiring, but his own age. But still,
the icy object eluded extraction.
As afternoon gave way to evening, the technician could begin to make out
details on the alien in the freezer and he quickly began to realize that
the poor thing had a human form. He increased his pace but still spent
several hours removing more ice before he could begin to free the poor
person from the ice. Finally, he had removed enough that an arm fell free
of the ice and the hair dryer began to warm the flesh. In less than an
hour, he had removed the last of the ice and the body fell to the floor,
shivering. As the body warmed, its lips moved as though trying to speak.
It was another hour though, before words began to form. The tech asked the
young man what had happened. Slowly, and with great effort, the young
scientist began to speak.
"I was on my way to the freezer to get some more DNA for my crystallization
trials -- I think that I'm close to getting a structure, you know -- when I
got trapped. I know I should have been using gloves, but I was in a
hurry. I grabbed for a box at the back of the freezer when my arm hit the
side and got stuck. Quickly the ice crystallized around me and someone
later came by, saw the door open and closed it without seeing that I was in
there.", he said, still shivering. "By the way, how are McCarthy hearings
going, anyway?"
This was not going to be an easy one to explain to the boss.
