In the summer of 2004, evolutionary biologist Aneil Agrawal packed up and moved from his postdoc at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver to start his own lab at the University of Toronto. Arriving to find a big, empty laboratory, he set to work buying equipment and installing incubators for his fruit flies. He didn't consider the other organisms he'd need in his lab: people. Concerned about his limited startup funds, he didn't hire a full-time technician. By October, when the university had its annual grad student recruitment, he was still setting up, so he discouraged potential students from applying to join his lab.
"That was stupid," Agrawal says, as those students wouldn't have started until the following academic year. Agrawal admits that his research suffered as a result. "One of the fallouts was I ended up doing a lot of busy work, trying to set up little experiments, ...
