On June 26, Business Insider reported that a janitor was sued for arbitrarily turning off a super-cold freezer in a laboratory at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI, USA), causing $1 million in damage to a scientific research project.
The lawsuit, filed by RPI, is against Daigle, the cleaning company that contracted with janitor Joseph Harrington.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Campus
Harrington began cleaning RPI’s Cogwell building, where the lab is located, from August 2020 to November 2020. He said he heard “annoying alarms” coming from the research storage facility in September 2020, and decided to turn off the power to the freezer.
Despite efforts to remedy the situation, most of the specimens were destroyed and more than 20 years of research could not be salvaged, the indictment states.
For many years, one of RPI's professors, Dr. KV Lakshmi, has been conducting high-level research inside the university-funded, "potentially groundbreaking" lab. The lab has a freezer filled with cell cultures and samples that must be kept at -80 degrees Celsius. The freezer is set up with alarms that sound if there is a change in temperature, as even a small fluctuation can cause "serious damage."
Still, Harrington said he thought he was doing the right thing. Representatives of Daigle and RPI's attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.
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