A contracted janitorial service worker turned off a laboratory freezer to stop an annoying beeping during a September 2020 shift at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, leading to the loss of genetic research compiled over decades when the contents warmed, a lawsuit by the university alleges.

NBC News reports Daigle Cleaning Systems Inc. was contracted to clean a lab building on campus during Covid shutdowns.  Around September 14th, the alarm on the freezer, which sounds when it neared its boundary temperatures of -82 to -78, started to sound irregularly even though internal temperatures were okay. The team called for an emergency service from the freezer’s manufacturer, and a repair appointment scheduled for the following week.

On September 17th, custodian Joseph Herrington shut down a freezer because, he said, he feared the beeping meant a circuit breaker was tripped.  The following day, researchers arrived to discover the freezer shut down and the temperature at -32 degrees. 

“The Graduate Research Staff discovered that the Freezer was off and that the temperature had risen to the point of destruction of the contained research,” the complaint said, adding that “a majority of specimens were compromised, destroyed, and rendered unsalvageable demolishing more than twenty (20) years of research.”  Herrington is not named in the suit, but the university is seeking Daigle Cleaning Systems at least $1 million for the cost of the lost research plus damages.