Our dosing solutions are in glass vials, our blood tubes and cryovials are plastic. I have used glass blood tubes and had them shatter in the centrifuge. That was a mess.
So, those most likely to get screwed are (in approximate descending order of degree of screwed-ness):
a) the biochemists b) the nanotech biologists c) the scanning and environmental biologists (working on finding new bugs)
I think in most cases that the effects are going to be small. I'll surmise that it's really only when you're working at nano-scale (technical definition of 10^-9) concentrations of compounds or targets that you'll likely see the effect.
Of course, balance out the pharmaceutical industry's drive to doing tests in smaller and smaller volumes, with less and less reagents and reaction constituents... the back-end pipeline just got *that* much longer.
My Dad & his colleagues found this out ~30 years ago. They convinced the pharmaceutical company they worked for to switch to all glass - from reagent purchase and storage to lab equipment.
It was discovered while calibrating test equipment. It took awhile to figure out why all of sudden some were getting inconsistent results with the testing compounds etc. Eventually someone noticed that the folks getting the strange results were using reagents etc, stored and/or mixed in plastic.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kickaha![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-07 07:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-07 07:56 pm (UTC)Hrmmm.
Date: 2008-11-07 08:00 pm (UTC)a) the biochemists
b) the nanotech biologists
c) the scanning and environmental biologists (working on finding new bugs)
I think in most cases that the effects are going to be small. I'll surmise that it's really only when you're working at nano-scale (technical definition of 10^-9) concentrations of compounds or targets that you'll likely see the effect.
Of course, balance out the pharmaceutical industry's drive to doing tests in smaller and smaller volumes, with less and less reagents and reaction constituents... the back-end pipeline just got *that* much longer.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-08 02:39 pm (UTC)It was discovered while calibrating test equipment. It took awhile to figure out why all of sudden some were getting inconsistent results with the testing compounds etc. Eventually someone noticed that the folks getting the strange results were using reagents etc, stored and/or mixed in plastic.