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Table of Molecular Biology Services Product Tables Courtesy of Invitrogen Many of today's brightest minds find themselves competing with their peers for limited resources in crowded labs. Ingenious experiments may end up on the back burner because another researcher has already booked the instrument through the end of the month or the instrument is awaiting repairs. Increasingly, scientists have come to rely on the convenience of prepared products and contract services.1 It began gradually with the commercial availability of items such as premade buffers, precast gels, and competent cells. These products not only provided significant time savings and consistency between experiments, but also decreased the need to train new workers for routine tasks. Before anyone had a chance to object, the "just add water" concept was firmly in place and expanded to encompass kits and entire protocols. Companies that offer custom services have become so adept at performing certain specialized functions such as gene sequencing or RFLP analysis that it is certainly less time consuming and may actually be more cost effective to allot these duties to outside laboratories. However, the thought of allocating a significant portion of one's research to a contractor tends to fly in the face of tradition. Scientists like to watch over their experiments. They also tend to divide tasks among colleagues and draw the combined expertise of scientists from a range of specialties through multidisciplinary efforts. This trend has enhanced the scope of biological research by bringing together professionals such as chemists, physicists, anatomists, and molecular biologists. Some scientists argue strenuously against outsourcing or succumbing to the temptations of kits and prefab reagents. They believe that scientists are forged in the flames of Bunsen burners and baptized in formaldehyde spills and that mundane lab tasks serve as a rite of passage for graduate students who must pay their dues. However, wouldn't this time be better spent forming concepts and developing new ideas? Is science supposed to be "quick" and "easy"? From our school days we are imbued with the notion that good, rigorous science is based upon observations. It's often the minute variations that seem to defy explanation that end up launching a whole new exploratory program. If science is indeed to be found in the details, what happens when you begin removing the scientist from the laboratory or, possibly, the laboratory from the scientist? In some ways, high-quality contributions to science may actually be facilitated by the recent surge in molecular biology services. For instance, what about the researcher who is professionally isolated--perhaps a young maverick big on ideas and short on funding? Without access to expensive equipment and the influence necessary to share another's time and resources, this person can rely on the services provided by private contractors and contribute to the field. Also, the use of unbiased custom service providers reduces the temptation, conscious or subconscious, to alter data. Another advantage of using molecular biology services is that it allows the testing of new ideas without interrupting the normal activities of the laboratory. Investigators that are willing to function outside their established expertise are critical to driving research forward. Rather than reconfiguring programs and instituting new protocols and unfamiliar techniques, molecular biology services allow promising hypotheses to be tested without detracting from the primary focus of the lab. Courtesy of Genome Systems Inc. According to Kurt Schaefer, a customer service representative for Genome Systems, high-throughput capability is one of the advantages of hiring a private contractor. One example is the company's transgenic mouse program. Genome Systems can produce a knockout mouse within one year, from the beginning of consultation and review of vectors to the final weaning of the chimeras. 95 percent of its EF clones produce chimeras, and 85 percent of the chimeras make it into the germline. By comparison, Schaefer estimates that the average time it takes for a postdoc to produce similar results is two years. No wonder it takes many grad students over six years to complete their doctoral programs. Nancy Groot of Invitrogen believes that her company's gene expression services save researchers money by assuming the cost of materials and manpower required for using baculovirus and Pichia expression systems. She reasons that the expense of setting up a lab for gene expression, including the cost of training new researchers to perform unfamiliar tasks, uses up valuable resources. Invitrogen has the necessary equipment for gene expression studies, and its team of scientists is very well versed in the necessary protocols, logging untold hours in performing these experiments. An added benefit in using Invitrogen Custom Services, as Groot points out, is its exclusive licensing agreement with Research Corporation Technologies (RCT) for use of the Pichia expression system. This gives Invitrogen the legal authority to perform Pichia protein expression on behalf of nonlicensed clients, and investigators have the opportunity to try the Pichia expression system for their research without purchasing a license. Daniel DiSepio, a drug discovery scientist at Allergan, has contracted Invitrogen to work with baculovirus expression systems for his laboratory's drug research program. The benefits, he explains, are twofold. First, it's cost effective. Without a service like Invitrogen's, Allergan would have had to establish a dedicated facility with a permanent staff just to culture these viruses. Second, DiSepio was able to get his laboratory up and running right away. "Baculovirus can be tricky to work with," says Disepio. "You learn as you go." However, using Invitrogen's experienced staff eliminates the typical learning curve. The only drawback to using contractors, he says, is the turnaround time. "You have to wait in line. If your virus doesn't work, you get thrown back in the queue." In contrast, with experiments performed in your own lab, you can prioritize tasks and even pull the occasional all-nighter to get things done. Courtesy of Grant Meisenholder Out of Sight, Out of Mind? "I'd like to use custom services, but I need to be involved," you say. You're not alone. As some researchers' livelihood is partitioned and farmed out, they feel a need to become reconnected to the work. Some companies invite scientists to participate as visiting scholars, which not only assures them that experiments are being carried out properly, but also teaches them new techniques and refines their skills under expert guidance. However, for a variety of reasons including liability and confidentiality concerns, not every company is willing or able to allow scientists to visit their experiments. One of the companies that has made client collaboration an important part of its services is Commonwealth Biotechnologies Inc., located in Richmond, Va. Its research activities include the strategic design and development of special projects for industry and academic facilities. Heath Knight, a scientist at CBI, describes her company's focus on custom services as unusual in biotech. Faced with requests for new enzyme assays or disease tests, the researchers at CBI find themselves modifying new technologies to meet unintended applications. Although some researchers prefer to remain connected to their work, others are just as happy to leave it to the professionals. Pushed to the limit by NIH grant deadlines and early product releases, many researchers find custom service contractors a welcome relief from the usual strain of keeping a laboratory up and running. According to Xin Li, product manager at Genemed Synthesis, most customers are primarily interested in the end product and are less concerned with how it's produced. Comparing his company's mutagenesis services to those performed in academic labs, Li says that his facility can make 10 mutants in one week. It would take a grad student at least a month to achieve the same feat. If you want high throughput with a minimum of effort, contract services are the way to go. Core Facilities Increasingly, academic departments are serving industry in addition to assisting their academic colleagues. This is nothing new. Universities have always cooperated with business, whether in pharmaceutical development, aerospace, computer science, or industrial chemicals. Apart from the dubious profit status of these partnerships, one of the primary controversies surrounding the Human Genome Project has been what certain critics describe as the indentured servitude to which some graduate students have been subjected. Instead of developing their own research, in rare instances students have been forced to work as virtual production line laborers, churning out experiments in exchange for grades or recommendations. But the collaboration of industry and academia does have its finer points. The combined financial backing from industry and government gives investigators access to the best instrumentation. All controversy aside, though, the question remains whether academic facilities provide services comparable to private industry's. According to a recent study of DNA core facilities conducted by the Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities (ABRF), the competence of these laboratories in synthesizing DNA was very high. They had an average coupling efficiency of greater than 98 percent for approximately 85 percent of the syntheses.2 Marcia Jones, a research specialist at the Medical University of South Carolina's DNA Sequencing Facility, emphasizes the cost effectiveness as well as the convenience of using core facilities. "Our lab is a lot cheaper [than privately run labs], and we guarantee a 24-hour turnaround." Jones attributes the success of her program to university support, which makes her institution attractive to scholars. Researchers can simply drop off their samples, and the next day they have a result. Though academics may once have judged the quality of an institution by the number of volumes in its library, the yardstick for today's institutions may become the accessibility to core research facilities. Science on Tap What if you have the facilities and the instrumentation but lack the manpower? For certain applications the most cost-effective solution might be a temporary employee. The expansion of the temporary labor market has been one of the most significant changes in American work habits in the last 20 years. Though this practice was once disparaged by social reformers, the temporary worker has become a vital resource in a rapidly growing economy.3 Yoh Scientific is at the forefront of this trend. With 20,000 biologists in its system, Yoh can fill vacancies in a variety of specialties, including molecular biology, in as little as 24 hours. Yoh recruits extensively at universities, targeting the best up-and-coming science professionals. In fact, according to Harvey Yau, account manager for Yoh Scientific, 85 percent of the temporary science jobs filled by Yoh become permanent full-time positions. Yoh Scientific also offers vendor-on-premises services, in which it consolidates the entire temporary work force of a particular company, essentially creating an ad hoc human resources department. For laboratory directors seeking new talent, temporary staffing agencies can provide immediate assistance with a minimum of hassle. One of the ironies of achieving an advanced degree is that when it comes to finding a job, many employers place a premium on work experience rather than education. After years of graduate and postgraduate training, emphasis on paid work experience can be a bitter pill to swallow. Kelly Scientific Resources(r) has responded to this curious state of affairs by offering a series of industry-specific, Web-based courses through its online Science Learning Center. This online virtual campus provides certification coursework in areas such as research and development, quality assurance, good management practices, statistical analysis, and even advanced coursework in HPLC. Final Frontier Specialized services for molecular biology are more than a simple convenience for academics or lab technicians. As contractors become all-encompassing, no doubt they will become more aggressive in range and depth of services. In terms of sophistication, these furtive steps might be compared to the colossal innocence of ENIAC or the fumbling pace of space exploration. The molecular biology services of today are merely a presage of what is to come. 1. M.E. Watanabe, "Research-for-hire companies proliferate," The Scientist, 9[24]:1,3-4, Dec. 11, 1995. 2. R.T. Pon, et al., "Multi-facility survey of oligonucleotide synthesis and an examination of the performance of unpurified primers in automated DNA sequencing," BioTechniques, 21:680-5, 1996. 3. R. Finn, "As temporary lab employment increases, critics decry trend," The Scientist, 11[8]:12-3, April 14, 1997. Brent Johnson can be contacted at bjohnson@the-scientist.com.

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