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Asked by sophie15 to Andrew, Ash, Gem, Paige, SJ on 27 Jun 2012.
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SarahJayne Boulton answered on 27 Jun 2012:
It can be…
The confocal microcopes I use cost about £1.5 million each.
The electrical set up I use cost about £5000, and the electrodes cast £200 each, but they can be reused over and over.THings that cost the most are things like DNA primers and chemicals for looking at mutations and damage using a procedure called PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction). see the chemicals cost £250 for a small bottle and onces it’s used it’s gone, we go through maybe 5 bottle a year.
A batch of nanosensors costs me about £300 to make myself in my little lab – These last me about 10 experiments. So sometimes it depends how busy I am!
Some things are really cheap though like Aluminium oxide (£4 for a whole kilo) or the little vials for doing light based assays (£3.50 for like 100) So it’s not all bad 🙂
If it wasn’t for brilliant and generous research councils like the Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK – we wouldn’t be able to to any of it though, so we are eternally grateful
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Gemma Staite answered on 27 Jun 2012:
It can be soooo expensive. To me I think it all is. Even the fridges and cupboards are expensive, because they are “lab wear”. We recently got a mass spectrometer. It’s a big silver machine, which looks a bit like a can dispensing machine. We can use to identify bacteria super quickly. It is a fantastic piece of kit but it costs about £1 million. The culture media is pretty cheap though, that can be just 50p per agar plate. I’m just glad I don’t have to pay for it all, or manage the budget.
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Andrew Thomas answered on 27 Jun 2012:
Yes the equipment we use is quite expensive. The laser set up I use cost over a million pounds (but it’s shared between three experiments), our spectrometers would cost at least £ 600,000 new and we have three of them. We bought one of them second hand for £2000 though! We have a couple of scanning tunnelling microscopes/atomic force microscopes we share with other researchers that cost around a million pounds each. So not cheap, really.
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Ashley Cadby answered on 27 Jun 2012:
Science is expensive, some of the microscope we have are 500K, they can see individual atoms though. In general it’s much cheaper to build a piece of equipment. Take SJ confocal microscope, 1.5 M to buy, it most likely cost 100K to build. The problem is science moves so fast you can not wait to build it. If I wanted to make a lot of money I would sell scientific equipment. The person that commercialised the atomic force microscope owns huge chunks of the Californian cost.
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Paige Brown answered on 28 Jun 2012:
YES! The equipment we use to see nanomaterials, called electron microscopes, are millions of dollars!!! They use electrons to see things that are smaller than the wavelength of light!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_microscopeFor my science movies, I also use camera equipment which is very expensive, because of the precise lenses and optics that these cameras use!
Comments
SJ commented on :
@ashley – It’s so painful parting with such cash when you know you could build things if you just had the time!! I’m just glad the electrodes are quick to make or we’d be well and truely up the creek!!