Donating used lab equipment is one way to improve the quality of science worldwide.

Nina Dudnik

In 2004, Ricardo Morbidoni returned home to Rosario, Argentina, from a postdoctoral fellowship at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. He planned to start his own lab at the local university, studying drug resistance in tuberculosis (TB), which would be critical in a country where the number of cases of multidrug-resistant TB is increasing.

What he found was a laboratory with empty shelves and very little equipment. The funding from his university was not enough to purchase a single piece of new equipment. His first task was to re-engineer an old refrigerator to use as an incubator for cell culture work.

Those of us fortunate enough to work in the well-funded labs of Boston’s universities and companies have incomparable access to resources—from the latest in advanced technology to reagents that arrive the next business day. In the midst of this abundance, it can be easy to forget that in all but the most developed of nations, our colleagues overseas often struggle to buy even the most basic equipment.

This infrastructure gap was made plain to me during the time I was doing research at the Africa Rice Center in the Ivory Coast before beginning graduate school. Rather than throwing away plastic pipette tips and microfuge tubes, we would wash and reuse the same ones for three months at a time. We had to rely on someone traveling to Europe on business to bring back certain reagents.

Pitching in

In 2002, I and a group of my fellow graduate students at Harvard Medical School decided to do our part in bridging this gap. We saw firsthand how equipment, still functional and useful, was either neglected or discarded when new machines were purchased. In collaboration with the Sustainable Sciences Institute in Berkeley, CA, we began shipping these surplus items to scientists in Latin America.

Since then, our organization, Seeding Labs, which consists of a core of a dozen graduate and medical students from Harvard, has sent more than 5,000 pounds of donated equipment—ranging from Petri dishes to microfuges to electrophoresis equipment—to researchers and clinicians in nine countries. Past recipients include a lab in Paraguay developing molecular diagnostics for Dengue fever, a stem cell lab in Argentina, and the medical clinic of Partners In Health in central Haiti.

This equipment would have otherwise cost these researchers hundreds of thousands of dollars beyond their budgets. But with these donations, they can stretch their budgets to pay for reagents and other infrastructure and, critically, for the training of the next generation of scientists. Increasing the research capacity in the developing world is also good for closing economic gaps; studies have shown that investment in basic science is a key contributor to economic growth and the development of a market-based economy. The UN Millennium Task Forces, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the World Bank have all stressed the need to invest in research facilities and the training of scientists in developing countries.

The scientific community at large also benefits. With better-equipped and trained researchers worldwide, there can be more research collaborations on a wider scope of projects, greater access to unique organisms or sample populations from other parts of the world, and an overall increase in the quality of scientific research. Donor institutions in the developed world also benefit from a low-cost and environmentally friendly way of disposing of unneeded equipment that would otherwise occupy warehouse space or simply be sent to the landfill.

Machine milestones

Equipment recycling gets results. In February of 2005, we sent 30 cartons of lab supplies and machines to Morbidoni in Argentina, including two power supplies for electrophoresis equipment, a magnetic stirplate, and a vacuum concentrator, as well as culture dishes, pipettes, beakers, and centrifuge tubes. Just over one year later, he said to me in an e-mail: “We achieved all our goals…funded a student’s fellowship…and most importantly we have gotten results that may merit publication in foreign peer-reviewed journals.” Morbidoni is now actively collaborating with scientists in the United States.

In an increasingly globalized and interconnected scientific community, communication and collaboration between scientists in Boston and Buenos Aires or Cambridge and Kinshasa is far easier than it has ever been. If the successes of Seeding Labs were multiplied many times over, it might well be an exciting move towards a better world. And some of the key ingredients might very well be gathering dust in a warehouse or storage room at your institution.

Seeding Labs welcomes volunteers, collaborators, and donors. Nina can be reached at nina@seedinglabs.org.