The Real Cost of Science

A memoir of money in the lab by Sarah Arrowsmith. February 17, 2020.

Money. We love it and we hate it.

This is the story of a dark and dangerous journey. A journey of soul searching, of love and loss. A tale of endless hours crying over failed qPCR, strange peaks in GC-FID chromatographs, and an old decrepit ICS3000 that refuses to give up the ghost. Oh yah, and money.

I think it’s safe to say, that when research science groups, whether they be in academia, government or private enterprise, declare their spending habits, everyone in one voice GASPS in disbelief and disgust. Don’t believe me? Let’s do an experiment. A quick google search provides the following article titles:

• Big Pharma shells out $20B each year to schmooze docs…
• HARD TO SWALLOW Big Pharma spent an additional $9.8 million on…
• Rampant Waste Reported in NSF- Citizens Against Government…
• What Percentage of Money Given to Scientific Funding is Wasted…

Okay! Are you gasping yet?? Feeling a little perturbed that I didn’t link the articles (I’m not voluntarily giving these sham articles free clicks, sorry!). Feeling a little perturbed that your tax dollars are being wasted? Such evil, evil scientists and researchers, how dare they.

Let’s talk about this incredibly damaging and insulting bias and perception that money is wasted on science. I’m going to quote some things from a really fabulous article by Chad Orzel, because he states my feelings in a much more eloquent way. He states,

“…accusations that scientific research is a waste of time and money are extremely common, and pose a real risk for science. They’re also extremely hard to fight, because scientific “waste” is so difficult to define. There’s also a more general and less crazy version of this line, which holds that resources ought instead to be directed at some other need which the author regards as a higher priority. These generally take the form of, “Why are we spending billions on the LHC when we should be putting that money toward global warming/flying cars/ending poverty?” Both of these are fundamentally unanswerable, the former because they’re crazy, and the latter because the different sides are starting from fundamentally different premises” (Orzel, 2017).

He goes on to talk about how people argue that fundamental science should only be funded if its goal is to create products for market, which is a bit crazy if your goal is to clean up the environment from say chemical spills containing TCE or oil. Heaven forbid we spend research dollars making sure our environment doesn’t become toxic right? Remember those sad commercials about otters and seagulls covered in oil? I promise seagulls aren’t going to buy any products. But their health and safety still has value doesn’t it?

Orzel continues to address failed experiments, another financial pariah. He states,

“A real “waste” would be an experiment that, due to poor design or incompetent execution failed to find something that actually exists. Most of the “failed experiments” that get called waste are, in fact, something different. I like the phrasing that Luis Alvarez used in describing his experiment using muons to “x-ray” a pyramid: they didn’t fail to find a hidden chamber, they showed that there was no hidden chamber to find. Negative results of this type are still providing useful knowledge: they’re excluding ranges of parameters where new physics might have been found, and telling us it’s not there to find” (Orzel, 2017).

One very popular subject matter on negative results are that of vaccines causing autism. It’s been over 20 years since Andrew Wakefield, in an article published in The Lancet, falsely claimed the MMR vaccine was linked to autism. (You can read all about it here, if you are interested) Ever since then scientists and researchers have been trying to reproduce his study and are finding that they are getting negative results, that there is no correlation between vaccines and autism (Branswell, 2019) (Hvidd, Hansen, Frisch, & Melbye, 2019). Having that negative result does not mean it’s a failed experiment. No, that result is incredibly informative and gives parents powerful knowledge to make educated decisions about their children’s health. I would hardly call these experiments wasted money. (Here is a great article on the current research if you are interested.)

The Big Costs in Science

I’m going to be making some assumptions based on the projects that I’ve had my hands in. Our field of science here at the Swette Center is Environmental Biotechnology. I can’t speak for the fancy centers like Personalized Diagnostics and their biomedical technology projects. I can probably safely assume their grants are bigger and shinier and they have more inspectors in their lab. However, I think I can also safely assume that our money woes are still pretty similar to other research groups when it comes down to the nitty gritty.

Start Up Funds

So, you’ve finished your PhD (yay!) and had a pretty awesome post doc experience. You’ve scored your first professor gig. You get some startup funds from your department (heck ya!) and now you are on your way to do incredible science! YES. The department granted you $150,000 to get started with your new research. And you got a nice DOE grant worth say another $100,000. That’s a lot of money to do amazing things with! Right? RIGHT? Yah, don’t we all wish… let’s just keep those numbers in the back of our minds as we move forward.

Costs of Instrumentation

Our lab spaces in Biodesign have a lot of equipment. Most of which was purchased with PI’s initial startup money when they joined the group. To give you a true idea of the cost of instruments let me just list some of our equipment and approximately what it cost to purchase them:

• HPLC (PDA, RID, ELSD): $80-100K, $9K/year service contract
• TOC (Liquid/Solid): $55K, $5K/year service contract
• GC-FID w/ AOC: $54,000, $3K/year service contract
• H₂ Generator: $15K
• qPCR: $30K, $4.5K/year service contract
• Liquid Handler: $47K-$123K, $4-8K/year service contract
• -80C Freezer: $8K

So this list is a small tiny fraction of the instruments in our facility. We have a legion of GCs. Yes, six of them! They all have contracts. They all guzzle down their share of compressed gases. In fact, the total cost of just purchasing gas was around $4.5K in 2019 and then another couple hundred in rental fees for the tanks themselves while we use the gas. Keeping in mind that we purchased a H₂ generator, so we aren’t buying UHP H₂ compressed gas anymore, that saved us a pretty penny.

If we look at the lifetime cost of say, our HPLC, which is the workhorse of our lab, after 10 years of just paying service contracts, that’s almost $90K! So really the cost of the HPLC is double the initial cost. I don’t want to jinx anything here because our HPLC is running smoothly, but 10 years seems to be the magic number where instruments crap out and about the time where service companies no longer insure the instruments, since at that point they are replacing every part exposed to air. Of course, this does not mean we give up on the instrument. Many a lad and lass have put in their blood and tears into keeping our ICS3000 limping along, since Thermo won’t touch it any more, not even with a 10 ft stick. Elbow grease and aftermarket parts have turned it into a mostly functioning zombie. A zombie that eats people’s brains and time. And sometimes their samples….

The point is, if you needed to purchase a new instrument (or even a refurbished one), your startup money is disappearing rapidly. It’s amazing how quickly it’s spent away… and those costs don’t even cover chemicals, safety equipment, and other supplies needed to do actual experiments.

Toss a Coin to Your Scientist

So, I’m not sure where this idea came from that money should never be spent on people. When we donate to charities or to Breast Cancer research, somehow when we look at those financial statements released surreptitiously by the media, we as a collective society gasp that people are getting paid salaries. I’m not sure why we hate paying people for their labor so much. New postdocs barely make a livable wage (stipends for international researchers are typically just enough to pay rent). A professor makes more, but their wages depend heavily on their grant writing and begging sponsors to pay them.

These cushy jobs are complete with 50+ hour work weeks, sometimes weekly reports to sponsors (we will get to that can of worms shortly), waking up at 2am for months on end to take samples, praying to the instrument gods that the ICS3000 won’t eat your samples or the GC’s detector doesn’t crap out again, and somehow managing to grade papers, lesson plans, and hold office hours. Science man, it’s demanding stuff. It’s no wonder popular culture has us pegged as “Mad Scientists” with crazy white hair and hunching over a lab bench in the middle of the night yelling, “it’s ALIVE! ALIVE!” AND THEN there are the graduate students and under grads you may have working for you… somehow you have to bring in enough money to pay for their tuition, a stipend, work study pay…

Here’s the next kicker. You know that fancy startup account you got? It’s not a yearly account. Spending is spread out over usually 3 years and sometimes you can’t pay salaries on it. So if professors want to stay paid, they have to continuously be writing grants and justifying their existence. The second consideration of this is that if you write many grants, you have to be providing results to multiple sponsors and doing multiple experiments, so you also have to be applying for a work load you can actually handle, or have the graduate student man-power to do it. Now this isn’t a sob story about how scientists aren’t being paid enough. Pay for scientists is very much a product of how in demand their work is from sponsors. However if you believe that scientists should also be allowed to make enough money to buy groceries and pay their rent, tell your local congress people to support research in their budgets. Encourage sponsors to allow for salary lines in grant proposals.

The next big step to making sure scientists are paid, is to stop gasping when organizations report how much money they spend on personnel. As a society we need to stop demonizing paid labor. Scientists who have extensive advanced degrees deserve to be paid. Scientists and engineers who are responsible for the technology created that makes your life more comfortable and convenient deserve to be paid.  The scientists who are researching safer more effective antibiotics to treat illnesses that would otherwise kill you, deserve to be paid. Scientists who research ways to have bacteria break apart oil that’s been spilled in our soil or our water, also deserve to be paid. See a theme here? No one seems to mind a surgeon making booko bucks, but they riot when a pharmaceutical company pays a living wage to their researchers who are creating lifesaving drugs. Alright, I’ll get off my soap box and get back to the point…

Costs of Overhead

Scientists everywhere are groaning in one grand voice. A very, very necessary evil called the much-dreaded overhead. I know that people hate when charities pay for overhead. The higher the overhead the more people don’t like that charity. Why? Because if money isn’t going directly to whatever cause they believe in, they automatically assume that it is a wasteful spending towards the hubris of the organization.

Let’s take a moment here. Can you imagine going to your work place and you find the following: Electricity is turned off. Water, toilets, sinks, etc. are no longer available. Your computer tech service guy is gone. The secretary is unavailable. You don’t have a computer or a company phone. No internet. No air conditioning or heater. No facilities people to complain to. No security. You wouldn’t work there long, now would you?

Overhead at the university level is negotiated with the federal government for all federal grants. Currently, 57% of all grant money is to be allocated to overhead. Other sponsors negotiate different rates. These sorts of things pay for the following:

• Non-grant paid staff.  Such as the lab manager who keeps you alive in the lab, financial manager who keeps you out of jail, security officers who protects your research, shipping/receiving crew for incoming packages, facilities crew who keeps the building operating, etc.
• Utilities. Labs disproportionally use higher amounts of electricity at the university. That’s because high powered equipment are electricity vampires. Even the “energy efficient” ones. Water, sewer, etc.
• The building itself, infrastructure, parking lots, landscaping, etc.
• At the university overhead also helps pay for broader academic use, such as paying professors and TAs for teaching, pays for the registrar’s office, and extra-curricular budgets for students.

Costs of Safety

Last year we spent around $5K on safety materials and equipment. Here are some of the primary things we purchased:

• Nitrile gloves (general chemical and biological use)
• Vinyl gloves (for double gloving when using DCM)
• Thermal gloves for the autoclave (good for objects up to 121C)
• Kevlar Thermal gloves for the muffle furnace (good for really toasty objects up to 600C)
• Viton-Butyl Gloves (for solvents and super corrosives)
• Puncture-proof gloves (for cleaning up broken glass and fabricating reactors)
• Lab Coats (to replace torn or just really yucky coats)
• Safety Goggles (protect yo eyes!)
• Laser Protection Safety Goggles (protect yo eyes from lasers)
• Replaced a fire extinguisher (sigh.. thank you laser cutter x2)
• CO monitor (for our compressed CO tank)
• All the 5gal buckets at Home Depot for biohazard disposal bins. On multiple occasions.
• Secondary containers galore (have to protect against spills!)
• Small, medium and 5 gal sharps containers.
• Spent an additional $15K for a new H2 generator, because it’s safer than compressed H2 tanks.

Things I didn’t recently purchase but also contribute to the safety of those in the lab:

• H2 Monitors and shut off system
• CO2 Monitors
• CO Monitors
• Chemical Fume Hoods
• Biosafety Cabinets
• Blast Shield
• Pressure relief valves for our high pressure systems

We spend the money on all these things because first, we care about the health and safety of our researchers and students and second, because injured people cost ASU an extravagant amount of money in medical costs and lost time. We had an accident in our lab a few years ago and it rendered an area of the lab unusable for months before EH&S rightfully declared the area and process safe to return to work.

We also recently learned that the reason the science buildings aren’t doing evacuation practices any more with the fire alarm is because, apparently setting off the fire alarm turns off the HVAC systems (in order to control the theoretical spread of smoke) and can cause experiments to shut down, costing those research groups money and time. Now we simply practice as a group how to evacuate the building on our own time and then sign off with the fire marshal. However, being in Arizona and having huge dust storms that come through during the Monsoons, which usually set off the alarms on its own. When the building evacuates, it counts as our practice run. Even if it was caused by dust. (Evacuating out into a storm isn’t the most fun. But at least we know what to do in case of a real emergency)

It’s really hard to misspend money!

So, here’s the process to hopefully get and spend money. First, you have to define an opportunity. This means you have to be tracking sponsors (like NSF, DOE, private companies of interest, etc.). Then when they solicit proposals you have to find the solicitation, develop a proposal with a corresponding budget, and then submit. If your proposal is selected, you then negotiate with the sponsor. Once the terms are agreed upon, the award is setup, an account is made at the university and eventually money is deposited. Depending on the project, the money may be deposited in one lump sum or dived out over a period of time (monthly, yearly, quarterly, etc.)  with different spending requirements. Really lucky scientists have business managers that help them manage those awards and subawards, make sure they spend the money in a timely manner and keep them out of jail.

Award management is huge deal. You can actually find the federal guidelines here from the Office of Management and Budget. Sponsored projects are a grant, contract, cooperative agreement, or any other mutually binding agreement with an external sponsor and the university which controls how funds can be spent. All sponsored projects have a principle investigator (PI), a proposal, a scope of work and a budget. The budget usually includes things like technical staff (could be a professor, technician, engineer, etc.), sometimes a line for a graduate student, travel costs, tuition remission, services (such as high-throughput sequencing or scanning electron microscopy), materials, supplies, consumables, and overhead costs. 

Now here’s the fun part. Well, fun for someone anyways. Every single expense is coded and tracked with a budget line. Every single expense on a budget line has to demonstrate allowability allocability and reasonableness throughout a project’s life cycle. Which, in English, means I have to write a paragraph for every single thing I buy on a sponsored account, about how it will directly benefit and support the project. Every purchase. EVERY SINGLE ONE. I kid you not, I have to defend buying things like printer paper (ex, “this printer paper will benefit the project because I can print out lab procedures for easier reading while I’m blowing myself up in the lab”).

Some accounts require several layers of approvals before ordering can happen. For example, one fine fellow wanted to order a compressed gas tank of Nitric Oxide. He had to get our business manager’s approval, lab manager’s approval (me), a grant manager’s approval, department approval, and Environmental Health & Safety Department’s approval. That’s a lot of eyeballs ogling at that order. The best part? This $1000+ expensive, nightmare of a tank, finally arrived at our facility 32 days later and then was promptly held up by the fire marshal. Turns out you need specialized, super expensive, extra safety cabinets to house this gas safely. Also turns out we couldn’t afford the extra equipment and the tank had to be sent back to the manufacturer (with no refund, mind you). Where we are glad that the fire marshal kept us from doing something potentially very dangerous, the process of approvals and ordering was exhausting.

Needless to say, I’ve accidently ordered the wrong item, because sometimes I’m an airhead, and you’d be amazed how quickly those requisitions get sent back to me for fixing. Or sometimes we unknowingly order things that require special permits, and those get sent back to me with angry messages telling me to get my act together.

If I order something over $5000, I have to provide a quote, have an existing contract, prove I used a small business or provide sole source justification. Over $50,000, I have to have all those things plus 3 more quotes. And as the dollars climb, so does the justifications. There is so much paper work, and attachments and justifications, that it’s a miracle any scientist gets anything done at all. Are you tired reading this yet?

The Moral of the Story

Alright let’s get to the take home message. Fund science. Support politicians who actually vote on bills that fund science and research. Stop demonizing research, whether it comes from for-profit sponsors, national labs or academia. We are all working together to further science, engineering and medicine, and our work typically makes the world a better place.

The Science Coalition states, “If America wants to maintain our innovative edge, create meaningful jobs, and realize economic growth, then we must make funding for fundamental scientific research a national priority. It is essential that Congress work toward a long-term plan to make wise and impactful investments, such as federally-funded research, that hold the key to our future.”

And with that, I leave you. Go forth and do great things.

Works Cited

Branswell, H. (2019, March 4). It’s old news that vaccines don’t cause autism. But a major new study aims to refute skeptics again. Retrieved from Statnews.com: https://www.statnews.com/2019/03/04/vaccines-no-association-autism-major-study/

Hvidd, A., Hansen, J. V., Frisch, M., & Melbye, M. (2019). Measles, Mumps, Rubella Vaccination and Autism: A Nationwide Cohort Study. Annals of Internal Medicine, 513-520. doi:10.7326/M18-2101

Orzel, C. (2017, January 24). How Much Scientific Research Is Wasted? Retrieved from Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorzel/2017/01/24/how-much-scientific-research-is-wasted/#2c6c8e53add0