Four Laboratories

Part 1 — The Supply Chain

From vial to bench: what is recorded and what is assumed

Chain of custody, in a regulated setting, begins at sampling. Here it begins when the package arrives.

Part 2 — The Ledger

The submitted sample: the weakest link in the whole system

Every third-party report in this market describes a sample somebody chose to send. That choice is outside the laboratory’s control and outside its records.

Part 3 — The Ledger

From vial to bench: what is recorded and what is assumed

A result on one vial generalises to a batch only if the vial was drawn in a way that makes it representative — and nobody records how it was drawn.

Part 4 — The Supply Chain

How a claim degrades between the bench and the listing

What a verification mark would have to carry to be checkable: a date, a lot, a method, a submitter and a link to the report.

Part 5 — The Ledger

How a claim degrades between the bench and the listing

The Journal does not treat a badge as evidence and states so wherever it reports one.

Part 6 — The Ledger

What a laboratory knows about the material it receives

A result on one vial generalises to a batch only if the vial was drawn in a way that makes it representative — and nobody records how it was drawn.

Part 7 — Explainers

Six lines that would make an identity statement checkable

None of what a checkable identity statement requires is commercially sensitive, and all of it is known to whoever produced the document.

Part 8 — The Ledger

An interlaboratory comparison nobody had run

Two years ago we ran an anonymised version of this comparison and promised a named one. This is it, with every method printed in full.