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Facing inflation: lab heads tighten supplies budgets

Group leaders must find ways to efficiently cut costs without sacrificing research quality.
  1. Chris Woolston

    1. Chris Woolston is a freelance writer in Billings, Montana.

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As the costs of fuel, groceries and housing surge around the world, scientists are fighting inflation at the bench. Reagents, gloves, pipette tips, microscopes and almost every other item 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 lab and clinical services at Avantor, an international science-management company in Radnor, Pennsylvania. In late 2022, Olorunnisola visited labs in the Netherlands, Switzerland and Ireland to help researchers facing a cash crunch find ways to stretch their budgets. “Scientists are becoming more conscious of costs,” she says.

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Nature 613, 601-602 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00088-z

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 12 April 2023: A previous version of the story incorrectly stated that Livia Guadaim is an employee of LATM Life Science. She is, in fact, a Brazil-based employee of Merck in Darmstadt, Germany.

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