Sandy Stomps Scientific Research

The effects of hurricane Sandy are a little more widely felt than expected. Apparently, the hurricane has ruined almost all ongoing research at the NYU medical campus. Gizmodo got a tip from an executive at a New York hospital, who wrote:

I just spoke to a friend at NYU medical campus and she is just shocked at the surroundings. The research labs lost ALL their mice (1000s) and most of their research samples. The labs are destroyed, the smell is apparently intense. The hospital is empty—and they’re devastated. Beyond the obvious impact on patient care—and I just heard Bellevue is now evacuating all the patients they didn’t already—this has a domino effect for patients at other hospitals: Can we all expand to accommodate more than our own patient loads?—the impact on the science will be terrible. It is a sad sad day for science.

So lets leave out the implications of an entire cutting-edge hospital being out of commission during one of the greatest natural disasters to ever hit New York City. Let's leave out that those thousands of mice were living creatures, too, while we're at it. Looking just at the scientific impact alone, this is an atrocious thing. NYU is one of the hotbeds of scientific research. Now their labs are destroyed, their samples lost, all their ongoing projects mangled. It will probably cost millions to restore everything to working order, and likely many of those projects will now never see completion.

And something tells me that NYU isn't alone. They aren't the only ones building things, doing research, and working on inventing the future. New York is one of the nexii of the world. So much happens there, is invented there. Just how much did Sandy destroy?

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