Five months after placing the orders, the cameras finally arrive. Biophysicist Gary Brouhard tears open the cardboard boxes, tosses the packaging aside, and gently places the two $47,000 cameras onto the cluttered lab bench, inconspicuously nestled between sheets of pink bubble wrap, unopened equipment boxes, and the week's growing heap of recyclables. "I don't break the boxes down as quickly as they come, so it's sort of a mess," Brouhard admits. Cleaning might not be Brouhard's forté, but he is crafty about setting up his lab on the cheap.

Brouhard, who studies single-molecule dynamics of the microtubule cytoskeleton, joined the faculty of Montreal's McGill University in August 2008. Nine months on, his lab was still very much a work in progress. Unlike most US institutions, which award new hires with generous start-up packages, Canadian universities provide little support to cover infrastructure costs. The government provides a boost, but the $750,000 CDN he received (including funds from McGill) didn't stretch as far after the Canadian dollar tanked last year, dropping from near parity with the American greenback to below 80 cents. Since he was buying equipment mostly sold in the United States, his funding didn't stretch as far and he could no longer afford everything he had budgeted for.

Brouhard realized he needed to take a more do-it-yourself approach to equipping his lab. He had spent three-plus years in graduate school building optical tweezers to study motor proteins, and he used some pretty snazzy fluorescence imaging systems at his postdoc at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany, so he had a good idea of the single-molecule fluorescence microscope setup he wanted. First thing, the two top-of-the-line, electron-multiplying digital cameras that just arrived from Andor Technology—specialty items from Belfast, United Kingdom, that can visualize individual photons to high precision, but were back-ordered with a 5-month waiting list. One of the cameras' outer casing turned up loose and jiggling, but Brouhard doesn't plan on sending it back to Northern Ireland—he can't afford another long wait just to repair a largely cosmetic problem, he says.

Next up: red, green, and blue lasers from Sweden-based Cobolt, each costing around $10,000. The red one, however, is yet to arrive and the other two are "just sitting there, shooting at the wall." Brouhard also picked up a microscope skeleton, objective lens, and emission-splitting device from Carl Zeiss, a German manufacturer, plus a motorized stage, filter cubes, shutters, and various other optical knickknacks from other suppliers. Eventually, he plans to track single kinesin proteins taken from baculovirus-infected insect cells.

All told, Brouhard figures that building his microscope in-house instead of purchasing a package deal saved him around $100,000, though it also cost him countless more hours researching the parts and speaking with sales reps. "At this point," he admits, "I think I have more time than money."

Brouhard is not the only scientist trying to economize. Gautam Awatramani, a neurobiologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, studies neural circuits using two-photon fluorescent imaging and various electrophysiological techniques—a technologically demanding layout that can cost upwards of $1 million. He received $300,000 CDN in government start-up funds, but that money has taken a while to arrive, and still wouldn't cover his dream tool. "The only way to do it is basically to build it from nuts and bolts," he says.

Awatramani managed to rig up an electrophysiological unit using a $12,000 amplifier from California-based Molecular Devices Corp.'s Axon Instruments with custom-written software implemented on $5,000 hardware from Texas-based National Instruments. He generated enough data to land him a 5-year $140,000 CDN operating grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. He spent around $12,000 on a microscope skeleton and lens from Tokyo-based Olympus and picked up a few $1,000 photomultiplier tubes from Hamamatsu Photonics, a Japanese optical sensor manufacturer. He is building the rest "from scratch" together with colleagues in Switzerland and at the Dalhousie physics department. He hopes to have the system's shell assembled soon so that once his start-up funding arrives, he can just slot in "the big ticket item"—a $200,000 titanium-sapphire laser. "In theory, I could have built that, too, but it probably would have taken me several years," he says.

It can be generally said that, once an equipment is commercially available, the most fundamental aspect of its usage is over. It becomes 'applied' in the sense that it is used to advantages outside its own origins. Spectroscopy is a classic example of how it moved from physics to other disciplnes. Same is with software. After acquiring expensive commercial software for molecular modeling , the only good results we got were when we wrote our own programmes for anomalous diffusion and discovered the formation voids in bilayers on energization even in 'in silico'.
Besides personal experiences that strongly speak for the advancement ones own research by doing 'it' yourself, there is an entire cultural phenomenon of asking interesting questions of your own.
India is classic example of total neglect of instrumentation as part of scientific development. Most of the money is spent on imported equipment merely because these topics were hot last year and discarded next year in an atmosphere of wanting to keep up with the west. The graduate training has been disastrous once kits became available.
There was one comment on how others go on publishing when this poor chap is building his own stuff. Turnkey publications based on availability of instruments rarely compete with ideation based studies, East or West.Libraries, equipment, chemicals ...all these cost money and are necessary but not sufficient conditions. Ideas are. Ideas include instrumentation for objective specific measurements.Unfortunately, we have relegated this major source of ideas to the market.

American educated... As a pre-doc, I was at the end of the food chain regarding grant dollars as well as priority in my lab's work-list for the machine- and instrument-shop. Ingratiating myself to the staff, I learned to operate precision mills, lathes etc from a pair of superlative instrument makers (previously hijacked from Harvard and a mid-western instrument company) and roll my own. Starting as post-doc, the experience was invaluable not only in specifying and communicating with various shops and vendors, but in being able to quickly fix or modify instruments, almost on-the-fly, without having to stand in line.

To put a broader point on Dr. Lasker's statement, I think it fair to say that American management in general, in almost all institutions, has been in a steadily expanding state of rot for several decades now. Once management freed itself from burden of dealing with the technically trained and competent in its ranks, it has steadily expanded its own domain by hiring and promoting its own supposed "business-oriented" types while denying advancement to all but a few "representative" technical types. The results, from universities and secondary schools, through the financial institutions and manufacturing, are obvious to all. A complete failure and well on the road to squandering the accumulated wealth and wisdom of many generations preceding.

Yes, it has gotten worse in Canada ....since you left. Please stay in the USA.

As s small independent research company in the USA we too struggle to find monies for equipment. All too often we hear others talk about all the R&D money available from the NIH and Federal USA government but be clear: virtually all that money goes to big-pharma and their lackeys in industry and university. The little guys, like us? No matter how promising our work, we are NEVER funded, they always find one reason or another not to fund us but, by then, they have all your ideas that show up again shortly: owned by, yep you guessed: big-pharma or their lackeys. So the little guys, where the real talent is, who have developed advances in bio, medical and energy: either sell it to the big boys (of course they steal it more often then pay) or perish.
What about this Canada and the rest of the world: this what you experience too?

Then, there is the other side of the story where huge amounts of money can be spent on prestigious instrumentation that will just sit there for ages.

While this nice guy is trying to gather and collect the spare parts, other are at work with complete and publishing soon.
Now we know why Canadian research is so poor...in results!

As in Canada, research funding is hard to get in Australia. This is also how it is done in Australia - except we have to wait even longer for things to come from the rest of the world. So...what's new? I imagine things are even more DIY in other not-so-rich countries.

Hi. I did my PhD in a Canadian lab and was used to doing most things from scratch. I was amazed to move to a US lab and have all these kits for simple things. I liked the spirit of the Canadian labs and I think I learned a lot more and had more connection with my experiments. Now, I try to do a combination of buying ready-made things and some do-it-yourself things.
I'm wondering if the money situation is worse with the current Canadian government cutting funds for science. Does anyone know?