Living and Breathing Science: Research in a time of austerity

These are trying times for academic scientists across this country. NIH grant success rates reached an all time low in 2011. With prospects of obtaining new funding being poor, many lab directors are struggling to sustain their research laboratories. Here are few approaches that might help. In addition to dedicating energies to applying for new grant funding, investigators need to work diligently to stretch the limited funds that are available. Place your fellows and students on a budget. This will force them to be frugal and better justify their expenditures. Require that graduate students and fellows apply for fellowships and travel awards. Perform an inventory of all of the reagents in your lab. You may find that you already have reagents you are about to purchase. Post inventories and require that they be maintained. Reach out to other scientists to freely provide reagents such as antibodies, cells lines and constructs. Take some time to work with sales representatives to get the best pricing on consumables. Make sure experiments are properly designed and controlled to avoid unneeded redos. Go micro and scale down reactions volumes to save reagent and supply costs. Get your animal housing costs under control. Reduce unnecessary drains on your resources by submitting mouse lines to the MMRCC Program at Jax for cryopreservation and distribution. Consider sharing effort/salary of your technician with another PI. Twenty five percent effort of your experienced technician may be worth more in productivity to another PI than what might be obtained through them paying 100% of the salary of an inexperienced technician.

Next, explore new avenues for funding. Since your experience is a valuable asset, let others who are writing grant applications know that you are interested in collaborating and that you, your team and resources can bring value to their program. Don't miss out on grant opportunities that could fund your research. Subscribe to receive notifications of new grant opportunities from COS or Grants.gov. If you have a scored, but unfunded grant application, consider submitting it to the HealthResearchFunding.org, a database that serves as a clearinghouse for unfunded research proposals. 

Living and Breathing Science: The Traditional Laboratory Notebook Needs to Go Electronic

Laboratory notebooks of scientists such as Michael Faraday and Thomas Edison not only provide details of experimental methods and the day-to-day progression of their historic research, but also offer insights into how they thought and accounts of the moments of breakthrough discoveries.

For centuries, scientific recording keeping involving handwritten entries in paper notebooks has sufficed. Over the last two decades I have witnessed dramatic changes in laboratory record keeping that have stemmed from the advent of digital data. 

In academic research, it is customary for a scientist’s original laboratory notebooks to be kept by the principle investigator. So, on shelves outside my office are rows of the laboratory notebooks that have been generated by postdoctoral fellows, graduate students and technicians who have worked with me over the last 20 years.

Looking through these notebooks one can see the variety of ways in which researchers have documented their experimentation. In addition to handwritten entries there are an assortment of films, gels, photographs, graphs, spreadsheets and printouts from all kinds of instruments that have been taped, stapled or simply placed between pages. In more recent notebooks there are attached storage disks containing electronic files. It is evident these scientists have had different degrees of success dealing with problems of annotation and cross-referencing of disparate types of data, particularly digital data.

Generally, once a year I discuss with members of my lab group how to maintain a laboratory notebook and store their digital data. I stress how vital stringent record keeping is to the scientific process and that valid records preserve rights to our discoveries. Despite this, upon periodic inspection of notebooks of my personnel I am often surprised to find what actually is being recorded. Rather than adhering to the conventional format some have adopted a ‘relaxed’ style for their notebook entries. Particularly disturbing are notebooks that lack discussion of results and conclusions. I have also found it difficult and sometimes impossible to locate digital data related to particular experiments described in my people's notebooks.

These experiences not only underscore breakdowns in record keeping training and compliance, but also highlight inadequacies of current record keeping approaches generally employed by basic researchers. I am therefore a proponent of implementation of electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs) that automate collection and recording of data. Such systems are not widely employed in academic research, but the NIH and research institutions need to take steps to see that these systems are implemented.