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Frankenstein may have been written almost two hundred years ago, but the iconic imagery of the lone scientist working in his homemade lab, trying to answer the most profound question of all -- "what is life?" -- still imprisons many people's perceptions of what scientists actually do all day long.
However, for an increasing number of research scientists such a hands-on approach is no longer an option as they face the pressure of ever more complex and expensive technology, relentless budget cuts and the never-ending pressure to "publish or die".
Instead they have to look outside their labs for technology and skills that would once have been found within them, and in so doing turn rivals into collaborators, once barely tolerated scientific research businesses into vital service providers sometimes as far away as Beijing, and creating an 'in' for innovative companies like
Science Exchange, which offers an online marketplace for experimental expertise.
According to specialised research company DeciBio, the market for next-generation sequencing services is expected to be worth $180m (£112m) or 11 percent of the whole genomic market by 2013 as more and more labs give up performing their own in-house sequencing. Since May 2011, Science Exchange has built up a network in the USA (and increasingly in the UK) of 25,000 researchers looking to use the services of more than 1000 academic core facilities and commercial providers to help with their research projects.
In this way the very role of the research scientist is brought into question, perhaps even turning Dr Frankenstein into more of a project manager. "The impression one gets of Dr Frankenstein is that he blew the glassware himself, constructed the electrodes himself and made the entire lab," says Dr Tim Humphrey. Humphrey is MRC Senior Group Leader at the Gray Institute for Radiation Oncology and Biology at the University of Oxford. "However, in a modern lab we buy in 95 percent of all the equipment and technology and the lab without this is just empty benches and people with ideas. So getting some work performed outside our laboratory that either we can't do ourselves or is more economical to do outside our lab, is really just the next stage." "In particular, things that are so technically complex and expensive to do on our own, like genome sequencing, are now achievable if you pay someone else to do it. And the fact that we can do this inexpensively is actually altering the way we think about what experiments we can now consider performing."
As it is now relatively cheap to identify mutations in yeast -- for example -- by sequencing, "we can look for mutations in an unknown gene without having to use expensive and time-consuming classical methods" . "Ultimately we want to ask biologically important questions and that is what we are funded to do," he says. "And how we are judged is by the number and quality of our publications. So outsourcing allows us to better particular questions in a timely manner, thereby helping us to remain competitive."
Although he accepts that the loss of control "sometimes means you are surprised by what you get back" and, in particular, "you can't always make sense of the data as it is presented in a way you are not familiar with".
For Jurg Bahler, Professor of Systems Biology at University College London, the motivation to outsource some specialised work to other laboratories is that "science has become more and more complex and specialised to the extent that it is impossible for a single lab to have the expertise for whole projects.... So we collaborate because we can't be the best at everything."
Funding bodies are also encouraging more interdisciplinary projects at the interface between different specialisms, which Bahler admits "can lead to fruitful collaboration". "To get biologically meaningful data requires very specialised data-mining skills which we could do ourselves, but it may involve maths and modelling skills that are present outside of our group."
Ultimately, it's a trust game: "you have to trust that your partners know their stuff and will do their bit ok."
However, he believes there is a limit as to what can be done outside of your own lab, since "you can't outsource the whole of your research, as you need the intellectual drive to inspire and control it. So while the body parts may be outsourced as you need them in high quantities and low cost, the more complex brains and eyes would be left to Frankenstein. "After all, what no one else in the world has done, you have to do yourself."
According to James Clough, while academics talk a lot about collaboration, Oxford Gene Technology (OGT) began by offering a commercial service "where we quote for work, give an order, do it and then move on to the next". Clough is Vice President, Clinical and Genomic Solutions at Oxford Gene Technology.
The boundaries between academia and commerce quickly blurred as the company became involved in early collaboration with Oxford University, and have continued to blur as funding agencies such as the European Union "increasingly" require participation of SMEs (small and medium enterprises) as collaborative partners in projects they are funding.
Moreover, scientists are increasingly attracted to commercial operations, which "live and die by the quality of what [they] do", compared with some academic core facilities that are "not so customer-focussed"; and which can achieve less variability in their output than a lab on campus thanks to the sheer amount of processing they do.
Now the need to analyse all the data produced, or bioinfomatics, is encouraging a new wave of outsourcing that is taking companies such as OGT into "more complex work" as "many labs don't have nearly enough computational biologists or the budgets to hire them".
More than anything, Clough says, "there is the fear that if you try to set up your experiment yourself, others will get the answer while you are still thinking about it". So while Frankenstein would have "outsourced the legs and arms as he would want lots of them at a low cost in short period of time" he would now also be outsourcing "the analysis as well".
In contrast, says Dan Knox, the success of Science Exchange is "really the case of being in the right place at the right time" as the idea came out of the experience of breast-cancer biologist Elizabeth Iorns, "who after going through the (painful and frustrating) process of finding experts to help with some of her research projects, realised that there was a need for an efficient online marketplace to access the right experts." "The 'Frankenstein' model of a single scientist working by themselves in a secret laboratory is no longer the way science is done," adds Elizabeth Iorns, Co-Founder & CEO of Science Exchange "The best science is now being done by groups of people with complementary skills working together."
In the end Clough believes that the reduction of scientists in Big Pharma to little more than project managers for the SMEs who are carrying out the research should act as a warning to the research community. Nonetheless, he says, "the academic curiosity remains very strong in the academic model, which is not our thing, but once you have realised what you want to do we can give project advice on how to achieve it".
Whereas for Humphrey, "the decision to outsource is driven by the balance between what you need to answer the question, how much you want it and what you can afford to buy. So if you just want the answer to a single question which you haven't the technology for you can outsource it to Beijing and get it done for $400 (£250). "And," he adds, "if Frankenstein had outsourced a lot of his work, then he may well have had the time to actually make life successfully."
Image: Patricia Marroquin / Shutterstock.com
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
