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Comment by Ardit20 | Hacker News Reader

Because we have not heard of a $225K microscope before - thus the microscope must be well good - but have heard of $10M research building and actually expect the latter.

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I'm sure the vast majority of the readers of this article have also not heard of a $10K, $100K or $700K microscope either which is why it's incongruous to have the price in the first sentence of the article without any context.

Here are many other microscopes the prices of which you may not have heard. Is it enlightening?

http://www.technicalsalessolutions.com/

There are only seven microscopes there which are more expensive.

This is journalism of course, but there is no need to discredit everything simply because you can word it in such a way as to make it sound stupid.

Personally, once the sum for the microscope was mentioned I was able to judge that the research is quite serious, has the latest technology and advantages of the latest technology and thus give me more confidence in their findings. Is it such a bad thing to use facts to make a story credible?

The point is that there are a range of microscope prices. The one they used falls somewhere in the spectrum of prices of lab microscopes I'd expect scientists to be using routinely. Mentioning it in the lead sentence of the article makes it seem notable for some reason. Maybe it is, but it's impossible to know without any context.

Aside from its price, does it have some unusual capability that enabled them to make this discovery? That is the kind of fact which would make the article more informative. When it's possible to image molecules with a device you can build for under $100, knowing the cost of the equipment someone used isn't very useful. It's analogous to an argument from authority.

I understand finely why your criticism might be a valid point, however, when all comments take the same shade that your criticism does, we start looking for the trees and miss the forest.

If you can build something for $100, yet the same thing they used costed $250,000 to build, ok let us even say for good measure it costed $25,000 and the rest was inflated, compared to $100 it must be a well awesome product, way superior than what you could build, ten times, 25 times, and if we are to trust the actual figure, 250 times better than what you could built.

The point of the article is most probably that it is the latest technology anyway. I mean, it is fine to look out for these flaws, but something much grater happened there, they actually discovered something. If all we get from comments is flaws flaws and the opposite down voted, then this community simply is not working.

Readers of a peer-reviewed article are, I think, willing to stipulate that the authors of the article are using adequate equipment. Probably most of the researchers of submitted articles which the reviewers criticize or reject use the same equipment.

The price of the equipment is not a factor in the credibility of the work. It does not make it more or less credible or flawed in any way. It is unusual to see the price of the lab equipment mentioned - that's all.

We were not reading a peer reviewed article.

No. But Virology is and its inclusion there is deferred until the third paragraph. If the point you are trying to make is that you are a representative audience member for this article and you find it more compelling that they used expensive equipment than that their result was featured on the cover of a peer-reviewed journal, I think we can agree that the the writer of the Loyola Medicine press release has taken the full measure of his readership.

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