Comment by ethanwillis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ethanwillis | Hacker News Reader

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This is exactly why I am aiming to bootstrap my own lab outside of academia and traditional research positions available private industry.

There's a lot of "BS" in these power structures that keep people from being able to dedicate resources and a proper amount of time to generate quality research.

I'm fairly "green" in my research career, but I've been in the game for a few years now in the Biology/Bioinformatics realm. I've seen and heard stories from plenty of colleagues about how when they first got started and well into their first P.I. positions (and even until this day when they're 10-20 years into their work) where they get abused by their institutions. Aside from "publish or perish" there's also your institution skimming 50-60% of your hard won grant funding to let you "rent" their facilities where you're fighting over shelf space with other P.I.s Absolutely insane.

Seeing this I decided I can bootstrap my own lab for much less and have true autonomy. For example a rough breakdown of my costs for setting up a bio/bioinformatics lab for myself and a few friends:

Land Zoned for Light Industrial and Scientific Research? about $1000/acre or less in my area. (hint: buy tax liened property)

CO2 incubators? Don't pay $4k-8k new. I can buy refurbed or liquidated lab equipment from the unsustainable institution labs for literally pennies on the dollar. Try $100-200 for this equipment.

High RPM centrifuges? Once again instead of $2k-5k I can spend $300 for a 15k RPM centrifuge. and something like $20 for desktop centrifuges.

PCR machines? Try < $100 each. And I've even gotten "extras" with them in that price range.

Compute power/I.T.? I can get 256 core, 1tb ram blade centers for about $1k. Modern Core i5/Core i7 desktops for $80 each.

By my estimates I can buy the land, build a building(admittedly a very utilitarian one), and equip a new lab for sub $30k. Now my only costs are re-agents(if I'm doing research that requires it), power, and cheap land taxes.

You'll find that any large state university has dozens if not hundreds of little businesses that sprout up in exactly this way. You see them in the little business parks -- most of them lease rather than buy. You see them at the trade shows.

It goes without saying that the idea is just like any other business venture, with ways to succeed and to fail.

But a useful thing is to try and get a survey of what kinds of businesses are out there, what they are doing, and how well they are doing. Next time you're at a conference that has a trade show, go and look at the booths in the "low rent district," because it will give you an idea of what people are doing.

Oddly enough I work for a F500, and we buy second hand gear. One reason is that if somebody is advertising a particular instrument, it means that they actually have it, and you can get it right away. With new gear, sometimes it can take weeks or even months. Also, if it's under a couple grand, I can buy it on my purchasing card without management approval.

I have a business park a literal stones throw from my home. I thought about going that route, unfortunately for me I have some higher power requirements that I can't get in those units. I thought about leasing correctly zoned warehouse space with the right power options but the cost is actually more expensive in year 1 than buying and building in my area.

I'll definitely take a look at what some other small businesses are doing. I've seen some up close, but the trade show run through is a great idea.

And yea. I buy stuff at auction within 300 miles of my area and drive the same day to pick up any gear I buy. What kind of department do you work within inside your F500?

I'm in "advanced" R&D, playing with technologies that will be in future products. For my group, we often need something on a temporary basis. So it doesn't make sense to invest in a brand spanking new machine. Plus, we might be intending to modify it.

Could you link/explain how you get those hardware prices, specifically the servers and desktops? Are the available for the average consumer (ie not making a bulk purchase)? I have very little experience buying hardware, but those prices sound 4-8x lower than what I'd expect (and I'd be super happy to find that I'm wrong).

They are definitely available outside of a bulk purchase. I see about an 80/20 split between having to buy in small quantities versus having to buy in a bulk purchase.

I'd prefer not to share the info on a public forum to keep mass buyers out of the market(more than there already are)

Shoot me a message at ethan at dancecardrx dot-com and let me know what you're looking for and I can point you in the right direction.

How will you pay yourself a salary? Act as some kind of researcher for hire? What kind of clients do you see yourself serving?

Good question.

There's a lot of consulting work available in traditional labs because of bureaucracy around hiring new employees full-time. So I can apply my skillsets in those labs as an outside consultant.

Ideally though this would be a pure-research endeavor. Which requires time and building up credentials and a funding base. So basically eventually income for the entire operation would be a mixture public/private grants and leasing out technology developed within the organization to others.

Are you worried that the necessity of getting those grants written/approved will push you into the same kind of incentive structure that you're trying to escape? Or is your theory that, yes, you'll have to deal with some of the same B.S. and incentive-skewing, but as long as you keep your burn low, it will be of a lower intensity?

I think that you will always have to deal with some amount of B.S. as long as you're spending other people's money. That's unavoidable.

The B.S. is amplified however when you're at a big institution. There's a lot more red-tape even if you have private financiers.

One way would be to yes, keep burn low. The idea there right would be that you're asking for less money, you're lowering expectations of those giving you money. If someone gives you $1000 they're going to micromanage you a lot less on how that money is used versus if they give you $10,000, $100,000, etc. The other idea is that if you have less stakeholders there's also less back and forth that needs to be maintained with them.

My idea would be that you'd avoid the incentive-skewing over the long term by doing some research that can be converted into revenue generators to cover the base costs of running a lab. Reinvesting profits into traditional finance products to get a yield on the lab's money. Even running a small scale cryptocurrency mining operation as a single part of revenue generation. If you combine this with low-overhead by being smart about what would typically be big ticket purchases that only the most well funded of labs can afford and finding people with a like mind who are willing to take a liveable(but smaller wage) to work in a more open environment then it should be sustainable. For me in particular I can balance research time with programming consulting time and make 80% of what I would make in Biology/BINF or at an academic institution without breaking a sweat.

Like I mentioned before about grant skimming by institutions.. If you're a PI at a state lab or university they will take a "generous" portion of your grant as soon as it arrives. I'm specifically thinking of one guy I know who recently had HALF of his grant taken for facility rental and upkeep. It was a large grant mind you. In another case a friend who had finished his postdoc and was a first time PI landed his first grant. As soon as it was in the lab managers tried to say "awesome, now we can pay your salary out of the grant" He had to play hardball with HR to state that his salary was guaranteed and not to be paid out of grant money intended for his research. Now I can understand why this happens. It's not free to run a research enterprise, and it's not particularly cheap when you're buying equipment at MSRP. Research equipment in the second hand market before it goes to professional refurbishers is literally cents on the dollar. It's so specialized, there's a small market for it, and big players are not buying this stuff because of the inherent risk! In my experience though the defect rate is so absurdly low that it's not an actual risk buying this equipment. But it's not something an institution with a multi-million dollar grant to setup a research center/core is going to waste their time on.

As for specifics of what I'm aiming to do. I intentionally picked a research area I'm going to delve into that has low costs. An operation like I'm talking about in my OP would not be feasible for high energy physics or high cost sequencing projects. I'm focusing on photobioreactor design and algae cultivation yields for animal feed, biodiesel refining, etc. For that I need CO2 incubators, centrifuges, a 3d printer, algae samples, a sample freezer, turbidimeters, photospectrometers, pH meters, and then a revolving supply of plant fertilizers, CO2, and Nitrogen. But before I get deep into actual PBR design and cultivation techniques I'm going to work on computational models for PBR design, algae growth rates, and PBR monitoring software for data collection.

Again, indirect costs do not come out of the direct costs of running the project.

If you get a $250,000 a year NIH R01 (the largest you can get without PITA budget details) and your institution has negotiated a 50% rate, the NIH pays your institution $375,000 a year. Your $250K doesn't get reduced.

The only time I've ever had something like what you described happen was when a private funder had X total amount they wanted to spend, but hadn't bothered pre-specifying that they'd only pay a particular overhead rate. Which is mainly just a company wanting to get something for nothing, and doesn't leave me particularly sympathetic.

It's kind of a mix. Many agencies and calls say that the maximum amount you can budget is say, $500K over 3 years including indirect costs. So you'll say the project costs $350K and allocate $150K to indirects. If indirects were lower, you could up your direct costs.

It's not only private funders who do this. It's the biggest funding agencies in the United States. NSF, DARPA, Army, etc. In fact, I feel most grants operate this way. I'm not sure about NIH since I've only been Co-I on those.

The NIH is by far the largest funder of research in the U.S., so "most grants" has to include them.

You are correct that there are grants from agencies with a cap including indirect costs - I confess I have the opposite experience of you, I'm usually the Co-I on NSF-style grants, so I don't look at them much.

In that case, yes, if indirects were lower you could up your direct costs. I still contest the idea that the indirect cost system is somehow stealing "your" grant money though (where you = lab).

I didn't use the word "stealing", but they take a cut from the grant money allocated to the PI.

Maybe here is another perspective. NSF "Smalls" in my program are 500K, and Army "YIPs" are 360K. If I get a Small or a YIP, and my friend at another university with half the overhead gets the same Small or YIP, my friend will get more spending money than me.

I get 300K on the Small, and my friend gets 380K. To do the essentially same unit quantity of research. A university with a higher overhead takes 80K more from the grant that would have gone to the lab.

> One way would be to yes, keep burn low. The idea there right would be that you're asking for less money, you're lowering expectations of those giving you money. If someone gives you $1000 they're going to micromanage you a lot less on how that money is used versus if they give you $10,000, $100,000, etc. The other idea is that if you have less stakeholders there's also less back and forth that needs to be maintained with them.

You do have to be careful about the fixed costs for them administering the grant however. The time and effort of reviewing and approving / rejecting a $1000 request is not going to be a fraction of a percent of a much larger request. Lower perhaps but proportionally higher. And by promising much less, you might not really make it more appealing.

I appreciate the questions!

He should be worried that the "skimming" he's talking about is, in many cases, legally mandated. Direct and indirect costs not being mixed isn't something that happened because universities wanted it that way.

"there's also your institution skimming 50-60% of your hard won grant funding to let you "rent" their facilities"..

Is certainly a creative way to describe indirect costs.

For standard NIH/NSF/most Federal grants, they don't come out of "your" grant funding - they're a pre-negotiated rate, and the award amounts are based on indirect costs. If an institution cut their indirect rate to 25%, you wouldn't see that money back, it would just never be there.

I've also never been at an institution that's not willing to at least work with a grant giving agency/firm/etc. on lowering the overhead if it's a sticking point.

But I will say in my experience that I get a ton of value for my overhead rate - and that it's known in the institution to actually be slightly lower in most cases than the actual cost of doing research.

I'll admit it's definitely a creative way of describing indirect costs. I think we may have some different viewpoints on whether or not those costs are inflated justly/unjustly.

I don't think I can argue that the overhead at traditional research institutions is super inflated. It makes sense when you take into account the level of bureaucracy and growing amount of "extra" administration :). But I think it's disingenuous to say that if the costs were cut back to 25% that you'd NEVER see that money. If indirect costs were able to be lowered at these institutions there would be more money in the funding pipeline for direct costs to begin with right?

It's fair that you think you get a ton of value for your overhead rate. Different setups are better for different people. My ideal situation is definitely not ideal for most people. I just don't think I can stomach supporting what I see as administrative waste and needless redtape(not that I believe there should be NO redtape, no one sane would believe that?).

Also in your other comment about private donors not wanting to cover any indirect costs.. completely agree.

I have a friend who works in a flow cytometry company. Flow cytometers are one of those things that really need to be run day in and day out by experts to be reliable instruments, so they do assays for hire, contract research as part of grants and studies, and use that to fund their own research. It works quite well.

One thing to check on, though, is the requirements for waste disposal from your lab in your area. You may find yourself having to pay for special disposal.

Good point. I'll check that out. There are quite a few hazardous waste disposal companies in my city.. and we have a pretty large research footprint, hopefully the rates aren't awful!

Thanks for posting this, best of luck!

Thanks!

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