• Question: What is the most amount of money that you have spent on an experiment?

    Asked by mike to Claire, Greg, Jane, Vicki on 24 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Jane Cleal

      Jane Cleal answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      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.

    • Photo: Claire O'Donnell

      Claire O'Donnell answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      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

    • Photo: Vicki Onions

      Vicki Onions answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      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!!!

    • Photo: Greg FitzHarris

      Greg FitzHarris answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      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

      so… research is a costly business!!

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