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Asked by anon-181147 on 14 Jun 2018.
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Jason Chu answered on 14 Jun 2018:
A whole research project can cost anything from thousands to millions of pounds. This accounts for the cost of lab equipment, chemicals, cells, animals, and of course the expertise and labour of scientists.
So for me, my PhD project (about 3-4 years) can cost around £75,000. But I don’t pay for this out of my own pocket. Amazing research like this is funded by universities, the government, and research councils like the MRC.
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Claire Donald answered on 15 Jun 2018:
Science is an expensive business. I work as part of a big lab group (about 20 people) and we can easily spend £1000s a month during every day experiments. This doesn’t include conferences or big experiments that we can only do occasionally. All of our money comes from the government so it has come from tax payers so we need to spend it wisely.
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Ashley Akbari answered on 15 Jun 2018:
Different research projects can vary significantly depending on the focus of the research, amount of people or things you need to successfully complete the project, and how long the project will need to run for in order to achieve its outcomes, to name a few of the considerations. I have been involved in some funded research for as little as a few thousand pounds, all the way up to major research programmes that are funded for a few million pounds.
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Joey Shepherd answered on 15 Jun 2018:
As everyone has said, it’s really different between projects. I have worked on projects that cost a few thousand right up to millions of pounds – at the minute the projects I’m working on are worth over £4 million altogether but that’s shared between lots of people I work with. The cost is for paying people to do the work, all of the chemicals and equipment they need, sometimes you need to pay for using special equpiment like fancy microscopes, and sometimes travel costs too if you’re working with people from other countries. Sadly we don’t get to spend it all on whatever we like! As Jason said, the money comes from various places like the government and research councils but also charities, so when people run marathons and things like that for charities such as Cancer Research UK or the British Heart Foundation, they are partly helping to pay for our research (thank you!!).
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Lauren Burns answered on 26 Jun 2018:
As my colleagues have said, it can cost a lot of money to fund research projects, but the other aspect is also time. You can spend a lot of hours doing a research project – my PhD is 3 years, so that’s about 6240 hours of my life gone on one research project!
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