For one experiment I had to get a protein made and it cost £4000. It was worth it because i used it to show for the first how a certain nutrient gets to the baby in the womb.
All my experiments were cheap if you don’t count the equipment. Bacteria don’t cost much and they reproduce like mad so you can get loads of them in a day:) I did use a machine that would cost about £80,000 now
Hi Mike
Now thats a tough one because some studies last for years and so the costs mount and mount and becasue i am only just starting out in research, its my boss that gets the final finances and i’m not really included for that information. For any one single experiment/study of mine, the most i have known be spent was in excess of £5000, but again i’m not sure of the exact amount. That was for a very big whole ovary transplant study and, obvioulsy was a one-off due to the cost – this was at the end of my PhD, so was kind of a culmination of 3 years work. It was the first study of that size and importance i had done and was very stressful but we got some fab results from it….which landed me another job for 3 years, so i guess it was worth it!!!
nice question! Its hard to answer in terms of an individual experiment…
but, I have a 3-year ‘series’ of experiments going at the moment which cost about half a million pounds!!!! That money comes from the medical research council (its taxpayers money, essentially)
that half million includes (a) a postdoctoral fellows salary for three years (b) buying microsciupes (my bes obne cost over 50,000 pounds) (C) all the ‘stuff’ you need to do the experiments — chemicals, test tubes, dishes, money to ‘rent’ time on even more flashy microcopes each week etc etc etc
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