Article

Problem: Molecular biology relies on the ability to precisely target and amplify nucleic acids, and next-generation sequencing (NGS) platforms and cloning reactions benefit from precise size selection and analytical characterization of samples. For decades, researchers have used electrophoresis with agarose gels for both size selection and fragment-length distribution assessment of DNA samples for downstream assays.

Problem: Researchers and scientists generate and collect vast amounts of data in their work, whether they are running experiments in the lab or surveying and interviewing people on the street. Researchers typically don’t deal with their research outputs until towards the end of the research cycle, when poor organization and data management can be difficult to manage and address, but causes the most problems. Poor data management results in experiments that are harder to replicate and findings that may be called into question. Papers can be retracted, careers impacted and ultimately science can suffer. When researchers move on they may pass their work to others in their research group, where poor data management results in the group inheriting indecipherable written notes they cannot use.

If you find yourself listening to co-workers complain at work, you’re not alone. Jane, a registered nurse, often eats her lunch sitting on a curb in the parking lot next to the clinic where she works. She’s looking for just a few minutes of peace and quiet from the chaos and complaints that echo off the walls in the employee break room where people wolf down their meal amid a chorus of gripes about work and working conditions.

It doesn’t matter whether you work on an assembly line or in a maze of cubicles – every organization has a culture defined by its rhythm and harmony, much like music. In the day-to-day grind at work, we don’t give much thought to our office culture, but David King, an associate professor of management at Iowa State University’s College of Business, says we should.

Much has been written about the business benefits of outsourcing “noncore” activities, and this approach is now well-established in most chemical, pharmaceutical, and biotech companies. By concentrating on core areas and working with specialists for other tasks, costs are better managed, efficiency is boosted, and ROI (return on investment) is increased.

Human behavior is difficult to figure out. For example, take the way we all tend to treat “priorities.” We all have them, and we instinctively know that some of them are much more important than others. Such as our families. The people we love. That novel we’d like to write. That project we’d like to tackle that could lead to a cure for cancer.













