STOCKHOLM: Research samples collected over decades at a prestigious Swedish medical university have been destroyed after a freezer malfunctioned over the Christmas holidays, the university said on Monday.

The incident has been reported to police, the university added.

The samples were stored in tanks cooled with liquid nitrogen, at a temperature of minus 190 degrees Celsius, at the medical university Karolinska Institutet (KI) in Stockholm.

The institute is home to the Nobel Assembly, which is tasked with selecting a winner for the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Sometime between Dec 22 and 23 there was an interruption in the supply of liquid nitrogen to 16 cryogenic tanks, and while the tanks can go for four days without additional liquid nitrogen, they were left without it for five, leading to the destruction of samples from multiple institutions. “It happened at possibly the absolute worst time imaginable in Sweden, just one day before Christmas Eve,” Matti Sallberg, Dean of KI’s southern campus, said.

Published in Dawn, February 6th, 2024