# Historian of policy re-tests the freezer a cancer programme left behind

> 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.

> 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.