Machines that go Beep 3

His science is just the sort you should have in mind when you are donating to cancer research. He leads the Tumour Metastasis Laboratory, investigating how prostate cancer spreads to the bone and how to tackle it. Cancer spreading to the bone is common in the latter stages of prostate cancer.

 

He’s agreed to show me one of his machines that goes beep. He was considering a centrifuge but he dismissed it as boring and so  settled on something very different.

 

We go through several corridors and up some more stairs, to a square room. It is all function and no style. There’s desk space with boxes of disposable gloves, a microscope, other smaller equipment and random office supplies spread about, but it clearly isn’t a room that doubles as an office. There was no one in the room until we got there, but loud music is playing and when he turns it off a loud low hum replaces it. It never stops. The room is warm and gets hotter while I’m there. Two large cigar shaped gas cylinders, almost as tall as me, catch my eye. Fume cupboards hide two walls, white coats cover a third and the main wall has five domestic fridges stacked against it, in twos, with one left over. These partially obscure the windows.

 

What appeared to be domestic fridges – the sort that go under a counter top – are in fact, nothing of the sort. They are the machines that go beep.

 

“These are cell culture incubators.”  So there’s nothing cold about them at all. Justin waves at the top one. “We’ll do this one.” It looks like a beefy fridge, wider, now I look at it with proper interest. “More in common with an Aga than a fridge” he observes. Justin and his team grow cells in order to see what they do and how they do it. To grow cells effectively the incubator has to mimic as far as possible the conditions inside the human body. The incubators aim for 37 deg. C, carbon dioxide at 5% and give humidity too. The incubator stops wide fluctuations in temperature and carbon dioxide that can shock cells, or finish them off. Could you manage without it? “No! It’s a daily essential piece of kit – and any lab working with cells would have one”.

 

Like the room, design of the Galaxy R+ is functional rather than chic. It’s off white, greyish, and has a blue LED screen about the size of a glasses case, at my nose level. I peer at it. There are five menu options and a series of corresponding buttons underneath the display, to access all the settings. To the left of the display is another arrangement of up, down, left and right arrow buttons, like the ones you get on a mobile phone, for further settings and adjustments.

 

In the display there are two words in big light blue font: Chamber temp and CO2 level. There’s a animal paw print on the bottom left hand corner of the door and I ask what it means. Justin is stumped and laughs. I wonder if it’s some kind of little joke by the manufacturers - showing you where to put your ‘paw’ when opening it. It isn’t. The handle is a catch at the top of the door. A couple of scientists come in, snapping on purple disposable gloves at the same time, for a bit of business involving some of the contents of our incubator  – we stand back – and the microscope. The bearded one says “’It’s a wolf paw print. Wolf Laboratories of Pocklington”. Light dawns. Wolf is the company that supplies the incubator.

 

Inside it is all shiny smooth metal and a range of round glass dishes, a couple of squared off, flattened bottles lying on their sides and some very small glass sample holders that will fit under a microscope rest on four metal racks. Each of the glass containers has some pale reddish soup inside – the culture in which the cell grow. Each shelf belongs to a different researcher.

 

Justin explains “This whole thing has to be cleaned every week or two weeks with 70% ethanol. We don't want bacterial or fungal infections in our cultures. It also has to be kept humidified. It has a tray with water - distilled water that has been autoclaved (sterilised under pressure) and has copper sulphate crystals in it to stop bugs growing.”

 

It’s attached to the cylinders I noticed earlier. They contain the carbon dioxide. The piping feeds through the back of the incubator keeping the chamber at 5% carbon dioxide inside. Carbon dioxide helps maintain the tissue culture medium at a neutral pH of 7, which simulates the physiological environment of cells in the body. If the CO2 concentration changes significantly or the temperature drops the beep is triggered.

 

Justin comments “If the door has been left open too long or when it’s busy in here and there are lots of people using the cells, in and out, in and out, in and out, it’s going off all the time. Some days it’s quiet and if it’s left alone it won’t go off.  If it’s going off a lot, because people are using it, you would mute it as it gets annoying. But if it’s a quiet day and something drops and it goes funny you would call out a technician to come and check it out. If the alarm did not go off or if we didn’t hear it, or took no notice we could lose up to one month’s work for the four full time members of research staff or post-graduate students with cells growing in there. Some of the cells in the incubator are unique and the results obtained from them can never be replaced.”

 

He continues ruefully “In fact we recently lost an important two week long experiment because there is no detector for a sudden loss in humidity which is what happened. We have to make our own checks that the water to maintain humidity is kept topped up on a regular basis.”

 

I can’t tell by looking at it if it’s hugely expensive bit of kit or not, but £3-4,000 each was the consensus of the scientists' opinions in the room at the time. Having opened and closed the door in the process of explanation we take a moment or two to get a beep out of it but you can listen here to the mp3 version and here is a WMA one. You can hear real scientists clonking about in the background too. A bit 'pale pink' for an alarm, to my ear, but it does the job.