Nature Medicine | Spoonful of Medicine

Science on a shoestring

Speaking of Apoorva, before she left the journal she managed to produce a fitting swan song — a collection of reports called “”https://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v13/n10/index.html#subcatxt">Science on a shoestring". In this collection, we present the stories of some scientists who, using materials as simple as litmus paper, bamboo and blenders, prove that science on a shoestring is possible.

We hope that these stories are inspiring, not only to other people who may not have the resources to do research, but also to those in rich labs, who often complain about their grants being rejected and about equipment being too expensive.

Back in Mexico, when I was starting in research, I do remember having to wash the plastic pipettes, as well as the pipette tips to reuse as many times as possible. We also had to remove the bottom of plastic graduated cylinders and glue a spout to them so that we could quantify the volume of liquid that our animals drank during their behavioral training. And we had these very elaborate contraptions to distill water, which was a precious commodity.

But that’s enough reminiscing for one day. Instead, tell us what’s happening in your neck of the woods. Do you also have to come up with clever inventions to compensate for the paucity of resources?

Comments

  1. Report this comment

    Tiffany said:

    When I worked up in Alaska at a very very raw microbiology lab, the first incubator was made from wood and a light bulb. We had to fashion metal loops from pencils with a metal wire looped and stuck onto the eraser end of the pencil.

  2. Report this comment

    Shivakumar said:

    Ask any resident doing ward work from third world countries like mine and you will hear many more innovations that they have to fashion out of the limited resources they have. My mind goes back to when we used hair dryers attached to blankets as bear-huggers in hypothermic patients, fashioned extra corporeal Le Veen shunts with IV sets for refractory

    ascites patients. I can also mention as noteworthy, Dr Abhay Bang’s method of using an abacus as a device for the illiterate health assistants to measure respiratory rate in infants with pneumonia.

  3. Report this comment

    Alan Dove said:

    The long career of Oliver Smithies, one of this year’s Nobel laureates, is full of inexpensive improvisations in the lab. In most cases, his motivation for building this gear was less about money and more about needing a tool that nobody was offering commercially yet. His “hexapus,” one of the first functioning PCR thermal cyclers, is my personal favorite. You can read an essay of his from a few years ago here, in which he details several other clever workarounds.

    In my own time in the lab, I routinely repaired and modified equipment ranging from microcentrifuges to vacuum pumps, and came up with a very cheap solution for incubating samples at precisely 25deg. C – a much tougher problem than you might think. The commercial incubators capable of this all have both heating and chilling elements, and cost thousands of dollars. My solution was to take an unused standard incubator, place it in the cold room, and add a surplus cooling fan from an old computer. The fan kept the air circulating, allowing the incubator thermostat to respond very quickly to small temperature changes, and because the unit was in the cold room, it didn’t need a built-in chiller. Once adjusted, it could hold a “room temperature” setting within a quarter degree C. Total cost was about five bucks, I think.

  4. Report this comment

    Mr. Gunn said:

    It’s easy enough to pull a hockey stick from a glass pasteur pipette, so I’ve never bought anything specifically for spreading plates. To regulate the temperature for our time lapse-microscopy, we used a thermo switch connected to a hairdryer, and placed a trashbag over the whole thing.