Thousands of Urine and Organ Samples Could Rot After CDC Staff Cuts

Imagine a fridge the size of a walk-in closet filled with lungs, spleens, and tiny frozen mouse brains—priceless in scientific value, but rancid if defrosted. Now imagine that the fridge lost power because the people who had paid to keep it running were unceremoniously kicked out of their jobs.

That’s what’s going down right now in Morgantown, West Virginia, according to a report in Wired. It’s happening under the bureaucratic disaster that is the Trump purge of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH.

Thousands of Urine and Organ Samples Could Rot Due to CDC Staff Cuts

NIOSH is responsible for researching and recommending measures to prevent work-related injury, illness, disability, and death. They were conducting all sorts of vital research: Gulf War syndrome, PFAS exposure in pregnant workers, and how inhaling nanoparticles might wreck your lungs.

They were even working on rapid toxicity tests to protect U.S. troops from surprise chemical exposure. Legitimate and valuable research that directly benefits the American people, all mostly shuttered and, in some cases, left to literally rot.

In a swift and seemingly pointless “restructuring,” thousands of Health and Human Services employees were fired or placed on leave—some literally while unpacking new shipments of lab chemicals. Now, the thousands of lab samples it stored in sub-freezing temperatures, either in refrigerators or in liquid nitrogen.

According to three staff researchers, unless there’s someone around to refill the liquid nitrogen when it dries out, although samples are going to rot. Frozen tissues, immortalized cell lines worth millions, and rodent organs with nowhere to go but rot. Some are part of a “time capsule” of diseased lungs from black lung victims—a literal one-of-a-kind scientific archive.

Since the layoffs, no one knows who’s responsible for keeping the supercooling systems going. HHS won’t say much, except to vaguely assert that “someone” is “monitoring” the liquid nitrogen. Not exactly a comforting plan when the contents of your fridge include irreplaceable human lung tissue.

Meanwhile, 600 or 700 lab rodents were mercifully rehomed to a local university. Their attending veterinarian, Stephen Harvey? Fired. Equipment worth tens of thousands sits unused, waiting to become giant paperweights.

Some of it may not be functioning when/if it’s respective labs ever get re-staffed. This wasn’t just a mass layoff. It was a brain drain—America’s top scientific minds being kicked out the door, their tools, labs, and samples left to rot, and for no discernible reason.