ANON POST: Modern day clinical lab equipment?

[kutsuwamushi]

My main character is a doctoral researcher at a very well-funded private clinical lab (I don't have a medical specialization for her yet, in part because of the question I have, but it would be something biochemical based) in a contemporary setting. I'm having the hardest time figuring out what kind of equipment would be present (cold rooms? TEM

Comments

[thekumquat]

By 'clinical lab' do you mean a path lab in a hospital (deals with clinical samples and analysis), a research lab that may happen to be in the grounds of a hospital, or a lab in a research institute or university that happens to do medical research? I'd assume a clinical lab was one that merely provided support for drug trials in patients so would be fairly basic.

However, you still have loads of ways to do someone in. The simplest might be the 'slips on some liquid in the cold room (or was he pushed?), hits their head, dies after lying at +4 degrees for hours. But has risk of survival. You could trap someone in the -20 room but you'd also have to disable the alarm inside.
A student did die while I was doing my PhD, by standing on a barrel (50L can) of phenol and the can gave way and his foot went into it. I got a few crystals of phenol on my arm a week later and was worried for hours (not helped by the post-docs winding me up that I was likely to stop breathing imminently...). People joked for ages about dropping phenol down someone's neck or throwing liquid phenol at them.
Tissue culture rooms are often hermetically sealed and if used for dissection/cell counting etc someone might turn the airflow off. And if the lab stores their gas cylinders in there like we did, then a leaking CO2 cylinder might lead to slow unaware asphyxiation?
Lastly radioactivity. Vials can be buggers to open, to the extent that students used to be advised to open them using the door jamb as a vice. Until one guy did this and the bottle shattered. 42S I think everywhere. He called his supervisor who told him to go home and have a shower ASAP - forgetting said student no longer lived on site. This led to a team of men in white biohaz suits chasing down the bus and his flat and closing the local High Street for a while... But given hot rooms may double as dark rooms, an 'accident' with sharp glass and radioactivity is plausible.

Actually, given that most scientists ignore the rule about no drinks in the lab and are constantly knocking back coffee, traces of sodium azide or (if any reason to need the stuff eg studying cell division) cyanide getting into their drink might be the easiest way. Especially if a fake suicide is an option.