Posted on 10/15/2019 2:50:57 PM PDT by Ciaphas Cain
BERKELEY, Calif. (KGO) -- Sarah Morris says 12-hour days are not uncommon at her bio-chemistry lab in Morgan Hall at UC Berkeley. But PG&E's power outage may have destroyed two years of her ground-breaking cancer research, valued at $500,000.
"I kind of had a moment of thinking, 'is my dissertation thesis going to include the lines: I did this, and then it got wiped out because of a power outage. Please let me graduate!'" says Morris.
Morris is a PhD student researching new therapies to fight drug-resistant forms of cancer.
She says PG&E assured UC Berkeley that the power would not be shut off, but then suddenly found herself with just 12 hours to decide how to salvage two years worth of research after PGE announced power would be cut.
"I was so excited because I was just one week away from finishing, and then all of a sudden I am (thinking), I may have to lose a year-and-a-half worth of work," explains Morris.
(Excerpt) Read more at abc7news.com ...
The dog ate my homework, 21st century style.............
Good grief, this student doesn’t know how to make backups?
Yes, except this one comes with LOTS of blame. Possibly she’s not PhD material, if the power outage did her in. Just sayin’.....
Read the article. Most of her work was in living cells that were temperature sensitive.
I hadn’t read the article. This is about power to a lab with on going cell maintenance losing power. I’m surprised a medical operation with the money and prestige of Berkely doesn’t have adequate on campus power for this sort of thing.
Home Deport sells generators substantially less than half a mil.
They had plenty of advanced warning to save the results.
The school didn’t have generators? It’s not exactly rocket science to backup power crucial processes.
That would be the smart thing to do. But since this is California we’re talking about here well...
Her whining included everything but the proverbial dog...
Anyone that hears the shutdown warnings for several days and doesn’t protect what she is doing is not much of a research scientist... Or the research was going nowhere and the shutdown was a lucky occurrence...
Call her a whaaaambulance.
What was her research on? LGBTQRS?
You don’t understand. The power outage wasn’t supposed to affect her. Just the little people.
If it was me I would have had a backup power source in place.
Californians had better get used to frequent blackouts since their elected officials are determined to eliminate all sources of electric power generation other than wind, solar, rainbows and unicorn farts.
Just wait until they finally eliminate all of the remaining internal combustion vehicles and several million more electric cars plug into the power grid.
If it had been that important, they should have had backup generators.
“Good grief, this student doesn’t know how to make backups?”
ummm, she’s a Grad student from Berkeley. Of course she’s smarter than the rest of us. s/
As another poster said, PG&E did give advance warning.
I had to ask that they reduce the frequency of advisories.
It was too much info for my uses.
If your project is dependent on a power source, it’s on you to be prepared for any power loss.
A Phd student doesn’t know to back-up her work? The lab PC’s do not have UPS?
Something smells a bit suspicious here. Just sayin’.
Servers and laptops have batteries.
Your desktop — not so much. Windows can be finicky when it comes to power outages.
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