Britain’s leading laboratory supplier launches investigation into racist slurs on products

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The UK’s largest independent supplier of laboratory supplies has removed an N-word racial slur describing some of its products and launched a review of the language used within its organization following inquiries from The Independent.

Scientific Laboratory Supplies (SLS) advertised cells from people of African descent using racially offensive terms in their description.

Skin embryo cells, liver cancer cells, and breast cancer cells were named “human n***oid skin embryo,” “human n***oid hepatocyte carcinoma,” and “human n***oid breast cancer.”

N***oid is generally considered a racist term used to describe black people.

The term was coined by colonialists and is particularly common in archaic scientific texts. It is part of a discredited human classification system that falsely claims that race is a scientific rather than a social construct and that people of African descent are genetically inferior.

The company said the offending terms resulted from a data processing oversight where SLS loaded a file from a third-party provider without checking the language.

As a distributor of laboratory products, SLS says it has over half a million items in its system and the vast majority of product descriptions are provided by suppliers.

The products in question were created on its system in 2009 and 2023 and provided in data files by manufacturers Sigma-Aldrich and Merck (Sigma-Aldrich was later acquired by Merck in a multi-billion dollar deal in 2015).

SLS managing director Ian Roulstone said The Independent: “SLS is a company that prides itself on its ethics and integrity. Therefore, we were very disappointed to see this terminology used anywhere in our business systems.

“I want to assure you that your email has prompted immediate action at the highest levels within SLS, with the immediate formation of a team of senior managers and board members from across our organization and the establishment of an action plan that will both lead to the elimination of the offensive term. “ and puts a robust system in place to ensure that something like this does not happen again in the future.

“Although we do not believe it is in the interests of science to remove the products from sale, they should certainly be presented in a way that does not cause offence. Therefore, on behalf of all of us at SLS, I sincerely apologize for any offence. “This is because we have not hidden this terminology.”

Merck products are primarily shipped directly from manufacturers to customers, and SLS has sold this product only once, to a customer who purchased it once in 2011 and again in 2012, a spokesman said.

As a result The IndependentSLS, which operates across the UK and has an office in Kenya, said when contacted by t that the company has now overhauled its internal processes to include a systematic review of product files to ensure offensive slurs do not appear in its inventory again turn up.

This process will cover the entire catalog of over 600,000 products, a spokesperson confirmed.

Cell culture lines from different ethnicities are widely used in scientific research to better understand the human body, improve human health, and ensure that drugs work properly in different groups.

Merck, a pharmaceutical giant based in Germany, develops and produces drugs, vaccines and therapies and also supplies biochemical materials to researchers around the world.

The company, which describes itself as “a leading supplier to the global life sciences industry,” was approached by The Independent for comment.

The development comes afterwards The Independent Last year, racist slurs were uncovered used in a number of official documents from the British government, the Met Office and the Royal Collection of Jewels.

Political activist Professor Gus John addressed both uses of the slur in the documents The Independent: “Racism and the language of racism continue to exist in structural, cultural, institutional and personal manifestations because of Britain’s stubborn refusal to confront the legacy of empire and colonialism.”

“N***oid…. denotes not a geographical place or a geographical region, but a people whose position in the human sphere has been defined and therefore qualifies as primitive, undeveloped, backward and not as human as the rest of humanity be used as furniture or for experiments by eugenicists.”