Nearly six months to the day since Hurricane Katrina roared ashore, Mardi Gras took place as scheduled, but New Orleans's research community—and much of its ecology—seemingly has little to celebrate. Instead, scientists are still making due with limited services, faculty, and funding, and scrambling to recover their lost work.
At Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center (LSUHSC), which suffered about six feet of flooding, scientists have reestablished cell cultures. But with limited exceptions, animal work continues to be conducted out of Baton Rouge, according to Arthur Haas, chair of biochemistry and molecular biology. "Virtually the entire animal facility was lost," he told The Scientist.
As a result of Katrina, Haas said he lost an estimated million dollars' worth of libraries and reagents - many of them irreplaceable - when the freezers went down, the result of 25 years of work. The LSUHSC reopened its first research center, the eight-story Mervin ...
