For those unfamiliar with academic research budgets, my lab's NIH budget was recently renewed and totaled to 2 million. So in the same ballpark as this. 2 mill

For those unfamiliar with academic research budgets, my lab's NIH budget was recently renewed and totaled to 2 million. So in the same ballpark as this. 2 million is not that much. When you add up research assistantship labor costs, scientific equipment and consumable reagents/materials, it depletes faster than you'd like. And our lab is quite small (~5 students); large ivy league research labs often have a couple dozen people.