You’d think a freezer big enough to hold 4 million vials of blood would be easy to spot. But to my great embarrassment, I couldn’t see it.
Humphries and I were standing in a lab in the basement of the Veterans Affairs hospital in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. He had led me through a labyrinth of windowless rooms, packed with robots handling tubes of blood donated from veterans, pipes roaring with coolant, and gorilla-sized tanks of liquid nitrogen, until he stopped next to a featureless wall.
After a few awkward moments, I admitted my ignorance. “So, where is the freezer?” I asked.
Humphries, the scientific director of the lab, blinked and then looked at the featureless wall. “Right here,” he said. He craned his head upwards. “This is it.”
I followed his gaze, and then it clicked. The wall was actually the side of a vault that seemed to be about as big as a two-story house.
Near the top I could spy a small window. Humphries led me up a mobile staircase so that I could look through it. Inside the vault was a long, dimly lit corridor, flanked on either side by 16 separate compartments cooled to as low as 80 degrees below zero Celsius. A robot inside the freezer ferried vials to their assigned compartments.
This is no walk-in freezer.
The freezer, in fact, is at the heart of one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken to understand our DNA. The Department of Veterans Affairs is gathering blood from 1 million veterans and sequencing their DNA. At the same time, computer scientists are creating a database that combines those genetic sequences with electronic medical records and other information about veterans’ health.
The ultimate goal of the project, known as the Million Veteran Program, is to uncover clues about disorders ranging from diabetes to post-traumatic stress disorder.