A lawsuit filed by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York accuses a cleaning company worker of destroying over 20 years of research that would have potentially led to groundbreaking work.
It all happened in September 2020. In a deposition, as part of the lawsuit filed in upstate New York's Rensselaer County Supreme Court, the worker, Joseph Herrington, said that"annoying alarms" were coming from the freezer. That lead to questions of why there weren't better safety measures and fail-safes put in place to prevent such important work from being destroyed.
The lawsuit said if temperatures went above or below that window the samples inside could be seriously damaged. The sign said, according to reporting and court filings,"You can press the alarm/test mute button for 5-10 seconds if you would like to mute the sound."