The research vials taken from a Boston hospital
Boston, United States, December 2019
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
In December 2019, a visiting researcher at a laboratory of Beth Israel Deaconess hospital in Boston was stopped at Logan Airport with 21 vials of biological material hidden in a sock inside his luggage. The material came from the laboratory's own line of cancer research.
He told agents he was carrying nothing, then admitted to the vials and said he intended to continue the research in another country. He pleaded guilty in 2020 to lying to the authorities and was deported. The case became part of a series of investigations into the transfer of research from American institutions.
Sources
In the game
Sample 7
Hale Lab, 5th floor of a biotech institute in Boston, 6:10 am. Postdoc Lakshmi Iyer opened the -80 °C freezer and found slot 7 of the rack empty.
The game borrows the researcher who smuggles vials of a valuable cell line out of the institution. Characters, crime and outcome are fiction.
