Restricted Services in the Core Facilities (November Update)

Dear colleagues, dear users of the Core Facilities,
all of us are aware of the restrictions in our public life that were set up to fight the current challenges of the corona pandemic. And it is time to remind you of the restrictions that we already set up for the core facilities during the first wave in spring. They are still in place and proved to work. Thanks for your discipline and collegiality.
Looking at the recent numbers it might be time to rethink the meanings of these restrictions. Maybe it is no longer to reduce our activities to what is possible but to what is neccessary, reasonable and safe. We therefore would ask you to rethink the necessity of your experiments until there are reliable measures about the further development of the pandemic and convincing numbers.

As already stated in our post in March, facilities that provide self service instrumentation, like microscopy and flow cytometry have set up regulations on how to access instruments and laboratories. You can find this information on the Intranet Pages, that can be reached while you are on campus or via Uni Bonn VPN. And as was mentioned during the shutdown in spring, it is worthwhile to visit the pages regularly.

For core facilites where users submit samples, i.e. mass spectrometry, NGS, Nanobodies, the core facilites are aware of risks and you should contact the core managers to make individual arrangements. But keep in mind that work in the laboratories of the facilities is also hampered by the current situation.

The MRT core facility will shutdown its services during November. Time can still be used to analyse previous experiments and plan future ones and the core facility is available for that.

We will keep the situation under constant review and will use this pages to update information. For general information visit the pages of the university and the medical faculty.

And strange but true, I found the most vivid description of the current situation in a parlament discussion featuring Angela Merkel, who cited Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim, a science journalist.

An ideal host for a virus is social, mobile and present everywhere … Evolution gave us brains to fight this constant challenges from viruses and to survive … So it is up to us to show the virus, that he choose the wrong host. (personal excerpt from an interview from Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim)