agreed entirely. labor costs are nearly always discounted in the life sciences from my experience. there's two origins of this phenomena. the first is that peo

agreed entirely. labor costs are nearly always discounted in the life sciences from my experience. there's two origins of this phenomena. the first is that people are accustomed to having graduate students, or worse, being graduate students in the sciences. people abuse their time and treat it as though it is valueless, and that habit persists in them when they become leaders. then, the habit percolates downward to people who were never graduate students. viola, you now have an entire group of people with no conception of opportunity cost or labor costs. the second origin is that scientists who are managers typically would rather have something "just work" (read: be jerry rigged and not work very well) than have to purchase a solution. this is another holdover from the graduate student days. buying solutions is expensive, and you still need to spend time to set it up and potentially troubleshoot. getting someone to make a one-time solution that is a totally incomprehensible mess is preferable if it is cheaper. besides, the manager scientist doesn't have to deal with the external time cost to their staff. the sad thing is that all of these people involved are very smart and far-too-hard working. these are great traits to have. but they do not always result in the best solution. working hard is not always worth the economic cost to the group... nor is developing a one-shot ingenious solution. terrifyingly, few lab managers or leaders outside of big pharma seem to understand these problems.