Being poor was not such a drag in hindsight

There are certain things about my scientific upbringing that sometimes makes me feel like a curmudgeonly asshole.

One of these things are privileged and un-self-aware* assholes who have only ever known labs that are flush with $$$BUX$$$ and take those conditions for granted.

I, however, spent a couple years in a lab when funding was scarce. I fought for, and eventually won, a teaching position to guarantee that I would be paid during the summer months in graduate school. Soon thereafter, my advisor was awarded a sizely grant, and we were suddenly a rich and powerful lab in our department. That didn't change how I approached my science work - I constructed the bulk of the behavioral testing apparatuses used in my dissertation study from abandoned materials found in the next door lab.

When I started in my current lab for my postdoc, we had substantial start up funds. Slowly, my active frame of mind has changed, but my perspective hasn't. Now, if I need something to complete my work, I simply order it without substantiating any of it to anyone, including an administrator. It was strange and new, but also amazing and liberating. Still - not something I planned to embrace mindlessly.

In fact, I switched to and learned a whole new statistical program because it was the cheapest through the university's IT department. I also negotiated aggressively with the vendor of our behavioral testing equipment - a system on which the lab invested more than $50K - to send us various free extras at every opportunity. Another major source of cost in an animal lab - the animals themselves - is often a poorly managed expense. With the help of my student assistants, I've been able to effectively manage and cull animals, keeping the smallest necessary group of animals.

Science is ridiculously expensive and the further the money goes, the further the science goes.

Now, as our current funding situation becomes increasingly dim - I'm even more thoughtful about how the lab spends its money.

So today, when I overhear a new graduate student flippantly declare that the lab needs to put forth $300 for statistical software on their personal computer, when it's available on numerous other computers in the lab, I pause. They probably don't know that it's possible that they got a position in the lab through the department's financial resources (rather than from the PI's funds) or that three of his coworkers are potentially losing their funding/jobs in only a few months. The Ivory tower of academia, it's sometimes called. And it is.

Even so, money is one of those taboo subjects in science - no one really talks about it. Sure, the PI is usually thinking about it, but few make a conversation out of it. Especially in the current funding climate, it appears that the predominant strategy is apply as often as possible and count the moments until the next grant review and score cycle. And probably pray, too, if they believe in that sort of thing.



* Yeah, I'm going to make up words. I use logic. Follow it.