50 Fun Facts About Lab Week

When is Medical Laboratory Professionals Week held each year?

It is coordinated by a committee of lab organisations led by ASCLS, and in 2026 fell on April 19–25.

In which year did Lab Week begin, under the name National Medical Laboratory Week?

'Professionals' was added in 2005 and 'National' was dropped in 2012, giving the current name.

Roughly what share of clinical decisions in acute-care hospitals is based on laboratory testing?

That statistic is the one Lab Week posters lean on hardest, and it comes from the definition of what a medical laboratory does.

Which Chicago-based body, founded in 1922, certifies most US laboratory professionals?

ASCP represents about 130,000 pathologists and lab professionals and publishes LabMedicine.

Who identified the main human blood groups in 1901 and won the 1930 Nobel Prize for it?

He went on to co-discover the Rh factor in 1937 and the polio virus in 1909.

Which blood type is often called the 'universal donor' for red cell transfusions?

O Rh D-negative red cells can go to almost anyone; AB positive individuals are the universal recipients, and guidelines now try to reserve O-negative units for true emergencies.

How many blood group systems did the International Society of Blood Transfusion recognise by June 2025?

ABO and Rh matter most, but the list runs from Kell and Duffy to systems most people have never heard of.

In the Rh system, which single antigen determines whether someone is 'Rh positive' or 'Rh negative'?

There are more than 50 Rh antigens, and there is no such thing as a 'd' antigen.

People with the rare 'hh' blood group, first found in Mumbai, can only receive transfusions from whom?

They make antibodies against A, B and O alike, which is how a type O child can be born to an AB parent.

What does CBC stand for?

It reports white cells, red cells, platelets, hemoglobin and hematocrit, plus red-cell indices and often a differential.

Hematocrit measures what?

Normal is roughly 41–50% for men and 36–44% for women; low values suggest anaemia.

Wright's stain, used on blood smears, mixes methylene blue with which red dye?

James Homer Wright devised it in 1902 as a modification of the Romanowsky stain.

Platelets are fragments of cytoplasm shed by which large bone-marrow cells?

They have no nucleus; in birds and amphibians the equivalent thrombocytes circulate as whole cells.

The erythrocyte sedimentation rate is measured after how long in a Westergren tube?

Westergren's original normals were 3 mm/h for men and 7 mm/h for women, with no allowance for age.

The automated cell counter that revolutionised the CBC works on a principle discovered by whom in the 1940s?

Each cell passing through a tiny aperture changes the electrical resistance; the patent wasn't granted until 1953.

Prothrombin time (PT/INR) is used to monitor patients taking which anticoagulant?

It evaluates the extrinsic and common clotting pathways; aPTT covers the intrinsic pathway.

Serum differs from plasma in lacking what?

Plasma is about 55% of blood volume and up to 95% water; the study of serum is serology.

Who invented the Vacutainer evacuated blood-collection tube in 1949?

The stopper colour signals the additive inside: EDTA, sodium citrate, heparin or a separator gel.

What is a person who draws blood for a living called?

Phlebectomy, by contrast, is the removal of a vein; a therapeutic phlebotomy takes about a unit, 450–500 ml.

Which Danish bacteriologist devised the 1884 stain that sorts bacteria into 'positive' and 'negative'?

Gram-positive walls keep the crystal violet; gram-negatives lose it to ethanol and take up the pink safranin.

In a Gram stain, what is the primary stain that gram-positive bacteria retain?

Lugol's iodine is added afterwards to lock the dye into the thick peptidoglycan layer.

Who suggested replacing gelatin with agar in culture media after gelatin kept melting?

Her husband Walther was working in Robert Koch's lab in 1881; agar changed microbiology for good.

In what year did Petri make the final modifications to the culture dish that bears his name?

His boss Robert Koch had developed a precursor in his private lab in 1881.

Whose 1876 discovery of Bacillus anthracis is considered the birth of modern bacteriology?

He later identified the causes of tuberculosis and cholera too, and won the 1905 Nobel Prize for the TB work.

A standard set of blood cultures consists of two bottles for which two kinds of organism?

Two sets from two sites are often drawn to tell a real bacteraemia from a skin contaminant.

MRSA is a strain of Staphylococcus aureus resistant to which family of antibiotics?

That covers methicillin, oxacillin and the cephalosporins; susceptible strains are called MSSA.

Which self-taught Dutch draper is known as the 'Father of Microbiology' for his 1670s microscope work?

He ground his own lenses in Delft and was the first to describe microbial life.

Who coined the word 'cell' in his 1665 book Micrographia?

He was looking at cork through a compound microscope of his own design.

Who invented the polymerase chain reaction in 1983, at Cetus Corporation?

He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Michael Smith and was famously eccentric outside the lab.

Taq polymerase, which made PCR practical, came from a bacterium found where?

Thermus aquaticus can take the near-boiling denaturation step; before it, fresh polymerase had to be added every cycle.

ELISA was first described in 1971 by Eva Engvall and Peter Perlmann. What does the E stand for?

Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay: an antibody carries an enzyme whose reaction reveals whether the antigen is there.

Above what HbA1c percentage does the glycated-haemoglobin test point to diabetes?

Glucose is actually less likely to bond to hemoglobin than galactose or fructose, which may be why the body runs on it.

Cardiac troponins I and T are measured in blood to diagnose damage to which organ?

They're subunits of the muscle-contraction machinery, so a rise means heart muscle has been injured.

About how many grams of haemoglobin does a healthy human have per 100 mL of blood?

Every vertebrate has it except one family of Antarctic icefish, which get by with no hemoglobin at all.

Roughly what fraction of total blood volume is plasma?

It's up to 95% water, with albumin, globulins, fibrinogen, glucose, electrolytes and hormones dissolved in it.

Urinalysis has three parts: physical examination, microscopy, and chemical evaluation done with what?

The dipstick reads pH, glucose and protein; microscopy looks for cells, casts, crystals and organisms.

The Pap test was invented in the 1920s by a physician of which nationality?

Georgios Papanikolaou also devised the multicoloured Pap stain in 1942; a simplified test came from Canada's Anna Marion Hilliard in 1957.

HeLa, the oldest human cell line, was taken in 1951 from a tumour of which woman?

The cells were taken without her knowledge; Jonas Salk used them to test the first polio vaccine.

CLIA, the US federal standards governing all clinical lab testing on humans, dates from which year?

The Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments cover everything except clinical trials and basic research.

Alexander Fleming's 1928 discovery of penicillin came from which mould?

He shared the 1945 Nobel with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, who turned it into a usable drug.

Louis Pasteur developed vaccines against rabies and which other disease?

He also disproved spontaneous generation and, of course, gave his name to pasteurisation.

The conical lab flask with a narrow neck is named after which German chemist, who invented it in 1860?

Its tapered body lets you swirl without spilling, which is why it's also called a titration flask.

In a laboratory centrifuge, where do the densest particles end up?

Spinning whole blood is how you separate cells from plasma or serum before most chemistry tests.

The Ishihara plates, published in 1917, test for what?

The full set has 38 plates, though a severe deficiency shows up after just a few.

Sickle cell disease is caused by an abnormality in which protein?

The misshapen red cells jam in capillaries; problems typically begin at five to six months of age.

Point-of-care diagnostics are also known by what other name?

The idea is to skip the hours or days of waiting for a specimen to travel to the central lab.

In lab informatics, what does the abbreviation LIS stand for?

The LIS prints barcoded labels that automated analyzers can scan to pick up test requests.

During which hours is the workflow in a hospital laboratory usually heaviest?

Phlebotomists draw the morning run so results are charted before physicians' rounds.

Which ISO standard sets quality and competence requirements for medical laboratories?

France made accreditation to it compulsory for all clinical laboratories in 2010.

In Australia, laboratories must be accredited by which body to receive Medicare payments?

COFRAC plays the equivalent role in France and HKAS in Hong Kong.