TROY. That noise coming from a refrigerator was so boring that a cleaner turned off the switch: a pity that inside the super-freezer of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, in the USA, there were microorganisms resulting from research that had been going on for twenty ‘years; and with temperatures rising, everything went up in smoke.
Now the American university, which filed a complaint with the New York Supreme Court in Rensselaer County, is asking for one million dollars in damages from the cleaner. “People’s behavior and negligence have swept away 25 years of research,” thunders Michael Ginsberg, a university lawyer, to the Times Union. The freezer contained cell cultures and test tubes of all kinds, the result of a research project on photosynthesis led by a professor of biology and chemistry, KV Lakshmi.
The fact dates back to 2020, but the request for damages dates back to these days. The material was stored at -80 degrees Celsius, when the Daigle Cleaning Services employee, whose name was not disclosed, turned off the circuit breaker: the temperature rose to -30 degrees Celsius, with the result that all the material was destroyed. The man – he explained – simply wanted to deactivate the unpleasant noise of the appliance, despite the fact that on the freezer door we were explained what was causing the noise and all the instructions on how to silence it without causing damage.