Thank you for sharing the story of your facility with us. I am very sorry
to hear about how your facility was treated and the sad ending. I have been
a facility director for 15 years, and a Principal Investigator for just as
long. I understand the different points of view.
I like to begin by saying that Principal Investigators are born skeptics,
they have to be. They do not grant respect to their peers easily, nor any
administrator, not just facilities. The same goes for administrators. Not
being respected by PI and Administrators is occupational hazzard in
science, what you want to accomplish is to have the funds and the
opportunity to do what you believe in, be it good science, or to help
others. I must hasten to add that I have seen many facility operators
highly respected by PI's by just doing a great job, by picking a service
that allows that, and maintaining a system that maintains the excellence.
Some facilities are inherently difficult to be money makers. I know there
are many ABRFers more experienced than I, and I would appreciate hearing
their opinions. I would like to, respectfully, share some experience that
has been particularly helpful to me. (1) Be able to help PI's write the
technical sections, or more, of their grants, not just your facility
description, and land those grants. If you are why the grants and overheads
come in, you are indispensible. You too can be a co-investigator. (2) Be
able to tell the PI's what experiments need to be done, not waiting for
them to suggest the experiment. To do this, you need to go to seminars and
to their group meetings. (3) Provide accurate expectations. PI's get really
upset when rosy predictions fade, even though they are accustomed to well
planned experiments failing. My foremost priority is quality control so
that my operators know that they will not be accused of inferior
performance. (4) Chargeback the right amount and balance your books.
Administrators respect those who can make a honest dollar. (5) Do not take
on any facility that is going to lose money, that's not the job of a
facility, such science should be done amongst collaborators with RO1's.
Administrators respect those who do successful business. I just heard today
that in many industries, it is not your fault if you do not take on a
project, but it is if you take on it and fail. (6) Be cross-trained,
maintain multiple technologies under one roof, because technologies comes
and go. Being a large enough facility is what provides enough people to do
the networking. Being large enough is essential to allow you to let go of
those services that are becoming impractical. (7) Maintain your own
grant-funded projects if you can. This is not to provide security, but to
enhance scientific interactions and awareness, and to stimulate ideas.
Increasingly, the demands on my facility has not been just the technical
services, but scientific judgement. What we facilitate has changed.
I take great pride and satisfaction in being a facility operator and be a
member of ABRF. I believe the communication of one's dedication is what
earns respect from PI's and administrators. It is just as hard to be a PI
as to be a facility operator. Though many may disagree, from what I have
seen, it is not much easier to be an administrator.
Best regards!
Tony
At 10:51 AM 5/29/98 -0400, jeni lauer wrote:
>Hello all,
>
>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
>
>
>
************************************
Dr. Anthony T. Yeung, Ph.D.
Director, Fannie E. Rippel Biotechnology Facility
Member, Institute for Cancer Research
Fox Chase Cancer Center
7701 Burholme Ave. Philadelphia, PA 19111
Voice: 215-728-2488
FAX: 215-728-3647
email: AT_Yeung@FCCC.edu
http://www.fccc.edu/research/labs/yeung/
************************************