On most mornings, Mary Freitag, a research assistant
in the Iowa Hygienic Laboratory, goes to work for
The University of Iowa in a building next to the
Capitol.
But it’s not Old Capitol. It’s the State
Capitol in Des Moines.
Across Iowa, pockets of University employees live
and work in research and service organizations. Some
of them never come to campus in Iowa City; they connect
with their campus counterparts only electronically.
Few on campus realize that these University employees
are out there.
The Hygienic Laboratory has a staff of 75 people
working in Des Moines, making it the largest UI department
located outside the Iowa City area. Most of the lab’s
staff is employed in one of two areas—the Iowa
Neonatal Metabolic Screening Program, which screens
all newborn babies for disabling conditions, or the
Environmental Quality Division, which analyzes and
detects contaminants in air, water, soil, fish, oil,
and human specimens.
Going to the flow
Freitag works in limnology, or the scientific study
of bodies of freshwater. Lean and tanned and dressed
in jeans and a sleeveless t-shirt, she loads a six-foot
cart with the equipment she’ll need to do water
quality tests at Camp Creek in Runnels. It’s
enough to fill the back of a large Suburban: hip
waders, the Iowa Atlas & Gazetteer, journals,
a cooler chest for samples, a six-foot metal fence
post, her cell phone, a laptop computer, a GPS instrument,
a trapper’s basket, and several bags of other
equipment.
She heads out Route 163 east to Route 316. At a
bridge over Camp Creek near Runnels, she unloads
and calibrates her equipment, fills out labels for
each bottle, and dons her hip waders—a challenge
on a hot, humid summer day. The trapper’s basket
helps her carry instruments down a steep slope. Wading
into thigh-deep water, she pounds the stake in the
stony creek bed and carefully attaches a Sonde meter
to it that will measure and record the amount of
dissolved oxygen in the stream over several weeks.
Next, she wades out to take several water samples
upstream from the meter. While calculating the stream’s
flow, she measures the stream width with a long tape
and the water depth every 2.7 feet across the tape.
Back at the lab’s offices in the H.A. Wallace
Building near the State Capitol, she turns in her
samples.
“We do all the limnology lab work for all
of Iowa roughly west of I-35,” says Richard
Kelley, assistant director of the lab. “The
Hygienic Laboratory in Iowa City does the rest of
the state. We also do stack testing for emissions
and track dispersions of particles in the air.”
Having two labs in the state is necessary because
of the travel time to reach sites on Iowa’s
borders, he says. As it is, 12 staff members frequently
have to stay overnight and ship samples back to the
lab by an overnight carrier so they can be tested
within a specified period of time.
Virtually all the lab work done by the Environmental
Quality Division is for the Iowa Department of Natural
Resources or other state agencies.
Screening the tiniest babies
Pat Timmins is a health laboratory scientist in
the Iowa Neonatal Metabolic Screening Program. She
works at her computer, evaluating data from galactosemia
tests. Each infant born in Iowa and North Dakota
is screened for life-threatening conditions, such
as congenital hypothyroidism or phenylketonuria.
The data on Timmins’ screen may identify a
baby who needs immediate medical intervention.
A sense of urgency seems to pervade the laboratory
on Second Avenue in Des Moines, where eight University
of Iowa employees work.
On average, 36,000 babies are born in Iowa every
year and all of them are pricked in the heel with
a lancet just before discharge from the hospital,
when they’re 24 hours to five days old. Drops
of blood are allowed to dry on an absorbent paper
collection form, which is then sent to the laboratory
for testing.
Each day when the mail arrives, it contains dozens
of forms. Lab employees punch tiny samples from each
blood spot form in order to screen for up to 39 conditions.
The employees say they feel deep satisfaction when
their tests uncover conditions that could result
in a baby’s death if not discovered in time.
Chemist Dana Hartsock explains: “There aren’t
a lot of places where you can say you know you’re
making a difference in people’s lives, but
we do here.”
While they enjoy their work—most have been
in the lab for eight years or more—employees
agree that they feel more like part of a state agency
than part of the University.
Staff members do find ways to tie in to the overall
University, though. Some attend a coordinators’ meeting
in Iowa City once a month. They have videoconferencing
capability for other meetings, and they publish a
newsletter, says Marcia Valbracht, health laboratory
scientist and technical supervisor.
Lab employees in both Des Moines locations say it
would be nice if they had closer contact with their
colleagues in Iowa City. But they’re so busy
that visits and tours are hard to accommodate.
A new laboratory near state government buildings
in Ankeny is on the drawing boards, Freitag says.
That will at least bring together all Hygienic Laboratory
employees in Des Moines.
She adds with a grin, “Maybe we’ll have
an open house and the Iowa City people will have
time to come.”
by Anne Tanner
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