• Question: how much money does your equipment cost

    Asked by anon-221058 on 28 Jun 2019.
    • Photo: Marianne King

      Marianne King answered on 28 Jun 2019:

      There’s a microscope I sometimes use called a confocal microscope that cost £500,000. And that’s cheap compared to some microscopes! Most of the equipment I use is quite cheap, but the stuff I feed my stem cells with costs £200 for 500ml!

    • Photo: Nina Rzechorzek

      Nina Rzechorzek answered on 28 Jun 2019:

      Great Q! Anything from less than a penny (a pipette tip) to a few million (MRI scanner)! And everything you can think of in between! Cell culture media can be very expensive because it contains lots of growth factors and chemicals to keep brain cells happy. Research costs money – but it should not cost more than it needs to – we all need to reduce waste in research as with everything else – helps the planet.

    • Photo: David Wilson

      David Wilson answered on 28 Jun 2019:

      Science can be as cheap or as expensive as you want. I’ve work in a lab that had (almost) limitless amounts of cash and I’ve also worked in a lab that had just started so money was really tight.
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      If i’m honest i preferred the second lab as we had to be really clever at designing experiments and inventive with the tools and equipment we used.
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      Even so, some chemicals and drugs i use are gram for gram more expensive the gold!!!!

    • Photo: Thiloka Ratnaike

      Thiloka Ratnaike answered on 28 Jun 2019:

      My current equipment are the computer at work, and my laptop- so probably about £1.5-2K in total. I used to work in a lab with access to laser microdissection, cryostat, reagents for processing muscle biopsies, a realtime sequencing machine, I didn’t dare to think how much those equipment must have cost, but at a guess- at least £50K! As you can imagine, I shed many a sweat bead over these precious things!

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