How much funding do you get for each experiment ?

Algernon Bloom answered on 16 May 2022:

It can depend on what you are doing and you normally get funding for a project that you then break down for experiments. I had one grant that was around £75k for 1 year of work.

Karin Purshouse answered on 17 May 2022:

Rather than getting funding per experiment, you usually get funding for a project. When I applied for my PhD funding, we had to put together a proposal for how much everything would cost. For example, an antibody might cost £200-300, but then you can use that for lots of experiments.

Gulnar Abdullayeva answered on 17 May 2022:

You usually get funding for a project. Additional to the tuition fee, you also need the bench fee which covers lab work.

Jocelyn Bisson answered on 17 May 2022:

In general funding would cover several years of work (i.e. you could be awarded funding for a 3 year PhD programme or 5 year research programme). Funding grants awarded to senior scientists who run large laboratories would pay for their salary, the salaries of several other more junior scientists and all materials and running costs of the lab so are often hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Working with laboratory animals such as mice is often very expensive as all of their food, cleaning, care etc has to be paid for, this is another incentive to think carefully about how we use animals and if we can reduce their use.

Chelsea Gerada answered on 17 May 2022:

This really depends on your funding source. I work for a CRUK funded institute/ lab so the CRUK charity provides resources for the projects you have submitted as well as salaries for staff. If you are not funded by a charity or institute then you have to apply for grants from different research organisations. In this process you write an application which explains what question you are trying to answer, why this is worthwhile and why you think you can answer this question. These grants generally include funding for experiments, salaries and potentially travel funds for conferences.

Overall science is quite expensive and it depends on what technology your using.

Annabel Black answered on 17 May 2022:

Scientific experiments are usually very expensive! The money to do a PhD (a PhD is normally a 3-5 year project where you work on a very specific focus, put together a big report called a thesis and, if your thesis committee agree that your work is good, at the end become a research doctor) usually comes from charities or other research organisations. This is normally tens of thousands of pounds each year for lab consumables (things like the dishes we grow cells in or reagents and chemicals we use in experiments), the technologies we use (like microscopes and machines that allow us to work with DNA from cells) and animal work (scientists often work with mice to find out how cancer grows and what treatments stop it growing – we have to feed, house and look after our mice which is expensive). Examples of organisations that provide money for experiments and projects include Cancer Research UK, British Heart Foundation, the Medical Research Council or Wellcome Trust (and many others!)

Erminia Romano answered on 19 May 2022:

It really depends on the type of experiment. Science is in general very expensive. The more advanced and complex an experiment is, the higher will be its cost.

Sophie Richardson answered on 20 May 2022:

That’s a really good but difficult to answer question! As others have said, researchers and their projects tend to get a pot of money for a project. This can be anywhere from a few thousand pounds to hundreds of thousands of pounds. Some experiments are cheap to do, like getting DNA out of cells. Other experiments are very expensive and can cost £10,000 or more! These experiments tend to involve new technologies and let us process lots of samples, like sequencing all the DNA from a sample (Whole Genome Sequencing).

Maria Peiris Pages answered on 25 May 2022:

It depends on the experiment. We normally apply for research project funding for 1, 2 or more years. Those projects include several experiments and the cost for all of them. Sometimes project grants also include salaries (yes, sometimes you have to find a way to cover your own salary!). For example, last year I applied for a project grant for 3 years to perform several experiments (some of them very expensive). We got almost £90,000 for 3 years of research

Rachel Harris answered on 6 Jun 2022:

In cancer research funding doesn’t work in such a direct way as some of our experiments can be relatively cheap (compared to large-scale setups as they might do in physics or ecology). Instead, we have each individual project funded, which might start with one large experiment and a very broad question, to begin with but will lead to many smaller experiments to try and help us understand the result of that first experiment. As an example though, a recent list of grants which can be applied for by a project leader range from £5000 to £2.5 million.

Question: How much funding do you get for each experiment ?

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