
How to start a lab when funds are tight - okket
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05655-3
======
kayhi
A major problem is that it is time consuming for researchers to comparison
shop and contact sales reps. We built Lab Spend
([https://labspend.com](https://labspend.com)) which has a pricing search
engine for supplies and chemicals to give people an idea if their quote is
fair.

"On Amazon, a $100 roll of paraffin film sells for around $25." Seems
reasonable

Price Distribution: [https://imgur.com/a/YobZnm2](https://imgur.com/a/YobZnm2)

List Price: $71.27 USD

"Can$20,000 ultra-low-temperature freezer" depends on model, but likely
overpaid

Price Distribution: [https://imgur.com/a/jZer27n](https://imgur.com/a/jZer27n)

List Price: $20,663.90 USD

~~~
vedtopkar
This is really cool! I hadn't heard of you guys before but will definitely be
using your service. I can attest to the fact that comparison shopping is a
huge time suck in science.

The one exception to the importance of comparison shopping is probably at the
very start of a lab. Oftentimes, PIs will negotiate with large suppliers for
massive start-up discounts in exchange for buying lots of equipment from a
single supplier. (Not relevant to me, but just thought people should know that
that is a thing that happens).

~~~
kayhi
Great point that there are new lab and volume discounts. Our data is showing
that you should always be negotiating and that pricing is still independent of
volume. We've seen cases of companies with 1/10th the spend of others getting
better prices by product and overall.

This line from the article made me smile...

"Besides, there’s often no need for aggressive negotiation tactics; most
suppliers will accommodate reasonable requests to secure the business of a
newly hired faculty member, notes Lisa Witte, president of Fisher Scientific,
a lab-supply company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania."

Of course a person in sales is going to tell you not to negotiate aggressively
with them.

------
cryoshon
i'm glad there was an article written about this sociological phenomenon in
the sciences.

begging, sharing, bidding, _stealing_, fixing, and making do were the standard
in every "poorly funded" (read: extremely well funded in comparison to many
others) academic lab and every "poorly funded" (read: fairly well funded)
private biotech company that i have worked with. i can only imagine what it is
like to work in a place that isn't very well funded, given the level of stuff
that was happening where i have been.

you can tell when grants are approved and when new rounds of funding are
raised because there's a new round of fresh equipment that shows up in the lab
-- then, later, the hand-me-downs and salvaged gear shows up between funding
rounds.

it isn't uncommon to see equipment in action that is 20 years old. one place
even had an analysis instrument from 1968, but i would say that is an outlier.
there are also a few places who pride themselves on over-spending on all-new
top of the line equipment, but in my experience these are the massive pharma
companies where money is not as much of a concern as equipment uniformity and
supply chain.

the result of all the old/salvaged equipment, of course, is that all of these
old things need maintenance and break down, typically at the worst possible
moment. tensions over resources are also the norm within organizations, in my
experience. there isn't always enough to go around, yet people are obligated
to share with their neighbors when they're in a pinch... and, on aggregate,
scientists have a habit of always being in a pinch.

interestingly, there was also a group that i worked with local to boston
([https://www.boslab.org/](https://www.boslab.org/)) which made a small
educational lab exclusively with auctioned/salvaged/fixed gear, and did so
extremely cheaply. they had sufficient means to do basic molecular bio
experiments, which was really cool. the trouble is that consumables are going
to be extremely expensive no matter what, so savings on capital are not as
significant as they may seem.

honestly, at this point the culture of austerity and recycling in the sciences
seems ingrained in a lot of people, particularly PIs from the US. giving them
more money isn't going to make the problem go away because they are accustomed
to hoarding their cash as much as possible. they don't know if or when the
next grant will be approved, or if it is going to be for as much money as they
really need. this habit works very well in certain biotech companies, too --
often, VCs don't understand that the cost savings might have consequences.

as someone who has been involved with founding several, starting a lab is time
consuming, but not particularly difficult. there's probably a business
opportunity somewhere in there. maybe something like assembling sets of
second-hand / repaired equipment and selling them as a package to new labs.

------
btrettel
While only briefly mentioned in the article, theory and analysis of existing
data are a lot cheaper than new experiments.

I am a PhD student in engineering right now. I've found that most of what I
would have liked to measure was already available in the literature, but the
papers of interest took some digging to find. I will be doing some
experiments, but they will be very targeted at filling in gaps. Most
researchers seem to think they are targeting gaps, but (in my field at least)
literature reviews are typically not detailed enough to truly know where the
cutting edge is. Researchers often end up reinventing the wheel.

I also have extended existing data by taking advantage of the properties of a
special case to get some information most would consider very difficult to
obtain. (Basically, I use a proxy which has a known strong correlation to the
quantity of interest in the special case. It doesn't work outside of the
special case.) Most avoid getting this information because either the
researcher chooses a bad proxy, or knows how to get the information more
directly but dislikes the method they know (because it would be a lot of
work).

I supplement existing data with sanity checks on existing theories too. In
fact, I will be presenting a paper at a conference in a few weeks where the
entire motivation of the paper was to criticize an earlier theory which fails
many sanity checks. (Wrong in the limits, wrong trend, lacks a necessary
functional dependency, etc.)

The remainder of my time is spent developing mathematical models. Math is
cheap and I think most researchers in the physical sciences would benefit from
more of it.

~~~
apathy
If only NIH agreed.

“You know what we need? More funding for shitty underpowered studies in
immunocompromised mice, and less funding for analysis & methods work. Besides,
if they’re any good, AmaGooFaceSoft will just steal them anyways.”

Ha ha only serious. You are 1000% correct, and I can only hope that NIH will
one day discover the same thing. Instead of destroying working APIs.

~~~
btrettel
> Instead of destroying working APIs.

There's a reason I hoard data. Data becomes inaccessible too frequently.

~~~
geoalchimista
Second this. I remember back when open access or reproducibility was not a
thing, I used some little app written in Java to "steal" data from scanned
figures of other's papers datum by datum, because they just wouldn't put the
data in an online supplement or a repository. I do this less often nowadays
because suddenly the community becomes more aware of data sharing.

------
justinclift
Some relevant links for the 3D printed content, as they seem to be omitted
from the article:

• [https://open-labware.net](https://open-labware.net)

•
[https://3dprint.nih.gov/discover?field_model_category_tag_ti...](https://3dprint.nih.gov/discover?field_model_category_tag_tid\[\]=93)

•
[http://www.appropedia.org/3D_printable_science_equipment](http://www.appropedia.org/3D_printable_science_equipment)

•
[https://hackteria.org/wiki/Generic_Lab_Equipment](https://hackteria.org/wiki/Generic_Lab_Equipment)

• [https://www.thingiverse.com/jpearce/collections/open-
source-...](https://www.thingiverse.com/jpearce/collections/open-source-
scientific-tools)

------
ptero
This is a good article. However, in the US there is a flip side to hardware
purchase optimization -- labor costs. It is sad (or infuriating, if I paid for
it) to hear a lab worker boast how he saved $200 on wiring up some monster
one-time contraption instead of buying off the shelf and it only took him two
days; great, huh?

With all loads (and his $1 salary probably costs 2.5-4$ total) he just wasted
at least $500. Just a data point, almost certainly not applicable to poorer
countries.

~~~
cryoshon
agreed entirely. labor costs are nearly always discounted in the life sciences
from my experience.

there's two origins of this phenomena. the first is that people are accustomed
to having graduate students, or worse, being graduate students in the
sciences. people abuse their time and treat it as though it is valueless, and
that habit persists in them when they become leaders. then, the habit
percolates downward to people who were never graduate students. viola, you now
have an entire group of people with no conception of opportunity cost or labor
costs.

the second origin is that scientists who are managers typically would rather
have something "just work" (read: be jerry rigged and not work very well) than
have to purchase a solution. this is another holdover from the graduate
student days. buying solutions is expensive, and you still need to spend time
to set it up and potentially troubleshoot. getting someone to make a one-time
solution that is a totally incomprehensible mess is preferable if it is
cheaper. besides, the manager scientist doesn't have to deal with the external
time cost to their staff.

the sad thing is that all of these people involved are very smart and far-too-
hard working. these are great traits to have. but they do not always result in
the best solution. working hard is not always worth the economic cost to the
group... nor is developing a one-shot ingenious solution. terrifyingly, few
lab managers or leaders outside of big pharma seem to understand these
problems.

~~~
ISL
It's not just the life sciences. Time is generally undervalued in physics,
too.

The most-successful scientists, though, have an excellent perception of the
value of time. They may not perceive it that way explicitly, but their choices
of what is and is not worth working on amount to valuing time.

------
brianbreslin
Not a plug, but here in miami we have a co-working type of shared wet lab
space at UMiami [1]. It is open to anyone, they can rent bench space and use
all the equipment. Happy to connect anyone to the team that runs it

[1] [https://cic.com/miami-lab-pricing/](https://cic.com/miami-lab-pricing/)

------
knolan
Im about to start building a lab in my new engineering academic position after
several years in pretty well funded industrial lab. While I’m posturing for a
donation of some critical equipment starting from scratch is daunting but also
exciting.

A part of what I want to achieve is the ability to replicate the types of
measurement that require these extremely expensive pieces of equipment in a
low cost facile manner. Students spend so much time building or setting up
their rigs that there is often little time to take meaningful data as time
runs out. I want my students to spend most of their time immersed in their
data and how it fits with theory and not fine tuning some over-complicated
proprietary tool.

As an aside I t’s surprising how much you can now get on Amazon. Whereas
previously you’d have to enquire after a quotation and wait days just for a
reply now you can just order direct.

------
beauzero
One of the sites to buy from that is not listed in this article is
govdeals.com You generally have to go pick up the item so a lot of it is
regional but you will find lab equipment there from universities, k-12
schools, and other government programs.

------
dekhn
Cheap second hand lab equipment can be great, but a lot of the DIY bio stuff
is garbage. It means to improve things by making it cheaper but often it
trades off predictable results for ambiguous ones, or safety for unsafe ones.

------
bayesian_horse
Have labs ever been started when funds were not tight?

~~~
jonhendry18
I suppose HHMI investigators already have labs when they get picked by HHMI,
but HHMI funds very nicely.

~~~
dekhn
many HHMI investigators are selected in high school.

~~~
mattkrause
Really? Do you have any more information because I find that incredibly
difficult to believe that HHMI is reviewing 16 year olds (on what basis?),
waiting two decades for them to go through undergrad, grad school, postdoc(s),
and open a lab.

~~~
dekhn
Sure, I know about 10 HHMI investigators. Of that, 8 of them were contacted by
HHMI after they won their (regional or national) science fair.

They all became early investigators with funding through college and grad
school. Students with HHMI fellowships in grad school could generally join any
lab they wanted, because their professor didn't have to pay their salary or
support.

Doesn't this make sense? HHMI plays a long game (centuries) and they are
competing with other people for the best candidates, so it makes sense that
they're capturing hearts and minds as early as possible and investing in them
long term.

~~~
mattkrause
To be clear, are we talking about these HHMI investigators?
[https://www.hhmi.org/scientists/browse?kw=&&field_scientist_...](https://www.hhmi.org/scientists/browse?kw=&&field_scientist_classification%5B0%5D=17367)

I’m still having a hard time believing that someone “scouted” Richard Axel in
1960 and threw his name in a file with a note saying that he should be
funded—-but only a quarter-century later.

I can imagine that they congratulate winners and perhaps invite them to apply
for one of HHMI’s early career programs, but I would be amazed and
disappointed if people were “locking down” investigator status at 16. Success
that early depends a lot on having access to the right opportunity and
environment.

~~~
dekhn
Oh look some of my previous advisors are on that list they're the people who
told me that.

~~~
mattkrause
Let me explain where I'm confused.

When I was 20, I participated in a (funded) fairly prestigious summer
workshop. This lead to a grant for a year of independent research from the
same funders, after which I went to grad school. As a postdoc, the same
sponsors funded one project of mine, then another, and a third is under review
right now. However, there's no formal "pipeline" here, no midnight meeting in
a spooky room where I was promised funding way down the line, long after I
finally grew a beard and had it turn grey. Instead, this has continued for as
long as it has because our interests have remained aligned and my
collaborators and I have done pretty good work. If we have a few down years,
the funding will probably dry up and someone, possibly even someone totally
new to this ecosystem, will get it instead.

That said, there is an obvious Matthew Effect: once you get one award, you can
list it on the next application. Now you have two awards, which is more
impressive, and you list them both on your third application, and so on. There
are other, less tangible benefits of being visible, getting face time with
program managers, and so on. My impression of the HHMI Investigator program
was that it was much more like this--early awards open doors and may make it
more likely that someone eventually becomes an Investigator, but there's not a
formal pipeline that reaches back to high school.

You seem to be suggesting that HHMI identifies high school science contest
winners with the express intent of funding them later as independent
investigators. _This_ is what I'm skeptical about. I can certainly believe
HHMI can identify smart people and that (some) smart people continue to be
smart throughout their career.

------
jacquesm
Step one: go to SciHub to ensure that you're not wasting a bunch of $ on
something that should have been free in the first place.

Not that you'll read that in Nature.

~~~
leemailll
I'm not sure whether you are joking or not, but how to get paper is never a
concern for a PI in academia.

~~~
jacquesm
Correction: in _rich country_ academia.

Go check up on how many people credit being able to finish their studies due
to SciHub being available to them when the institutions they are affiliated
with did not have the funds to be able to stay current.

There is a tendency to conflate 'I don't have this particular problem' to
'This particular problem does not exist'.

~~~
leemailll
No, I don’t mean in rich country.

First, I believe most papers already list coresspoding author’ email, which
one can send a request to for a reprint. And most people would be happy to
send one, and because citation is one of the important metric for how
successful and influential one’s research is. Most people is happy to send
one.

Second, PI is different from student for this. As a PI one basically already
has some connections with people in the field. It’s likely you already know
some of the authors, or your friends in the field could help you get a copy.

I don’t mean PIs would find scihub not useful, but PIs likely have other
resources to help get a paper.

~~~
jacquesm
> First, I believe most papers already list coresspoding author’ email, which
> one can send a request to for a reprint.

Sure. If you have a couple of weeks to spare and you feel that disturbing the
author of a paper from whatever they are working on to send you a pdf which
you could just as easily fetch for yourself in a few seconds is a good way to
spend _both_ your time.

PIs tend to find SciHub _very_ useful, even the ones in rich countries where
plenty of universities are cutting costs (so sorry if that means cutting
access to a critical journal for your field).

------
jaxtellerSoA
Not the kind of "lab" I was expecting. Being HN I assumed lab ==
server/network/computer playground/test environment (like a home ESXi lab).

~~~
torbjorn
Information technology is not the only thing that can be "hacked" on

------
ryanmercer
The title immediately made me think of Walt taking stuff from his department
at school. "Jesse, we've got to cook."

------
zerostar07
You should also consider whether you need to start another lab.

~~~
mattkrause
This is the million dollar question. If you want a long-term career in
academic research, you pretty much have to strive towards running your own
lab; you can’t string together 2-3 year contracts, scattered all over the
globe, for your entire life. Even if you were willing to, there are all sorts
of stupid institutional barriers to doing this. In particular, there’s a
ridiculous bias towards funding recent PhDs and funding is very hard to find
after ~4 years.

I would wager that one experienced researcher at $70k easily trumps 2-3
Masters students at $25k each. However, there are lots of mechanisms for
funding studentships, but few for paying for experienced employees. The NCI
had experimented with something like this, but there were maybe 100 positions
total. This is a shame for many different reasons but seems depressingly
unlikely to change any time soon.

------
M_Bakhtiari
> Microbiologist Rebecca Shapiro faced a daunting task after starting a
> tenure-track job at the University of Guelph in Canada: building a
> laboratory from scratch, on a tight budget.

The absolute state of western higher education

~~~
golergka
> western

I didn't realized we're blessed with enormous science and education budgets
outside of western world!

Seriously, it's the same old problem: when you hear about how bad things are
in some first world country, please don't forget that it's still the best
point in human history and one of the best places on Earth at the current
moment.

~~~
apathy
Having discussed lab budgets etc with an Indian colleague just recently, I no
longer feel justified to bitch about funding... possibly forever.

It was a necessary perspective check

~~~
golem14
... and yet: it's a reasonable thing to ask how much of a GDP should be spent
on research funding. That the US will spend more than India (for now) isn't
surprising.

------
cup
Nature should publish less articles about how to do X on the cheap and more
articles about how the government needs to increase funding for primary
research.

As one of the most prestigious journals around, or at least most well known
generally, they should be using their clout to go in and bat for researchers,
not constantly being reactive and defensive.

~~~
azeotropic
Nature (and Science) are already constantly publishing pieces whining about
government funding levels. I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Honestly, I'd rather see most of the front matter of both journals disappear
in favor of more room for scientific articles.

~~~
apathy
Alternately, there is some indication that little of value would be lost if
the journals themselves disappeared.

I hear there’s some sort of intertubes system to more efficiently disseminate
papers for review & reading nowadays

~~~
Thriptic
Actually I find the high tier journals such as Nature do add value through
editorials, keeping tabs on industry trends, and various programs. It's the
low impact factor journals that are glorified FTPs that have to go.

~~~
apathy
Just FYI, as an author and reviewer for some of these journals, I would
suggest that the value added by their news pieces can be compensated for (and
not in a good way) by professional editors in pursuit of "impact". The review
process becomes intensely political. As is well known, a suitably well-known
senior author can get just about anything sexy enough accepted, and the
referees can be easily overridden by an eager editor. Although the news
divisions are editorially independent, they face a fundamental conflict of
interest: biting the hand that feeds them is unlikely to lead to enhanced
rations.

Nature and Science are less bad than, say, many Elsevier imprints. In most
cases I feel like Nature or its daughter journal genuinely improved the
manuscripts we sent them, at least the ones they published (and some they did
not!). But this is also true of eLife and Genome Research. NEJM is wonderful
to work with as an author, but in retrospect I sometimes wonder if they were
too nice to us (Stockholm syndrome?) and have had this thought about some
well-regarded specialty journals. In such cases, it is hard for the news staff
to justify reporting on the underbelly.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I had a paper last year in a journal
with an impact factor of 15* that was accepted in 15 minutes. It took longer
to sign the copyright transfer agreements than to "review" the work. (I have
the timestamps on the emails to prove it, although I'm not going to do that
because one of my coauthors is an editor.) There's just no way that peer
review was adding any value in that case. And yes, it has already been cited
by other groups.

* Yes, IF is a silly metric. But the parallel is just too good to pass up. One minute per point of impact, I suppose.

