The Science Behind Moving Science

Alongside death, birth, marriage, divorce, and disease, moving is often cited as falling in the top 10 of life’s most stressful events. If you were to ask Barnard’s scientists — who recently moved their labs out of Altschul Hall so that the building can undergo its transformation into the Roy and Diana Vagelos Science Center (R&D Science Center) — they’d likely concur.

“I want to emphasize the tremendous and all-around heroic efforts by my colleagues across the board,” says Dina Merrer, dean of science education and infrastructure.

Highly sensitive equipment, delicate specimens, hazardous materials, and active experiments — some years in the making — required an extraordinary level of expertise to ensure everything would reach its destination safely. Professors’ research and experiments weren’t called to halt because of the move — rather, in most cases, the experiments were briefly paused, preserved, and then resumed at the new locale.

There’s a science to moving science that necessitates precise timing. The right conditions and technical know-how were crucial so that when they returned in the fall, students could pick up their studies from where they left off.

Merrer had the challenging task of being the bridge between the academic departments, leadership, chairs, vice chairs, their respective laboratory managers, as well as the myriad contractors and subcontractors who helped with transport. Fifty-seven faculty and staff from four departments had to be relocated. Books, papers, and decades’ worth of ephemera needed to be sorted, evaluated, and sometimes discarded.

“There were pieces of equipment and laboratory instruments that required more than just a regular plug in the wall,” says Merrer.

For the move, which took place over the summer, Barnard retained Hoffman, a moving company with expertise in laboratories that must function on an academic schedule. Hoffman, in turn, managed subcontractors who are specialists in specific equipment, such as a half-million-dollar confocal microscope.

“Sometimes you need people from the company who made the instruments to come and shut down the equipment, and that could take a day or two, then have them carefully pack it up to preserve not only the sensitive electronics in that equipment but, in some cases, sensitive optics that need to be handled very carefully,” says Merrer.

Before the move, a range of facility requirements needed to be assessed at the destination lab, such as climate control, ventilation, and electrical supply. Equipment was then very slowly driven across 120th Street to temporary homes at a half-dozen buildings on the campuses of Columbia and Teachers College, carted to other Barnard buildings, or driven upriver to the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Nevis Labs. Once there, the entire process was reversed so that the equipment could be put back together and turned back on.

The many experiments and specimens moved were as diverse as the disciplines housed at Altschul. Some of the countless items transported were cytoskeleton proteins, 125-year-old herbarium specimens, and a gorilla skeleton.

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For biologist Jordan Balaban, a specialist in muscle physiology and biomechanics, the move represented an opportunity to take stock of a trove of bones and muscle specimens preserved in mercury. Among them was the gorilla skeleton of an undetermined age that for years has greeted biology students as they exited the elevator. The gorilla held court with a dolphin jaw and skull and the skeletons of a sawfish, reptiles, birds, and other species whose ages range approximately from 20 years to a century.

“The move was a nice excuse to kind of go through and see what we had and [discover] things that I’d like to use in teaching in the future,” he says. Like the equipment, the specimens came with a host of needs before and after the move.

To give one a sense of the complexity and technical concerns related to the move, it helps to examine one type of experiment: Biochemist Christina Vizcarra’s lab studies the cytoskeleton, the network of protein filaments that provide a cell’s structure. To prepare her experiments, the lab workers grow bacteria from which the proteins eventually get harvested and isolated. The isolated proteins are placed in liquid nitrogen and then stored in a freezer at minus 80 degrees Celsius.

“The minus-80 freezers are essential for us to be able to run this whole research program, because we can’t isolate the proteins over and over again,” she says.

Each protein sample is referred to as an aliquot. It takes two to five days to make a batch of 50. To prepare for the move, Vizcarra took a scrupulous inventory and discarded the surplus. She eventually sent about 4,500 aliquots, which translates to years of work, to their new home at Columbia.

“[Two to five days] is definitely an underestimate, since we do a lot of troubleshooting before figuring out how to successfully isolate a protein,” she says. “I would estimate that if we trashed everything in the minus-80-C, it would take several years to restock it.”

The freezers are notoriously temperamental, which is why they keep two only half full. If one goes down, the experiments are moved to the other. One could imagine Vizcarra’s concerns about simply unplugging the freezer. Compound her concerns and multiply that by four, as she shares the freezer with three other professors — and that’s just two freezers out of the dozen or so “live” freezers that were moved. Needless to say, the freezers were among the last items to be moved out of Altschul.

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Not all the freezers are minus-80; there are also minus-20 freezers. Before moving the plant specimens in the College’s herbarium, two of those freezers were used to kill off any tiny and potentially damaging critters that might have settled onto them over the years. Many of the specimens, which number more than 4,000, are well over 100 years old.

The herbarium samples were removed from their cabinets and carefully kept in the original order. They were then sealed in large plastic bags before being stored in the freezers for 48 hours, after which they were taken out of the bags and brought to room temperature to release condensation. Two full-size freezers went through two cycles to process the entire collection. Finally, the specimens were moved into new archival boxes and stored in the Barnard Archives, where they’ll stay until the completion of the renovation.

The herbarium stands as one example of moving Barnard’s history alongside its cutting-edge technology. Its 50-year stay at Altschul was preceded by more than 75 years at Milbank. “The herbarium is a record of Barnard’s science origins,” says Hilary Callahan, Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Biological Sciences.

At the turn of the 19th century, before railroads and subways spurred development, faculty, their colleagues, and students gathered plants from around the greater metropolitan area. “So there’s actually a record of predevelopment Bronx, Queens, and Fort Lee in New Jersey,” she says.

Callahan notes that the collection’s first steward was famed botanist Emily Gregory, who also happened to be the first woman professor hired at Barnard. Callahan says that Gregory and others involved in the collection were among the same circle of intellectuals involved in the founding of the New York Botanical Garden. 

“It’s very clear from looking at the collection that that group, that circle of experts who founded both of those institutions, focused very intently on helping Barnard initiate what I like to call ‘an herbarium of her own.’ ”

By spring 2026, professors will have more labs to call their own when they make the final move into the R&D Science Center. The new building will offer an additional 87,000 square feet of programmable space, doubling the previous amount at Altschul.

Once the move is completed, Vizcarra’s students will study proteins through a confocal microscope in a space that matches that instrument’s technological modernity. Callahan says the herbarium will return to a climate-controlled environment and, hopefully, an equally accessible home online through digitization. For his part, Balaban foresees a rotating student-curated display of specimens, with the gorilla skeleton returning to pride of place welcoming future generations of scientists.