Research Work Is Spoiled at Columbia Medical Labs
By RANDY KENNEDY
Columbia University medical
researchers said Thursday that the power
failure that darkened northern
Manhattan may have destroyed or set back
by months hundreds of
experiments into illnesses ranging from
Alzheimer's disease to cancer to AIDS.
Two of Columbia's four laboratory buildings
in Washington Heights -- which
together make up one of the state's largest
medical research complexes, with
around $200 million annually in Federal
financing -- were without any power on
Tuesday night and through most of Wednesday
when the university's backup
generators were either not in place or
failed, university officials said.
Even when the backup generators began
running, they provided only minimal
power through late Thursday, they said.
They said that freezers that maintain samples
of tissues, blood, viruses and
bacteria began to warm up before they could
rush in to pack them with dry ice.
And incubators that maintain stable
environments for experiments stopped
working, forcing scientists to throw away
dozens of cell samples.
"It may take us weeks or months to be able to
assess the full extent of what has
happened, but we do know there has been
extensive damage and damage to
very important research," said Dr. Herbert
Pardes, dean of the faculty of
medicine for the College of Physicians and
Surgeons at Columbia.
Thursday, researchers dumped into pink
biohazard trash bags what they
estimated to be hundreds of thousands of
dollars' worth of enzymes and other
chemicals ruined when refrigerators lost
power.
University officials said that their own
emergency power systems, intended to
protect delicate and in some cases
irreplaceable research material, failed for a
number of reasons. The university was unable
to supply emergency power to an
18-story research building at 168th Street
and Fort Washington Parkway for
almost 24 hours because a backup generator
was on order, to be installed later
this summer.
A generator at another building relied on
steam from New York Presbyterian
Hospital's steam plant, which Columbia
officials said failed because of low
water pressure in the area. The officials
said Con Edison was then unable to
help the university connect portable
generators to those buildings for several
hours because they were busy insuring that
the hospital received backup power.
"It was multiple things things that happened
at one time," said Carolyn Conway,
a spokeswoman for the Health Sciences
Division at Columbia. "Nobody ever
thought that power would be down for three
days."
Although Con Edison restored power to much of
Washington Heights
Wednesday evening, the hospital and
Columbia's research buildings were still
without power from the utility most of the
day Thursday.
Michael J. Spall, a Con Edison spokesman,
disputed Columbia's account. He
said last night that while maintaining
emergency power for the hospital was the
highest priority, Columbia officials never
asked for help in connecting portable
generators to the two buildings without
backup power,
>>>>>>>>>>>the William Black Medical Research Building
and the Armand Hammer Health Sciences Center, both on
West 168th Street.
Columbia officials said the damage could
reverberate beyond the research at
those buildings, because it shares tissue
samples and other materials with as
many as 30 other medical research schools,
including New York University and
Mount Sinai medical schools in New York.
Marc Stern, a spokesman for the National
Institutes of Health, the Federal
agency that finances much of Columbia's
research, said he could not confirm
the extent of the damage.
In lab after lab, researchers spent Thursday
using dry ice to save what they could
and trying to figure out what they had lost.
>>>>>>>>>>>Dr. Michael Shelanski, a Columbia neurobiologist and an
expert on Alzheimer's
disease, said that researchers in his lab
thought they were able to save what
they call the "brain bank," a freezer with
hundreds of samples of brain tissue, by
packing it with dry ice before temperatures
rose substantially.
But he said a bank of tumor tissue for
several research projects warmed up
more, from 80 degrees below zero centigrade
to 20 degrees below. That may
have ruined some tissues, especially because
they became colder again once
emergency power was available, which may have
created ice crystals that
damaged cells, Dr. Shelanski said.
Freezers with cells involved in prostate
cancer research also warmed to 20
degrees below centigrade and could have been
damaged.
"We will not know until we have used every
individual sample," Dr. Shelanski
said. "Basically, what this does is makes you
suspicious of everything you have."
He said the situation was made worse because
Con Edison did not provide
reliable information to the university about
how long central power would be off.
"What's unconscionable is not that power
failed," he said Thursday afternoon,
"but that we were made to think that it was
going to come back earlier, and it still
has not." Behind him in the sunlit
laboratory, researchers were peering into a
dark, warm refrigerator that had not come
back on with emergency power.
Several floors below them, Dr. Samuel
Silverstein, chairman of physiology and
cellular biophysics, said that the failure of
two incubators forced researchers to
throw out dozens of samples.
Some of the cells in Dr. Silverstein's lab
were from human umbilical cords, being
used to investigate white blood cell activity
for use in understanding
inflammation in illnesses like rheumatoid
arthritis.
"This was full of flasks of cells, and now
they're all gone," said Dr. Silverstein,
opening a nearly empty refrigerated case. He
and other researchers estimated
that the experiment had been set by back a
month.
Behind him, two scientists emptied the
shelves behind a stainless steel door in
a room that should have been refrigerated but
was about as warm as the
laboratory, where Dr. Silverstein stood
sweating.
"In this lab alone, I know we've lost
hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of
enzymes and other reagents," said Dr. Indra
Koraci, who was helping pull dark
bottles and beakers from the shelves.
Researchers were particularly worried that
irreplaceable cell samples, taken
from patients as long as 15 years ago and
involved in long-term research, might
have been lost as freezers warmed up.
"If we're working on a particular brain from
some time ago, especially in cases
where the patient may have died or conditions
are changed, then we can't go
back to that brain and gather more tissue,"
Dr. Silverstein said. "Right now, it
doesn't look like we've lost anything and
we're trying to salvage what we think
may have been damaged. But in the weeks to
come, we may find that we've lost
more than we think."
Copyright
1999 The New York Times Company
