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It's how the magic happens (mander.xyz)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Don't they have tools to do 100 at once, and machines to do 10,000 at once?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yeah there are robots, but they tend to be $500,000+ and many scientists in this field are tech luddites who are allergic to learning how to program a robot.

A postdoc will do the same work for (probably) less than 1/10 of the price AND do free overtime. Better yet, you can sometimes get students to do this work for free/nearly free.

That's also assuming they are able to get funding to cover any of these costs.

As for using a multipipetter, it just depends on the experiment and you can do ~10 at once.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Also too there is a lot of prep to get those thousands at once. Maybe 10x the work rather than 1000x but if your doing basic research your looking at effects small scale. ramp up happens when results are promising.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Yeah, but those are for scaled up processes. If you're doing basic research, most of the time you'll want to do it yourself. Plus, those bots are very expensive.