Lab freezers are like mom's attic: cluttered with the property of people long gone. At home, that might include baseball cards and old shoes; in the lab, it's samples that graduate students and postdocs left behind. Mom can clean out her attic easily enough, but what about in the lab?
"I probably have stuff that goes back 20 years," in the freezers, says Jeffrey Bada, director of NASA Specialized Center in Research and Training in Exobiology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "I'll keep a sample as long as somebody knows what it is."
"It's a huge issue," agrees Kris Klueg, assistant scientist and cDNA/vector lab manager, Drosophila Genomics Resource Center, Indiana University. Klueg has helped move several labs. Most recently, "The principal investigator had been at the university for 15 years. Between one-third and one half of the freezer space was filled with samples from people who had left. Half ...
