PIXABAY, REPUBLICANeuronal cells just weren’t growing properly in Ulrich Dirnagl’s laboratory at the Free University of Berlin, in Germany. But after several members of his team had submitted error reports through LabCIRS—a system developed in Dirnagl’s lab to enable anonymous incident reporting—the cell deaths were soon traced back to a single mislabeled shipment of cell culture serum. “We then, as part of our error discussion, immediately contacted the manufacturer,” Dirnagl said. “It turned out that a whole batch had this problem, and they had to recall the batch.”
“We may have even helped others avoid these errors,” he told The Scientist.
Dirnagl and colleagues described LabCIRS, a critical incident reporting system borrowed from clinical medicine and optimized for the preclinical biomedical laboratory, in a December 1 PLOS Biology paper. LabCIRS is a free, open-source software tool that can be customized for different laboratories and allows employees report mistakes or raise concerns anonymously. In their paper, Dirnagl and colleagues wrote that the system has helped foster a “mature error culture” in their lab’s department.
“There are quality issues in clinical medicine—reproducibility—and part of that has to do with the basic quality of the experiments that we do” in preclinical research, Dirnagl said. “With these complex machines and many people working, errors happen, mishaps happen, ...
