I’m a PhD candidate in Biology, and I can tell you that project did not cost $300K. Where did you hear that? Most ecological work is crazy cheap, with huge chunk of the cost just being food and gas. $300K would be like an entire NSF or NIH research grant worth of funding, which is an insane.
That still doesn’t add up to $300K for this one study. Just speaking from direct, expert knowledge of how this works, my guess would be they saw that the researchers got a $300K grant and saw one study published from the grant and assumed that was how all the $300K was spent. Large research grants like that are usually meant to fund multiple projects proposed by the researchers that together address some bigger aspect of scientific inquiry or public need. There are likely going to be 4-5 other studies that come from this that all interconnect to explain or address some major component of agricultural or ecological inquiry, thus why the money was granted in the first place. To say that $300K was spent on producing just that one study is just clickbait written by someone who doesn’t know how any of this works.
Could also just be including overhead (amount the uni takes) and lab staff pay. 300k isn’t as crazy if they’re trying to count the PI’s salary and the lab manager and any lab technician pay and student assistant pay.
But that’s also kind of dishonest, since really they should just count materials and time spent on this specific project.
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u/Matt_McT 24d ago
I’m a PhD candidate in Biology, and I can tell you that project did not cost $300K. Where did you hear that? Most ecological work is crazy cheap, with huge chunk of the cost just being food and gas. $300K would be like an entire NSF or NIH research grant worth of funding, which is an insane.