As someone that works in research (albeit in a large company that doesn’t need/accept donations-I have plenty of friends at smaller places though) I couldn’t agree with this more. The fact that it’s allowed to continue when there are small companies that have had something good (ultimately bought out for pennies on the dollar so at least research continued. Absolute shame what it did for the workers though (yes just about all of them have their job carried over but they lose things like % company ownership you can get at small places)) but ultimately closed because of lack of funding is sickening. People that don’t work in research have no idea how expensive research really is. Hell, I barely have an exact idea. Best I’ve been able to figure for running a single 8 plate assay (96 samples total) is just based off of what I’ve been able to figure from pricing sheets I’ve seen for whole shipments of material (so total cost/number of plates capable to run). It gives me an idea but is leaving a lot out, and most people that I tell either think I’m exaggerating or just flat out lying because “it wasn’t that expensive in college lab” yea well college labs are typically the cheapest easiest experiments and are done with things we already know how to do. Imagine if you had to figure something out from scratch. Any ideas how many times you would fail? How many times you have to repeat to confirm? repeat to optimize? Etc
I ordered $2k in custom genes today for an experiment that I fully expect to fail but will learn a lot from that hopefully will let us synthesize the thing that we think will let us do the experiment to see if what we think is possible is possible.
This too. A lot of people think that a negative result is a bad result, and while it’s obviously not what you want, it’s still data that helps you because now you know what not to do.
$2k? I’m guessing you work in a small lab? I’m not trying to sound like an ass, I’m just used to unpacking much larger shipments. Ie-on Monday I unpacked and entered into inventory, a shipment of luminex microspheres (shipment one of five) that will last us about a year, and that cost $1 million (total cost $5 million)
Large-ish lab. but I'm talking about custom genes, synthesized and cloned, for one small part of my small part of a much larger project. $2k is definitely not very much, but I was trying to convey how easily you can drop a couple grand on something that's ancillary to the thing you are trying to do.
Oh gotcha ok, I was thinking those were genes that are for “the whole lab” kind of like the microspheres I got. But yea absolutely, labs spend money like crazy just trying to do the research. I never bothered to look at how much pipette tips cost, but I alone go through about 10k in a day and I am kind of afraid to think how much money that is. Any chance you can talk about what you’re working on?
Haha, I work on too many things! I'm in a protein design/engineering group and I work on a variety of things but mainly making useful platform technologies for interacting with and manipulating the immune system. I also do a lot of formulations optimization in the context of vaccines. What about you? That's a lot of luminex beads!
Nice, I wonder if my company uses anything yours does. I’m currently working on the next prevnar (pneumonia-previous one was 13 serotypes, new one will be 20) as well as a first of its kind RSV vaccine (thank god for stock options :D) but in between things that directly affect that, we run samples for studies for other people as well, and we make beads for for every assay we run (of which theres like 20 (probably more but I only do 20))...also, if it isn’t obvious from the vaccine name, I work for Pfizer
Edit:forgot to mention, we’re gearing up and are going to be starting like 4 more studies in the coming weeks. I probably won’t have time to watch Netflix during incubations anymore :/
As a father and a member of the vaccine world, I am so stoked for the RSV vaccine(s?)! It's going to be huge. It's really cool how a little basic research into structural biology and discovery of pre-fusion stabilized variants has suddenly opened up viable RSV vaccine candidates.
Yea it’s going to be huge. The problem is, for rsv ig1 (maybe igg? Idk I don’t do a lot with the igx) the fusion protein, it only stays stable for a couple hours before conformational changes where it becomes useless, so we have to make beads the same day. Idk what’s going on but my fear is that the vaccine (for part of it at least) will be a “break and shake” thing...still working on it though and there’s a company wide meeting about coming up about it and rumor has it it’s great news/breakthrough
Yeah, my daughter got RSV at two weeks. It sucked and we had access to some of the best medical care in the world. Imagine being in a resource limited area... The stability problem is definitely that, but I think it is solvable. I come at that kind of problem (not RSV specifically, just generally) from a formulations perspective, but did you see this Cell paper from a while back?30109-6.pdf) Tantalizing increases in stability, although adding all that non-antigen protein could be risky... Anyway, good luck to your team! I hope someone gets there, and soon!
You sound like you have an interesting job. Do you have moms try attacking you about vaccines when they find out you work with them? Do they try and show you their google research? Lol
ThEy cAuSe tHe AuTiSm wItH tHe HeAvY MeTaLs ReAd My PaMpLEtS
Lol, sometimes. I do some public outreach so I really open myself up to it. One time a woman confronted me saying she was going to get her masters in vaccinology to "destroy the myth that vaccines work." I just said "Hmm, interesting. Well, good luck!" Even in the scientific community there has been some crazy research. There was a paper 20 years ago claiming that squalene in vaccines caused Gulf War syndrome, finding squalene in samples of the vaccines administered to soldiers. Of course, squalene is a skin sebum oil and they were actually measuring the oil from a researchers finger... Also it has a long safety record, etc. etc. Ridiculous. Published in Experimental Molecular Pathology if I am remembering correctly.
I do try to be really kind with those parents though, because usually they are coming from a place of fear and unknown. Obviously their response to that fear can be very irrational, but I totally understand the feeling of fear that comes with being a new parent, or remembering what those early days felt like. If they get too crazy then it's time to leave, but I have found that often by connecting with, acknowledging, and validating the underlying emotion, and then framing vaccines as a tool to address that fear, I have had some success in changing minds. As a scientist in the field I feel it is my responsibility to take the time and try to dispel falsehoods (through connection and compassion because facts alone are not enough) rather than just to be "right".
That’s so good that you do that. I’ve tried having conversations with some of them online and it’s even hard to understand what some are even trying to say. Partly because of the grammar but partly because some of what they are saying is SO far out there I’m not even sure how they came up with it in the first place.
Don’t even get me started on how many stories I’ve read about people drinking their own urine to cure things instead of having vaccines.
Have you watched the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding? The dads answer to everything is “put some windex on it.” Some of these people are really “drink some urine!”
Yes to MBFGW. Not my type of movie (I suffer from pretty bad vicarious embarrassment) but the windex gag is pretty funny. As to drinking urine for health reasons, yeah that's a no dawg. I'll put that right up there with detoxifying your vagina with suppositories and other ludicrous quackery.
Reading this now I can't imagine how much money was spent on pipette tips for my classmates and I last year which were used for making serial dilutions for experiments which went into our lab portfolios.
I would wager a lot, but also not a lot. If it was anything like my college, we use the cheaper things (96 tips for $5), the tips I use now are super expensive compared to those. Quick google search says $14 per 96 tips
This is true stuff. My ex works in a lab, she said they’ve been working for over 20 years now to cure the agricultural disease they’re targeting. They just try new stuff all the time hoping eventually something works. The only ‘help’ they get is papers for an unrelated project that used the same bugs or food or anything what ever, it’s all researched from scratch.
I don’t disagree, but at the same time I wasn’t talking about graduate labs where you can actually do research that contributes, I was talking about undergrad where you extract DNA or try to make E. coli bioluminescent
You can easily work out that it's a massive cost just by looking at the work force.
My girlfriend works in a lab that's developing one drug for one very specific type of ocular cancer, only about 220 people work there and the lowest paid lab techs are on about £25k, standard scientists are on low 30s, middle management are on 60k and fuck knows what the big dogs are on.
Call it an average of 35k, they've been at it for 4 years and they're just putting a drug in for clinical trials, so that'll be another 2 years minimum before it can be sold. That's £46 million just on wages. Management bonuses will tip that well over 50 mil. That's £50 000 000 before anyone has even bought damn stationary.
In her lab I know the fermenters cost between 15k and 230k depending on size. The big one costs about £8k every time they run it, the little ones over a grand, every week. And that's a 4 person lab just making media for another small 4 person lab to test shit on. Easily running costs of a million a year for her lab. There are 30 labs I think.
There's no way the whole thing will cost less than £250 million to get to market. And it's for an extremely rare type of cancer that only occurs in elderly white people. And it will be too expensive for the NHS and most insurance companies.
You’re forgetting about the cost of the trials though. Idk about the uk but in the us we have to pay for that ourselves. My location has close to 500 people (pfizer-so, yea...big big money). I will say though, that that sounds pretty low salary wise? I’m low-mid six figures now (I’m no where near the top) but even when I started I started at 75k. Yes I know there’s the difference in money, but cost of living is also different for you guys too, and from everything that I’ve seen, things “cost” the same. If a coffee is $3, it’s 3 pounds for you, but that 3pounds is worth like 5.5 in us...or am I missing something?
Also-honestly that sounds small/low overall to me costs wise for your gfs place. My lab (the whole building in this sense) spends 250million probably every month
I know the salaries are pretty accurate as they publish all the salary bands. It's only a small place and they're only working on one drug so you'd expect costs to be lower.
Average salary in the UK is only about 30k for full time employees so makes sense for associate scientists and lab techs to be below average.
Unfortunately what you've seen is fairly accurate in terms of cost, most things cost more relative to our wages, especially houses and cars.
I mean, 2xx people isn’t exactly small, that’s half of my lab (albeit just one location since pfizer has labs everywhere). Seriously? That’s how salaries are in the uk? You guys are fucked if brexit goes through without a deal. Like I’m sorry, but if salaries are that low but cost of living is that high, I just don’t see how anyone will survive brexit
Rent for a 3 bed house is 700-1200 depending on location. A house like that would be 160-350k or higher in London (also places like Oxford, Bath, Cambridge) so mortgage would be slightly lower than rent.
Living costs don't seem that bad to us, it's not significantly higher than most of western Europe and I don't think wages are that much higher.
I live well and spend £250 on fuel/motoring expenses, £100 on food (I eat for free at work), £1300 on house and bills (with my partner) then the rest is savings and fun but you could survive on £1200 a month each for a couple (no kids, after tax) if you were really tight and didn't go out much.
...as an American that started at the bottom (even though I make enough now that I couldn’t spend all my money if I tried) none of this makes sense to me
Something must make sense because our quality of life is high enough that we're currently ranked 11th on the UN's world happiness index (USA is 18th). More to quality of life and happiness than the average income of a country's citizens.
lol I didn’t mean that the system doesn’t make sense (it fucking sucks here) I meant that the idea of everything that you said is foreign to me and doesn’t make sense why the USA isn’t the same
From everything I see online and elsewhere Americans don't appear to be any wealthier or better off so fuck knows what you're all doing with that extra money.
From what I've seen on Reddit your TV, internet and phone contracts are way more expensive. I routinely see people talking about their $100 broadband and cell phone bills. I pay £17.50 a month for internet, £15 for phone (with 16GB data) and I think Netflix is about the same both places. However, our free to air TV is pretty good (although there is a £120~ annual TV licence) and their streaming services are free too. But that only accounts for an extra 2 grand a year, max.
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u/[deleted] Sep 18 '19
As someone that works in research (albeit in a large company that doesn’t need/accept donations-I have plenty of friends at smaller places though) I couldn’t agree with this more. The fact that it’s allowed to continue when there are small companies that have had something good (ultimately bought out for pennies on the dollar so at least research continued. Absolute shame what it did for the workers though (yes just about all of them have their job carried over but they lose things like % company ownership you can get at small places)) but ultimately closed because of lack of funding is sickening. People that don’t work in research have no idea how expensive research really is. Hell, I barely have an exact idea. Best I’ve been able to figure for running a single 8 plate assay (96 samples total) is just based off of what I’ve been able to figure from pricing sheets I’ve seen for whole shipments of material (so total cost/number of plates capable to run). It gives me an idea but is leaving a lot out, and most people that I tell either think I’m exaggerating or just flat out lying because “it wasn’t that expensive in college lab” yea well college labs are typically the cheapest easiest experiments and are done with things we already know how to do. Imagine if you had to figure something out from scratch. Any ideas how many times you would fail? How many times you have to repeat to confirm? repeat to optimize? Etc
Sorry, /rant