• Question: what could be the worst thing that could happen in your work ?

    Asked by to Ian, Claire on 21 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Ian Simpson

      Ian Simpson answered on 21 Jun 2014:

      We try to protect against it by holding essential computer code and data in what are called distributed (or more commonly called “cloud”) systems so that we don’t lose important work in the event of hardware failures. If we had a catastrophic hardware failure it would be a big problem for us and would take a long time to put everything back together again. If the internet goes down that’s always a bit of a problem as we are often working on remote servers. We have local resources too, but long term couldn’t survive without it !

    • Photo: Claire Shooter

      Claire Shooter answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      Mixing up samples from different patients and giving them the wrong diagnosis. This would be a very serious mistake, as some women may choose to have an abortion if our tests show that their pregnancy will result in a child with a really bad haemoglobinopathy – these conditions are incurable and can be pretty horrible. We have many, many different safety checks to make sure this never happens.

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