In the early 2000s, I was a technician in Carina Wallgren-Pettersson’s group at the University of Helsinki, and we were studying nemaline myopathy, a rare muscle disorder. For this work, I routinely cultured fibroblasts from patients to turn them into muscle-like cells to study mutations in the genes that cause this myopathy. Because nemaline myopathy is rare, we saved any patient samples that we acquired and screened them for contamination before we used them.
Hanne Ahola, lost weeks of work in a split second when she threw her collected cells into the waste flask after their discarded medium.
Katarzyna Leskinen
One time, a sample that I started to work with contained mycoplasma contamination, so I treated the cells with an antibiotic regimen. This required replacing the drugs every time I split my cells. Finally, after almost a month, I eliminated the mycoplasma contamination, and the cells were ready for my experiments.
Beside me, I had a flask for discarded liquids and a clean bottle to save my cells. Somehow, just as I was splitting the cells, I got distracted or lost in my thoughts for a moment, and I dumped my cells into the waste flask!
I was horrified. I remember thinking ‘this can’t be happening’. I also remember being so mad that I didn’t just concentrate on what I was doing. Luckily, I knew that I could save the experiment, because I had more vials of the cells from the same patient in the freezer. However, these also contained mycoplasma, so I was going to have to do the same treatment regimen again, and I was so frustrated that I wasted so much time and reagent.
In the end, I didn’t get fired. Today, I work in Sara Wickström’s group studying the role of mechanical forces on stem cell development, so I’m still doing cell culture. Now, when I share this story with colleagues, we have a good laugh. It’s a great reminder to stay focused on your task.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity