Celebrating 50: Air Force's unsung Biomedical Corps maintains health, mission capability

  • Published
  • By Air Force Staff Sgt. Wes Wright
  • JBER Public Affairs
JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska --  The virus or disease somehow got out of the lab and now there are flesh-eating zombies walking around presenting a global threat to what's left of mankind.

It's a fairly common plot in popular movies and TV series like the Walking Dead and Resident Evil. Invariably, somebody in a white lab coat appears holding a vial of blood or tissue sample explaining to the viewer how awful the disease or virus is, and how, if left unchecked, it will bring down all humanity.

Who is the guy or girl in the lab coat?

The folks at the 673d Medical Support Squadron Anatomic Pathology section will tell you it's a pathologist or histopathology technician.  

Histopathology is just one part of the Air Force's Biomedical Sciences Corps, a discipline composed of 17 primary specialty codes. This year, the BSC turns 50 years old.

"Helping to diagnose cancer is very rewarding," said Air Force Staff Sgt. Christiane Shoenhair, 673d MDSS histopathology technician. "Sometimes it's hard to see what you do here when all you're doing is handling pieces of tissue. When you look at the big picture, knowing that you maybe helped save a life because you did this step in the diagnostic process, is awesome."

"Histopathology is basically the study of diseased tissue," Shoenhair said. "Anything that gets cut out of the body or is from
the body, we receive and process for a pathologist to look at and see if someone has cancer or perhaps some other disease or condition."

Typically, the processing and diagnostic procedure takes between 24 and 48 hours.

While Shoenhair considers all facets of her job to be potentially lifesaving, one is especially key: cryosection, more commonly referred to as "frozens." It is laboratory term used to describe the rapid microscopic analysis of a specimen.

"We drop everything we're doing when a frozen comes in," Shoenhair said. "Many times, a doctor will have somebody still open on an operating table and we have to get them a preliminary diagnosis within 20 minutes. The work we do alongside our pathologists is critical to the assessment and treatment of somebody lying on an operating table."

For patients who have passed away, pathologists and histopathology technicians like Shoenhair perform autopsies.

"Helping family members find closure is a big part of that process for me," Shoenhair said. "You're able to provide that information to the family. 'How did they die? Were they in pain?' It's hard but the big picture is such a great outcome. Knowing I helped a doctor be able to console a family member - that means so much to me."

The BSC's mission is to enhance Air Force combat capability and effectiveness by providing world-class customer service and scientific expertise, resulting in peak force performance, productivity, and quality healthcare to the beneficiary population.

With 2,400 officers, supported by 5,800 enlisted members in parallel career fields, BSC members can be found at 81 locations around the world in multiple settings. 

The BSC encompasses physical therapy, optometry, podiatry, physician assistants, audiology, speech pathology, clinical psychology, clinical social work, occupational therapy, aerospace and operational physiology, dietetics, bioenvironmental engineers, public health, medical entomology, pharmacy, biomedical laboratory, anatomic pathology, healthcare facilities architects and engineers and health and medical physics.

Histopathology technicians, of whom there are fewer than 60 in the Air Force, are qualified to receive and prepare surgical specimens for tissue diagnosis, prepare specimens for microscopic examination through manual or automated procedures, and maintain records of all surgical, cytological and autopsy specimens.

They also maintain laboratory instruments and equipment, and assist the pathologist in performing postsurgical examination of specimens, just to name a few.

"You know the show 'House'?" Shoenhair asked. "On the show, the doctors did the processing. That never happens.

You don't have a doctor come down here, run our machines and have a diagnosis ready two minutes later.

"The process takes 24 hours. That's probably the biggest misconception about our career field," she said.

"When a specimen comes in, we enter it into a computer and assign a tracking number to it. A pathologist or a histopathology technician with advanced training will then cut it up on a grossing station and look for any visual abnormalities," Shoenhair said.

In pathology, 'grossing' is the process of examining a specimen with the naked eye and dissecting it to take samples for processing.

"After that, the sample is put into a processor for about eight hours and is run through several different chemicals, to include a formaldehyde solution that kills mostly everything infectious in the tissue and freezes the cells in their current state so that they don't deteriorate and can be examined microscopically," Shoenhair said.

"One of the technicians takes sections out of it and embeds the sample in a wax mold where it is even further broken down on a microtome where the samples are cut into sections thinner than a strand of hair," she explained.

At this point, tissue samples are "stained" as one of the final steps in the process. Sections are stained with one or more pigments to reveal cellular components.

"All of BSC is important, but histopathology is especially important because their findings in tissue samples can be life-and-death," said Air Force Maj. Matthew Glynn, 673d Medical Support Squadron chief of laboratory services. "They can confirm or dispel a doctor's initial assessment, and sometimes they can catch cancers that the doctors don't know about."

Glynn said the skills of technicians like Shoenhair, while seemingly routine in today's medical world, would shock founding BSC experts.

"We've come a long way," Glynn said of the science. "The advancement of every section within BSC since our inception is simply astounding. We take great pride in what we do.

"We look forward to continuing a tradition of excellence for another 50 years."