Lab Size
Bigger Not Always Better
09/11/10 15:09 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Blogger Massimo Boninsegni at Exponential Book said that when it comes to choosing a lab group with which to work, there is an approximate "optimal" lab size, "beyond which productivity ... no longer grows proportionally to the monetary investment, and even the effectiveness [of the lab] as a training and educational venue decreases. S. Pelech agrees and further points out that lab politics can be very problematic in "sink or swim" lab groups, when the principal investigator is just too busy to attend to the needs of each trainee. Read More...
The Happy Medium
19/11/10 16:45 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Jeremy Berg, the director of National Institute of General Medical Sciences, suggested that mid-sized labs do best from his analysis of NIH data to study correlations between grant size and scientific output. S. Pelech comments that Dr. Berg's data confirms what he and many others have suspected all along, i.e. too high amounts of funding for a laboratory group can provide diminishing returns and this has enormous implications for the funding of mega projects. Based on US NIGMS data from 2007 to mid-2010, the Division of Information Services in the NIH Office of Extramural Research determined that the median annual total direct cost was $220,000 in funding, the median number of grant-linked publications was six, and the median journal average impact factor was 5.5, which indicates that the typical costs of a scientific paper with a 5.5 impact factor is about $128,000. Read More...