The freezer meltdown was a huge disaster for Judy Muller-Cohn. One night in 1997, she lost millions of dollars’ worth of crucial DNA and protein samples. But this major meltdown at Mycogen Corporation, an agriculture and biotechnology company based in San Diego, ultimately had a happy ending for Muller-Cohn.
“My husband and I knew that sample management was a major issue,” says Muller-Cohn. Her husband, Rolf Muller, had also been complaining about the issue in his lab at Digital Gene Technologies, a genomics and pharmaceutical research company that was generating thousands of samples each week and spending millions of dollars to store and organize them.
Research institutions often have warehouses full of large, expensive freezers that, at temperatures as low as minus 80 degrees Celsius, use lots of energy and are expensive to maintain. Plus there’s the problem of freezer malfunctions, which can happen up to twice a year in ...
