• Question: how much money on average is used to fund a single experiment

    Asked by anon-181562 on 6 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Alexandra Hogan

      Alexandra Hogan answered on 6 Jun 2018:

      Great question! The answer is ‘it depends’!

      My experiments are not in a laboratory, but at a computer – all I need is some free software and a good desktop computer to do my ‘tests’, and each test might only take a few hours to do. So, those types of experiments are very cheap. If I was running a big vaccine trial in thousands of people, though, it might costs millions of pounds and take several years.

    • Photo: Joey Shepherd

      Joey Shepherd answered on 6 Jun 2018:

      That is a good question, and as Alexandra says it really does depend on what experiment you are doing. If I am running a simple experiment of say, growing some bacteria and lab then seeing if I can kill them with a new antibacterial product, it will be quite cheap (and it’s all relative – quite cheap is maybe a couple of hundred pounds?). If you’ve seen anyone growing cells in dishes or flasks, each of those dishes or flasks costs money – anything from 50p each to up to £3 each, and you go through many of those in one experiment as well as food for the cells (can be around £80 for a bottle) and other bits of sterile plastic you will need. But large projects can and do take years and cost millions of pounds – one project I’m involved with is making new antibacterial products to stop bone infections and that has cost over two million pounds, with around fifty people working on it.

    • Photo: Camille Parsons

      Camille Parsons answered on 7 Jun 2018:

      Brilliant question, and I’m afraid the answer is not straight forward as will depend on the experiment you are running. I work with the numbers and data, so all my investigations need is a laptop/computer and some software to help me with the maths. However a specialist scanner can cost £500,000 to buy in the first place, which we need to allow us to collect information/data about peoples muscle and bones. But a scanner will last for years and years.

    • Photo: Claire Donald

      Claire Donald answered on 8 Jun 2018:

      What a good question! Unfortunately, science can be very expensive depending on the work you do. The lab I work in can easily spend £10,000 a month on doing lots of little experiments. The most money I ever spent in one go was £7,000 to see if there were any viruses hiding in my samples that I didn’t know where there.

    • Photo: Lauren Burns

      Lauren Burns answered on 8 Jun 2018:

      As has been discovered, it does depend! I could never afford to access the data I need to access if I was paying out of my own pocket, which is why the University pays me to do it. Or, you can apply to different organisations for funding depending on how much you need. Some larger charities and research councils will fund a significant amount towards your research project (so long as it is a good one!) Or some large companies may already have money in place to fund research – they just need a wonderful researcher to conduct it!

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