Parts Is Parts

A typical day at work for me in the food science lab usually consists of doing plasma extractions for my honors project, washing glassware, and making solvents, but today was not a typical day of work. Currently, we are in the process of moving to a larger lab. The previous professor in that lab left a large amount of his stuff there and we (the other people that work in the lab and I) have the responsibility of cleaning it out. One of the things that he chose to leave behind was freeze dried baboon parts….yup, that’s right, monkeys!!!!

What exactly would someone be doing with baboons???? I believe he was doing some sort of research on their bones. Anyway, we had to figure out what to do with these random baboon parts and it wasn’t as easy as we thought it would be. Since they are animal parts they are considered to be biohazard and cannot just be thrown in the trash so we called over to the vet school to see how we should dispose of these animal parts. They said they would have to be incinerated, but first we would have to take them out of their plastic containers and put them in paper bags since plastic can’t go into the incinerator.

All of us in the lab group thought, great, not only do we have to dispose of the baboon parts but we first have to take them out of their containers!!!! We were all freaking out at this point because this is about the weirdest thing that any of us have had to do before, and we were all hesitant to start. Finally, we removed all the parts and put them in the paper bags and took them to the incinerator. Needless to say, this was a very interesting day at work for me.

--Teryn