Used Lab Equipment Finds A Second Home Overseas : NPR
Science is an expensive endeavor. Labs in the U.S. can easily spend millions of dollars each year on equipment, chemicals and supplies alone. But for scientists in the developing world, these costs are often prohibitive. That’s where a clever idea has made all the difference.
In a Harvard Medical School corridor on a rainy Saturday afternoon, a handful of graduate students are emptying boxes of scientific equipment into the hallway to take inventory: microcentrifuge tubes, radiation counters, micropipetters, Erlenmeyer flasks.
The boxes, which are stacked up to the ceiling, are full of equipment the Harvard labs no longer need. In many academic and industrial labs around the country, it gets thrown out or used for scrap. But here, it has a different fate.
Amanda Nottke, who has just defended her Ph.D., puts down a handful of pipettes and explains.
“We help consolidate surplus into shipments to go to labs in developing countries,” she says. “Our upcoming shipment is going to be going to University of Nairobi in Kenya.”
Labs all over the developing world can really use this stuff. Science overseas often stalls because of a lack of basic equipment, and many times, teaching labs just don’t have enough materials to go around.