When New York City lost power in 2003, security guards at Columbia University's medical center had to trawl the dimly lit halls to kick out all the lab workers. There's no snowstorm fierce enough or holiday sacred enough to keep a dedicated scientist away from work. And yet, if the government shuts down in the coming days, many publicly funded scientists will have to stay home stewing as their clinical research goes stale on the shelves. "It's very frustrating. Everyone is demoralized,". The agency has been very quiet about who gets to make these decisions, but has indicated to its staff that much of the work will simply have to stop. For clinical researchers, the interruptions could be devastating, potentially threatening patient participation. Animal work and molecular biology are likely to fare even worse during a government shutdown. If they get the plug pulled on them, researchers at these labs will have no idea when they can return, forcing them to freeze what samples they can and throw out the rest. Most experiments that get interrupted will probably just have to be trashed and restarted. "If you lose a month, you lose a year's worth of data. It's really horrific," they said.
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