Welcome to my world

The line below was a typical conversation during the first week's Monday meeting in my office. One pHd student and his/her technician give a presentation about their progress and their work. Since our research centered in the mechanism of natural immune system, all member of our research group work with materials from patient and donor, mainly bone marrow, core blood, saliva, or such.

Presenter : "...thus so far we are still trying to figure out how to generate enough cell from a limited sample in order to see the expression of this and that marker on this and that population, and to do this and that future experiment. We also wanted to relate clinical phenotype with the result if that's possible, which so far isn't because of confidential reasons".

Colleague : "Can't you thaw frozen materials from this patient, or get DLI materials from other patient with similar phenotype?"

My boss : "The problem is we only have 3 patients that meet our criteria. We certainly cannot access patient's detail, but I can tell you that the material in which we are interested in couldn't be recollected. That particular patient experienced swelling and fever while on holiday, and the doctor who treated her just removed the lession and throw it away without preserving anything. What a waste. She died shortly afterwards".

.....

Then, we all take a glance in the slide which represented the time of injection, immune response, course of treatment, and relapse of the patients. At the end of the line, there was three very small crosses which was colored red, blue, and black.

Colleague : "Ah. So all three patient have died already?"
My boss : "Yes. They all died within 5 years course. ".

......

Okay, okay, I get it. I will treat every bone marrow aspirates, every buffy coat, and every thawed cryo vials with respects and care, since maybe the original owner of those materials are watching me from heaven while I centrifuge a part of them in a 96 well plates and analyze them in FACS machine (hoe they are praying for the success of my experiments as well). Those part of them will live long in the FACS sheets folder in my table, at least as long as it takes for the paper to keep intact before time and air destroy them.