Post 13: Doing science is very expensive 💸

I found this diagram showing how Harvard spend/invest their money, and then i was thinking a lot.

I love how we oversimplified things during undergrad to sell us stories. I often heard, “you don’t need much money to develop a good idea” and is common to se the Richard Lenski’s experiment (on the left in the picture) as an example.
His experimental design is a simple and good idea: tracking bacterial evolution over generations. And for that, Lenski’s team has been sequencing the genomes of an initial bacterial population for over 30 years (more details about the experiment here).

Except they forgot to mention the big pile of cash needed for:

1. Sequencing the 75,000 bacterial generations (so far)
2. Having the staff to maintain the project
3. All the infrastructure (like refrigerators or computers) and supplies needed to keep the cultures
4. Having trained personnel in bioinformatics and evolution to analyze the tons of data
5. Etc.

Doing science does require a lot of money.

The experiment’s website:

• https://the-ltee.org/history/