As the costs of fuel, groceries and housing increase suddenly around the world, scientists are fighting inflation (通货膨胀) at the bench. Almost all items needed to conduct science are more expensive than they were just a year ago. And that means that nearly every researcher is feeling the pressure. "Nobody is immune to this economy," says Tola Olorunnisola, who leads innovation in the lab at Avantor, an international science-management company in Pennsylvania. Olorunnisola visited labs in the Netherlands, Switzerland and Ireland to help researchers find ways to enlarge their budgets. "Scientists are becoming more conscious of costs," she says.
The increase in lab costs has forced scientists to make some difficult choices. Scientific budgets are pretty fixed. If they pay double for something, it means they're not buying something else. Scientists can keep their research projects moving forward, but to avoid overspending on their budgets, they'll probably need to adjust their buying habits and take steps to make their labs more efficient.
Julien Sage, a cancer researcher and geneticist at Stanford University in California, estimates that lab supplies historically account for roughly 20%of his overall budget, but he says that the balance is shifting.
Without significant boosts in funding to keep pace with inflation, it's up to scientists to find creative ways to diminish costs. One option is to rethink experimental design.
"It will probably take more than discounts from lab-supply companies to truly protect scientists from the impact of rising prices," Sage says. "Unless something is done on a large scale to either stabilize costs or increase funding, science is likely to suffer. If you have less money, you're going to have fewer people or be less productive, which means you're going to have fewer grants (拨款) which means you're going to have fewer people. That's probably happening to a lot of labs these days, and the question is: When is it going to stop?"