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Worse, scientific organisations are institutions. I trust individual scientists to be reasonably honest, but I trust the bureaucratic organisations they belong to as far as I can throw them...

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I really would like to do research in a specific field, but I’m just so worried about the bureaucracy and horror stories of academia. I mean I’ve had to operate in bureaucratic environments, but it just seems so antithetical to what my actual goals would be. Just the amount of bureaucracy I’ve encountered trying to get into universities has rubbed me wrong.

Sadly I couldn’t remotely afford the equipment to do things on my own (nor do I think I could handle the initial learning workload these days without some structure).

The equipment can be affordable depending on how you structure things. For example, there are opportunities like the Molecular Foundry user program [1] which provide grants for the costs of running experiments on expensive machinery. The main trick is having a specific enough question to answer that you can define how the grant would help you do so.

There are also community initiatives like BosLab [2] which are more similar to maker spaces in structure.

[1] https://foundry.lbl.gov/user-program/get-started-here/

[2] https://www.boslab.org/

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