Sunday 29 May 2011

Securing Your Chemicals

My first post will deal with perhaps the most important topic of all in any biology or chemistry lab: the security of your biochemicals. Any scientist knows that the chemicals in her lab are her assets.

Let's start by looking at the price of common molecules. These are actual prices taken from Sigma, one of many biotech companies.

1g of NADH = $395.00
5g of ATP = $540.00
25g of cAMP = $2,835.00

Now if you took science in highschool, you have just realized these are all molecules found in the human body! That's right you are a walking asset worth hundreds upon thousands of dollars. However extracting these chemicals is not easy, and requires millions of dollars worth in laboratories.

As a result scientists though scientists spend a great deal of money to acquire these assets from biotech companies its a fraction of the price it would cost to obtain these chemicals directly from a subject. Thus any university lab holds thousands upon dollars in assets.



However walk into any lab and you will see many chemicals stocked on the shelves. The truth is these chemicals on display are of little value. A good scientist hides the expensive assets from public view safely secured by omission.

Omission is a psychological technique that I intent to delve on further in my next post. To put it simply it's to keep information a need to know basis. It is why professors hide information from their students, and why the Dean doesn't truly know what is within each lab of the universities she oversees. Look forward to it and more on tips on how to insure your biochemicals in case of theft.

Until then bye.

21 comments:

  1. MY chemicals are always safely kept. Or ingested.

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  2. I had no idea they were so expensive

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  3. Wow they're actually really expensive, thanks for sharing, I needed a better explanation for Omission! Following!

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  4. what are you planning on doing with these? bio or chem?

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  5. both but mostly bio. more on that soon.

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  6. that is a pretty big bill there

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  7. wow. Am i really worth that much?? =D

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  8. How do I extract this adenosine triphosphate from meh? ;o :P

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  9. oh man i should be getting paid millions for donating blood then

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  10. Great info! I'm somehow connected to that field and it's truelly impressive. The same thing with the costs of some basic 'dyes' i.e. in histology. Often 1 g costs more than 1 g of gold

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  11. ya have a neat blog mmm

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  12. Wow that is very expensive! Following your blog, so I can gain some insight on the scientific community.

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  13. I had no idea I was worth that much ;)
    How do you go about getting a job there?

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  14. It's amazing how much this chemicals can cost.

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  15. never realized how much these things cost...

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  16. So when can I sell my chemical compounds on the black market.

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  17. i foresee an experiment involving the relationship between cAMP and ATP. be careful with those, an accident will cost you a lot

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  18. Yummy, is that cyclic adenosine monophosphate? Daaamn, looks delicious! Just watch the silver nitrate. that stuff is dangerous.

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  19. well thought out and put together post
    never even thought about something like this before

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  20. Achieve a reliable and established manufacturer suggested a Spectrophotometer cuvettes

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