Recycled lab equipment scheme opens new training window in Africa

Eleven years ago, as a Fulbright scholar, Nina Dudnik did a year-long research stint at the Africa Rice Centre in Côte d’Ivoire, where her colleagues meticulously rinsed out disposable items, such as pipette tips, so they could re-use them. Soon after, when she went to graduate school at Harvard University, United States, she saw that serviceable equipment and laboratory equipment were routinely thrown out whenever laboratories upgraded their inventories.

Along with a small band of fellow students who had also worked in resource-poor laboratories, Dudnik kept her eyes peeled for discarded equipment such as chromatographs, microscopes, centrifuges and glassware. They soon sent their first shipments to Guatemala and Paraguay.

When Dudnik graduated with a PhD in molecular biology, she received a fellowship from a non-profit organisation (NGO), Echoing Green, to set up Seeding Labs as an NGO, and opted to become a full-time social entrepreneur instead of pursuing a career at the bench.

In 2008, she formally launched Seeding Labs in Boston, using surplus laboratory equipment in the United States, from both industry and academia, to enable world-class science in the developing world.

The organisation also helps to forge links between young scientists in those countries — its current focus is Sub-Saharan Africa — and researchers in Boston, a hub for the life sciences.

Laboratories in the developing world often lack the sophisticated equipment of their western counterparts. “But first-rate scientific talent is everywhere,” says Dudnik, who has made it her mission to level the playing field for talented individuals who lack access to research tools.

Other organisations already send recycled equipment to hospitals in developing countries — the Sustainable Sciences Institute, also in the United States, for example, caters for public health institutes. And there are individual initiatives to send equipment to chemistry and biology laboratories.

“Many individual scientists have collaborators or acquaintances in the developing world and will use their own surplus equipment to help equip these labs,” says Dudnik. “But ours is probably the most organised large-scale programme to address lab equipment needs.”

Seeding Labs receives wish lists from science departments abroad. Student volunteers at US universities inventory, test, pack and ship the items, keeping costs low.

Recipients pay a fraction of the equipment’s cost to offset the logistical expenses — although Seeding Labs refuses to say how much — and, as buyers, they assume responsibility for setting up and maintaining the equipment.

Recipients are also given some guidance on the set-up, says David Qualter, operations manager at Seeding Labs. “If we don’t know the answer to a question, we may know someone who does. We also connect recipients to equipment manufacturers so they can follow up directly at some point if the need arises,” he adds.

This mode of operation is very different from the dump-and-go model of global aid, says Martin Mwangi, a postdoctoral associate at Harvard University who is on the Seeding Labs board of directors.

But using wish lists has its own limitations, he concedes. For example, researchers sometimes ask for obsolete items because that is all they are familiar with.

To upgrade expectations and expose researchers in developing countries to modern equipment and techniques, Seeding Labs joined forces with the pharmaceutical giant Novartis to create a summer fellowship programme for scientists from Sub-Saharan Africa. The scheme was launched last year and runs alongside the equipment programme.

Visiting fellows are given individual mentors and gain exposure to current tools and techniques, helping them tackle research problems that are important to their communities back home.