Photoessay #2089 - Biochemistry yarn

So my brother was telling me a story this morning and it strikes me as having a lot of potential.

So this afternoon we are working together on the framework of a story set in 1989.

My brother was working on a third generation HIV assay for testing blood (remember the tainted blood supply issues?)  They would get lots of negative blood samples from the nearby blood bank to run through their new machine.

The conflict:  what happens when the blood you run through the new and improved machine gives a positive result?  For a particular sample?  At a time when transfusion of HIV positive blood was a sure death sentence.  The company resolved the issue by contacting the blood bank and saying that the company wanted to buy all of the blood from this donor including any future donations.  They would attempt to take that blood out of circulation.  They weren't really sure it was a true positive result so they could not inform the blood bank for legal and regulatory reasons because their 'assay analyzer' was in testing and not an approved machine.  And what happens when the lab employee makes that call to the blood bank and they are told that the blood has already been used?

That third generation stuff?  That's just to make myself look smart.  He told me about first -fifth generation types of HIV testing.  Very interesting.

So now in a role reversal, I'm writing about the scientific stuff and my biochemistry PhD brother is writing the creative stuff about how working in a lab at that time felt like.

Picture from Max Planck Laboratory Center for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden.  Used without permission.  My brother says that his lab looked something like that.