How to start a lab when funds are tight

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

Price Distribution: 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

List Price: $20,663.90 USD

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/) 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.

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.

• https://open-labware.net

• https://3dprint.nih.gov/discover?field_model_category_tag_ti...

• http://www.appropedia.org/3D_printable_science_equipment

• https://hackteria.org/wiki/Generic_Lab_Equipment

• https://www.thingiverse.com/jpearce/collections/open-source-...

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.

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

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.

Not that you'll read that in Nature.

The absolute state of western higher education

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.