On the first full day in his lab after 10 weeks of hurricane-forced exile, Tulane University cancer researcher Matt Burow looks on with dismay as his gloved and masked research assistant Alberto Salvo holds out a scrap of brown tissue-a mouse tumor that sat at room temperature for weeks. "Everything liquefied. It just melted," Burow says of the sample, which is now useless for protein analysis. Burow's group also lost 200 costly mutant mice, including a half-dozen that had just been injected with a promising antitumor chemical that took 2 months to extract from soybeans. Burow, who is just 34 years old but already has independent funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), says his research has been set back a year. Yet he tries to remain hopeful. "The only way you can really function is on the premise of faith that there's going to be support," he says. "Because if [we] don't, we'll fall apart. Especially at this point in my career. You just have to hope we can catch up."
展开▼
