Now that everybody is sick and tired of this issue, I want to add my $0.02
worth. I am not a voting member of the ABRF, so my opinion doesn't really matter
to anybody, but I've had some experiences I think people might want to hear.
The short story is that core facilities do not necessarily get the respect they
deserve. The ABRF has been a woderful tool to gain this respect, but the job is
not finished. Researchers need to learn that facility is not a four letter word.
The long story is that my lab was a part of a combination research lab and core
facility that performed peptide synthesis, protein sequencing, and eventually
mass spec. analysis. Our lab was given virtually no support from our institution
(beyond a start-up package for the basic equipment, and one technician). We
charged users a minimal fee covering a fraction of reagents without covering
service contracts, extra labor, or extra charges for resynthesizing difficult
peptides. The reason we ran our facility in this manner was that nobody at our
institution saw the benefit of what we did, and thus saw no reason to support it
financially. After 5-6 years of running the facility this way (and wasting our
research money on repairs, service contracts, etc., that went out the door with
our peptides), our fearless leader put his foot down and demanded money. The
institution said they would give us money for 1-2 years, but we had that amount
of time to become a self-sustaining facility, including recovering the costs of
instrumentation. We spent months coming up new fees for our services only to
find that the users couldn't afford to pay them (for example a batch of 25
peptides that used to cost around $500, now cost them $4,000-$5,000). The
sticker-shock scared most of them away.
We soon came to realize what we had suspected all along, that nobody at that
institution (administrators or researchers) had any respect for the services
that we were offering. We knew the facility's days were numbered, and this along
with a host of other issues, led to our fearless leader taking a position at a
new institution.
I look back on my days as a part of a core facility as some of my most
frustrating ones in science. I have a tremendous amount of respect for facility
members and think the ABRF should keep the "F" and wear it with pride. I think
the name ABRF implies the technology available in the various facilities
throughout the world, without pigeon-holing the group.
ABRF, keep up the great work!
Jeni
Janelle Lauer
Florida Atlantic University
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
777 Glades Road
Boca Raton, FL 33431
jlauer@fau.edu
Phone: (561) 297-2094
FAX: (561) 297-2759