ABOVE: ST. ANDREWS UNIVERSITY
Late in the afternoon on February 10, a fire broke out on the third floor of the University of St. Andrews’s Biomedical Science Building in a chemistry lab. Late in the night, a team of 30 firefighters had extinguished the blaze that had scorched a relatively small part of the building, and no one was hurt.
While the fire itself only affected a handful of labs, it took six hours and thousands of gallons of water to bring the blaze under control, says David Evans, a virologist at the University of St. Andrews and director of the complex that includes the Biomedical Science Building. “The water damage is very extensive,” he says, displacing the researchers who work there and cutting off access to specialized facilities, including shared cell culture rooms.
Right now, approximately 125 staff members and scientists who work in the building’s offices and roughly ...
