A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities re-assays the frozen galectin stocks of a concluded tumour-adhesion programme against the figures its notebooks recorded.
Fourteen archived batches of a sugar-binding protein are assayed again and set beside the titres in the programme's own notebooks
A freezer is a long sentence that somebody stopped writing. It has been a privilege to be handed this one and allowed to read to the end of it.
— Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor, Horizon Register
So says the lead author of Thawed Once More: Residual Haemagglutinating Activity in the Archived Galectin Aliquots of a Concluded Tumour-Adhesion Programme, a research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities. Dr Solheim prepared it with Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer in the School, and Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Continuous Improvement.
The poster brings bench practice and record-keeping into a single line of sight. A tumour-cell adhesion programme at a host department had concluded and left 41 boxes of a laboratory-made galectin in cold storage, together with the notebooks in which each batch’s strength had been written down on the day it was made. The team tested 312 tubes from fourteen batches by the field’s classical method and placed each result beside its notebook entry. Seven of the twelve batches that could be compared were within one step of their recorded figure. The rest had weakened in keeping with the number of tally marks on their box lids, and not with their age.
The University is content to be an institution in which a programme that has closed may still be asked a question and may still answer it. Dr Chikere said the three of them had “come away with a regard for lids that none of us had going in”.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.1dz57y.