What type of biomedical research costs the most? That is an interesting question. With the NIH asking for a 20% cut in everyone's grant, our lab has been looking into who spends what, and where can we cut costs. An interesting number set fell out of this internal audit: how much each postdoc in the lab spends ... and there is an interesting trend.
We have basically 3 types of postdocs:
1) Structure biologists.
2) Biochemists.
3) Cell biologists.
So who do you think spends more money each month?
Structure Biologists. Between all the specialized detergents and many little consumables that they go through, they tend to spend way more than anyone else. I would also add that there is an NMR guy in the lab too, and with all the isotope labelling his reagents are by far the most expensive. Now don't get me wrong, I don't blame them, it's partially the cost of structure biology, it's partially the nature of the projects in our lab.
As for the biochemists, they tend to spend the least, that is if they are not sending samples to the mass-spec. Once they've gone into that phase, the cost of doing research rises sharply.
Then there are the cell biologists. With the tissue-culture hood upkeep, it does cost a bit more than the biochemists, but only if the biochemists don't use pre-cast gels. (I run some gels but not as many as the typical biochemist in our lab). In many ways we cell biologists have the biggest startup costs: microscopes, tissue-culture hoods, microinjection setups, needle pullers etc. But once all those items are purchased, it doesn't cost much to keep experimenting. Biochemists and structure biologists also tend to have high statup costs, but this tends to involve the ultra-centrifuge. And then there are things that we all use (PCR machines, table-top centrifuges, SDS-PAGE setups ...) In many cases, you can lower your costs by sharing big equipment with other labs. In my case, I got the department to house and pay for the maintenance and upgrade of the microscope and injection apparatus. Moreover I use another lab's needle puller. So over all I calculated that I don't tend to spend much over an average month.
Ideally we should be spending about 1000$/postdoc per month, right now we're over 1500$ (I personally am probably
OK I should go back to today's "money-down-the-drain" experiments.
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Sometimes I got the feeling that I should have gone to structural biology 15 years ago because if those guys get a structure they can publish it in journals of reasonable impact and usually such papers gain quite a good number of citations. Thus, in terms of publicity it seems a good choice for an institute like ours to invest in SB. However, based on the talks SB PhD students give in our seminar it seems to be a quite boaring buisiness that to a degree relies on trial and error: trying a series of different expression systems to obtain a soluble form of the protein, trying different purification schemes, trying thousands of different crystallizing conditions. Thus, SB is not really hypotheses driven. To be fair though, I must admit that one can really learn a lot from a solved structure and solved structures often leed to new hypotheses. And indeed their visualisation techniques are very impressive.
So, maybe I am just jealous because breeding mice is even more expensive and we often end up with just EXCEL graphs depicting tiny differences between wildtype and mutant mice, which is of course not as catchy as a coloured rotating 3D graph of a protein at single atom resolution.
By far the cheapest postdoc would by a someone doing theory/computational biology. The only costs come from maintaining a decent computer cluster working.
Electrophysiology is also relatively inexpensive in terms of ongoing costs (once you have paid for a rig). All you really need is electrode glass, salts and buffer, and animals (in our case, flies). As has been discussed before, by far the most expensive aspect of biomedical research is salary and fringe benefits for personnel.
I'd quibble with you saying that the structural biologists are expensive.
NMR-types, yes; but crystallography is pretty cheap, especially if you don't have in-house X-ray generators and can drive to the synchrotron. Our largest consumable expense was probably the Linbro plates, and we used fewer of those than the cell bugoloists used TC flasks. The amounts of 'special' reagents we used were tiny. Screening kits are pricey but last ages.
Anecdotes aren't data, but our lab in Cambridge was one of the cheapest in the building (we spent much, much less money than the neurobiologists), but our paper per dollar ratio was one of the highest :)
BK,
I guess you should come over and talk to our structure guys! Like you said, anecdotes aren't data, (or more precisely, I have very few data points in my set) and before coming here I would have imagined that crystallography wouldn't cost much. I must add that the projects in this lab may require my x-ray colleagues to spend much more money than the typical structural biologist.
I have to say that the SBs in your lab are definitely atypical. Most labs don't have Uncle Howard and so the types of spending is typically much less. The other problem is the focus on membrane proteins and the high cost of detergents. That is hard to factor in for a typical lab but it will raise costs. As far as the CBs are concerned, considering the cost of media for cell growth I'd say that a typical cost is much higher. SBs can definitely do things on the cheap, CBs can't. Not too mention that cell lines are one thing but adding in vertebrates really can step up the costs.
Yeah, mouse biology is really expensive, so I bet hardcore cancer biologists with all the tumorific mousies are costing waaaaay more than the pure CBs gleaming phosphorescent and pale in the 'scope room.
The other thing to remember is that a great deal of SB is getting a protein (or whatever) to crystallize in the first place. And that's just cheap, bog-standard molecular biology and protein chemistry, albeit a fair bit of it: Getting the right clone, the right expression system, etc.
Even NMR guys can (not always, admittedly) just grow up one prep and spend nothing but computer time for six months subsequently :)
I concede. Most structural biologists don't spend much money. Our lab is different (as Bil pointed out) in that we study membrane bound proteins and have all sorts of exotic detergents and lipids in out freezers. And Joolya has a point, animal work is by far the most expensive type of biomedical research.
By the way, has anyone else heard of the 20% cut in NIH grants? I don't see it anywhere online or in print, I've only heard this from my boss and our department financial manager.
A very gracious capitulation. I'm honoured to correspond with you.
Why do structural biologists spend more? Because they can. The information yielded by a SB experiment is huge, and granting agencies realize it.
"By the way, has anyone else heard of the 20% cut in NIH grants?"
This should be temporary, assuming that the NIH budget that is ultimately appropriated for fiscal year 2007 is not much below what the House appropriations committee has already approved. The reason for the cut to non-competing renewals being awarded now is that the entire federal government is operating under a "continuing budget resolution", which allows agencies to spend money as if they are funded at the 2006 fiscal year levels. This happened last year, and once the 2006 budget was appropriated, the awards were restored to 97.65% of their originally committed levels.