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OHSU Turns Mouse into Factory for Human Liver Cells
Oregon Health & Science University researchers have figured out how to turn a mouse into a factory for human liver cells that can be used to test how pharmaceuticals are metabolized. The technique, published in the journal Nature Biotechnology, could soon become the gold standard not only for examining drug metabolism in the liver, which helps scientists determine a drug's toxicity, but also can be used as a platform for testing new therapies against infectious diseases that attack the liver, such as hepatitis C and malaria.
We had this one project where one of the milestones required really heavy duty updates to the system. The database schema was being updated. The front end was being updated. The backend was being moved from crappy PHP code to elegant JSP code. If this were anything but our modus operandi, you'd consider it a major version upgrade, not just a point release.
Needless to say, we took all the precautions we could. We first integrated the system on our development server. We got a quarter of our users migrated to that before we called it stable enough to move to the staging server. At that point, we moved half the users over and things were humming.
It was when we took that last step and moved the system to the production servers that all hell broke loose. First, the database couldn't handle the load and started ignoring requests. Then the webserver started hiccuping and returned all sorts of invalid data. Finally, the client side programs did what they could to degrade gracefully, but without valid data our clients were totally useless.
Total system meltdown. And everything had worked so great up to the final step. If there was ever any proof for the saying "the proof in the pudding is in the eating", this was it.
We can create equivalent environments and simulate the conditions necessary for just about anything. Still, it isn't until you actually take the systems live (whether that be a stock exchange trading facilitation program, as in our case, or a medicine developed on mice rather than humans, like in the article) that you actually find out whether things work correctly or not.
Luckily for our team, our manager took the brunt of the fall and only he and the lead developer got canned. If it's your life we're talking about though, there aren't any second chances.