50 Fun Facts About Lab Week

Medical Laboratory Professionals Week is held in the last full week of which month each year?

April. The week exists to show the public the people behind their test results, and a coalition of national laboratory organisations now runs it together.

Lab Week was launched in 1975 by the American Society for Medical Technology, known today by which initials?

ASCLS, the American Society for Clinical Laboratory Science. It called the celebration National Medical Laboratory Week, a name Canada's lab week still carries though the American one has since been renamed.

Which laboratory machine sterilises instruments and culture media with pressurised steam?

An autoclave. Under pressure, steam gets far hotter than boiling water, hot enough to kill bacterial spores; Charles Chamberland, a colleague of Pasteur, devised it in 1879.

Which Chicago-based pathology body, founded in 1922, certifies laboratory professionals through its Board of Certification?

ASCP, the American Society for Clinical Pathology. Lab staff who pass its Board of Certification exams add the letters to their titles, as in MLS(ASCP).

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

Karl Landsteiner showed that blood from different people can clump when mixed, which explained why transfusions had so often killed and made it possible to match donor to patient.

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

O negative red cells carry none of the A, B or Rh markers that a recipient's immune system might attack, so hospitals reach for them in emergencies when there is no time to test a patient's type.

Which human blood group system was the first to be discovered, in 1901?

ABO. By mid-2025 the international list had grown to 48 blood group systems, but this first one is still the most important to match before a transfusion.

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

D. Someone without it can make antibodies after meeting D-positive blood, which is why D-negative mothers are offered anti-D injections to protect a later baby.

Carriers of which rare blood group, lacking even type O's H antigen, can receive blood only from one another?

Bombay phenotype, first described in 1952 in the Indian city now called Mumbai. Routine typing reads it as group O, yet ordinary O blood can set off a dangerous reaction.

In a medical laboratory, what does the abbreviation CBC stand for?

Complete blood count. A single small tube yields the numbers of red cells, white cells and platelets, which is why it is so often part of a routine check-up.

Hematocrit measures what?

The volume percentage of red cells in blood. Dehydration is the commonest reason for a high reading: no extra cells have been made, there is simply less plasma to dilute them.

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

Eosin. It colours red cells and certain granules pink while the blue dye picks out nuclei, and the white cells whose granules it stains brightest are the eosinophils.

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

Megakaryocytes. Platelets have no nucleus of their own and are found only in mammals; birds and amphibians make do with whole cells called thrombocytes.

Which blood test, read in millimetres after one hour, measures how fast red cells sink in an upright tube?

ESR, the erythrocyte sedimentation rate. Inflammation makes red cells stick together in clumps that sink faster, so a high reading warns of trouble without saying where it is.

The machines that tally blood cells automatically work on a principle discovered by whom in the 1940s?

Wallace Coulter found that each cell passing through a tiny opening briefly changes an electric current, so a machine could tally thousands of cells in the time a technician managed a few by eye.

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

Warfarin. It was first sold as a rat poison and takes its name from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which backed the work; only later did doctors use small doses to prevent clots.

Serum differs from plasma in lacking what?

Clotting factors. Serum is the liquid left once blood has clotted, so fibrinogen and its partners stay behind in the clot; plasma is drawn from blood that was never allowed to clot.

The blood-collection tube that fills itself by vacuum is sold by Becton Dickinson under which brand name?

Vacutainer. Because the vacuum is set in the factory, each tube draws just the right amount of blood for the additive inside, and the colour of its stopper tells staff which additive that is.

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

A phlebotomist. The word is built from ancient roots meaning 'vein' and 'cutting', and for centuries it meant bloodletting as a cure rather than drawing a sample for the lab.

After the alcohol rinse and counterstain of a Gram stain, gram-negative bacteria end up which colour?

Pink or red. Their thin walls let the rinse wash out the first dye, so only the counterstain shows; the Danish physician Hans Christian Gram devised the method in 1884.

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

Crystal violet. Iodine fixes the dye in the thick walls of gram-positive cells, while an alcohol rinse washes it straight out of thin-walled gram-negatives.

Fanny Hesse, who used it in her kitchen jellies, suggested which gelling agent to replace gelatin for growing bacteria?

Agar. It stays firm in warmth that turns gelatin to liquid, so her husband's laboratory could at last grow separate colonies of bacteria on a solid surface.

The newborn heel-prick blood test was first developed, in the early 1960s, to screen babies for which inherited condition?

Phenylketonuria, or PKU. A baby found to have it is put on a special low-protein diet straight away, which prevents the brain damage the condition would otherwise cause.

Who identified the bacteria behind both tuberculosis and cholera in the 1880s, helping to found modern bacteriology?

Robert Koch. He also set out the tests still used to prove that a particular microbe causes a particular disease, known as Koch's postulates, and won a Nobel Prize in 1905.

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

Aerobic and anaerobic. One bottle suits organisms that need oxygen and the other those that cannot grow in it, so whichever kind has reached the bloodstream gets a chance to multiply.

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

Beta-lactams. The family includes the penicillins and their relatives, and a single acquired gene, mecA, gives the bacterium a wall-building protein that almost none of them can block.

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

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek ground his own single-lens microscopes as a hobby and was the first to see bacteria, which he described in letters to London's Royal Society as 'animalcules'.

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

Robert Hooke. He was looking at a thin slice of cork, whose rows of tiny empty boxes he described as 'much like a honey-comb'.

Who invented the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, while working at Cetus Corporation in the 1980s?

Kary Mullis. His method turns a trace of DNA into vast numbers of copies within hours, which transformed medical testing and forensic science and won him a share of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

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

Hot springs. Thermus aquaticus was found in the steaming pools of Yellowstone in the 1960s, and its polymerase withstands the near-boiling heat that every PCR cycle requires.

In the lab test ELISA, first described in 1971, what does the E stand for?

Enzyme. The antibodies carry one that triggers a colour change, which let labs give up the radioactive labels that earlier immunoassays had depended on.

Which test shows average blood sugar over the past two to three months?

HbA1c. Glucose sticks to the haemoglobin in red cells and stays there, so the test averages out daily swings; a result of 6.5% or more points to diabetes.

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

The heart. Troponin leaks into the blood when heart muscle is damaged, so a rising level is now the main laboratory sign of a heart attack.

Which fish have pale, colourless blood because they make no working haemoglobin at all?

Icefish live in the near-freezing Southern Ocean, where the water holds so much dissolved oxygen that their blood can carry enough without any red pigment.

Blood for a CBC is usually drawn into a tube containing EDTA, marked by a stopper of which colour?

Lavender. EDTA stops the sample clotting by locking up the calcium that clotting needs, so the cells stay separate and free-floating when the analyser reads them.

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

Test strips. Each pad on the dipstick changes colour for a different substance, such as glucose, protein or blood, so a single dip screens for several conditions in a minute or two.

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

Greek. Georgios Papanikolaou reported in 1928 that a simple smear could reveal cancer cells, but the idea was largely ignored until the 1940s.

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

Henrietta Lacks died within months, but her cells are still dividing in laboratories today. They were taken without her knowledge, and for years reports gave the donor a false name such as Helen Lane.

CLIA, the 1988 US law setting quality standards for clinical laboratories, is run mainly by which federal agency?

CMS, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The rules reach every site that tests human samples for health purposes, from a big hospital laboratory to a doctor's office running simple tests.

Which two Oxford scientists made Fleming's penicillin a usable drug and shared his 1945 Nobel Prize?

Howard Florey and Ernst Chain. Their team had so little of the drug in 1941 that they recovered it from their first patient's urine to use again, and still ran out.

Louis Pasteur developed vaccines against rabies and which livestock disease, tested on sheep in a famous public trial in 1881?

Anthrax. At Pouilly-le-Fort his team vaccinated half of a flock, then infected every animal; before a crowd of onlookers, the vaccinated sheep all survived while the unprotected ones died.

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

Emil Erlenmeyer described the flask in 1860. Its sloping sides let a chemist swirl the contents hard without spilling a drop, which is why it became the standard vessel for titrations.

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

At the bottom of the tube. Spun blood settles in layers by weight: red cells at the base, a thin pale band of white cells and platelets above them, and clear plasma on top.

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

Red–green colour deficiency. On one well-known plate, people with normal colour vision read the dotted number as 74, while those with the deficiency see 21.

Carrying one copy of the sickle cell gene partly protects against which disease?

Malaria. That protection is why the gene has stayed common in families with roots in malarial regions, even though inheriting two copies causes sickle cell disease.

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

Bedside testing. Because the sample never travels to a central laboratory, results such as a finger-prick glucose reading arrive within minutes, while the patient is still there to be treated.

In a clinical laboratory, what does the abbreviation LIS stand for?

Laboratory information system. It prints a barcode label for every tube, and the analysers read it to pull up that sample's test orders themselves, so staff just load the tubes instead of keying each request in.

What do labs call a blood sample whose red cells have burst, releasing their contents and skewing the results?

Haemolysed. Red cells are packed with potassium, so when they burst the reading comes out falsely high, and the lab has to ask for a fresh sample.

Which laboratory technique sorts DNA fragments or proteins by size as a voltage pulls them through a gel?

Electrophoresis. The gel works like a sieve: small molecules slip through its pores faster than large ones, so a mixture spreads out into bands that can be compared with known standards.

A 'differential' ordered alongside a CBC breaks down the numbers of which type of cell?

White blood cells. There are five kinds, each with its own job, so knowing which one is raised or lowered tells a doctor far more than the overall total alone.