My husband is a brilliant man with a deep love for home improvement shows. I could do that! he says. I just need a fancy saw, some tool, this other thing, wood and a plan. Sometimes these projects turn out great, but as often, we find we wasted money on equipment we can’t properly use, a plan we can’t follow and a project abandoned before it has taken shape.

Today’s scientists encounter similar challenges in their research programs. The cost and complexity of science and technology equipment have grown faster than science funding, and research has become so specialized that a gap has grown between the experiments scientists would like to do and the ones they can do.

In a market where the latest version of “Next Generation Sequencing” equipment approaches $1 million and is replaced as often as the iPhone, scientists struggle to afford the equipment and to maintain the scientific expertise for emerging technologies.

Yet to perform top-quality and cost-effective research, scientists need these technologies and the technical knowledge of experts to run them. When money is tight, where can scientists turn for the tools they need to complete their projects?

Sharing resources

An early solution to this problem was to create what the academic world calls “resource labs” that specialize in one or more specific type of science experiments (e.g., genomics, cell culture, proteomics). Researchers can then order and pay for that type of experiment from the resource lab instead of doing it on their own.