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Nestled inside a generic-looking office building here in suburban Maryland, down the hall from cable-provider Comcast, sits the largest blood serum repository in the world.
Seven freezers, each roughly the size of a high school basketball court, are stacked high with row upon row of small cardboard boxes containing tubes of yellow or pinkish blood serum, a liquid rich in antibodies and proteins, but devoid of cells. The freezers hover at –30 degrees Celsius—cold enough to make my pen dry up and to require that workers wear protective jumpsuits, hats, gloves and face masks. Four more empty freezers, which are now kept at room temperature, await future samples.
The bank of massive freezers—and its contents—is maintained by the Department of Defense (DoD). The cache of government-owned serum may provide unique insights into the workings of various maladies when linked with detailed information on service members’ demographics, deployment locations and health survey data. New research projects tapping the precious serum could lead to breakthroughs in some of the hottest topics in military research—including the hunt for biomarkers for post-traumatic stress disorder...
Seven freezers, each roughly the size of a high school basketball court, are stacked high with row upon row of small cardboard boxes containing tubes of yellow or pinkish blood serum, a liquid rich in antibodies and proteins, but devoid of cells. The freezers hover at –30 degrees Celsius—cold enough to make my pen dry up and to require that workers wear protective jumpsuits, hats, gloves and face masks. Four more empty freezers, which are now kept at room temperature, await future samples.
The bank of massive freezers—and its contents—is maintained by the Department of Defense (DoD). The cache of government-owned serum may provide unique insights into the workings of various maladies when linked with detailed information on service members’ demographics, deployment locations and health survey data. New research projects tapping the precious serum could lead to breakthroughs in some of the hottest topics in military research—including the hunt for biomarkers for post-traumatic stress disorder...