Automation doesnt do it right every time... it does it the same every time.

A highly trained individual getting freed? more likely to get fired instead when the robot is bought.

If you dont have starter jobs then where do people start? Moving plates and liquid handling is tedious but its what I did for a year during my first post doc.

I agree however that automation CAN be a good thing but I've seen too many robots just gathering dust - ESPECIALLY in Universities.

"I thought the most wasteful thing ever purchased was called MedImmune ?"

Not the first to point this out and probably not the last. Brennan should be made to pay back the cost to investors out of his pension fund.

I thought the most wasteful thing ever purchased was called MedImmune ?

you're missing the point - HTS as an approach is a complete waste and has totally failed in drug discovery, it's not the way of doing it that's wasteful or not.

The folks including lab automation in this post are wrong and dont seem to understand the real value of this equipment. First off lab automation performs an assay the same way every time no matter who is runing it. This should give you better data quality and most importantly your best shot at comparable data. The other thing it does is frees highly trained individual from spending their days moving liquid and plates around. Did any of us who work in science go to school to spend our lives pipetting and moving plates from place to place? Presumably now people are free to spend time with assay development and data analysis and maybe focusing on what exactly useful actionable data is.

That said I agree generating a whole mountain of data that is never used is indeed a waste of time and $$$. This is not the fault of the lab automation equipment though.

most lab robotics everywhere I've ever worked.

It is almost always cheaper and better to hire a real person on $40k than spend $200k on a robot. Real people can do other things and can get fired + you give someone a start in a job + you dont give your money to those idiots at PE / Hamilton / Tecan etc...

I'm not sure which was more wasteful- the "smoking gazebo" installed a few years ago (pre-Siemens acquisition of Dade) on the side of the R&D building, put there to wean the nicotene addicts away from the front entrance (but is very seldom used), or the more recent "bus stop bench" (heavy painted metal, set permanently in concrete) that is now in front of that same entrance. Why wasteful? Closest bus stop is at least a mile away outside the Glasgow complex, the bench faces an employee parking lot. Guess where some people smoke now......

ion torrent.

The severance package Clown Shoes received when he was Pfired. I would like to have watched him beg for job.

any number of the useless robots and other pointless high throughput nonsense currently buzzing around our (Novartis) labs in cambridge. How many bucks? countless millions. How many clinical candidates added to the pipeline since 2005? Zero, zilch, a big fat nothing. NIBR, where good ideas go to die. But then again, HTS was never meant to be a platform for drug discovery. It was only sold that way to ensure technical and scientific also-rans could justify career progression based on false measures of productivity. No one had a more efficient and well oiled HTS set-up than the mighty Pfizer. And look where it got them. And another thing, our kettle doesnt work properly and it cost $23.

I know a SVP that purchased a "personal massager" as a company expense

Genzyme research

none of you can beat my purchase of Pharmacia when I was CEO at PFE
Hank McKinnell

Take your choice: Siemens buying Bayer diagnostics or Bayer buying Technicon from Cooper. Either way it's the same place in Tarrytown NY.

Years ago at a NJ based company, a marketing director bought a gown using company money for the National Sales Meeting. Her excuse? The men use company money to rent their tuxes. Hmmmm
Same company - marketing manager (mid management) takes his whole family for a trip to NYC using a company car driven by a chauffeur.

Simply put, they are an example of "Stockholm Syndrome".

they are dumb so of course

Keep this in mind....would any of you loyal and productive employees currently at Dako have remained through the turbulent times only to see your loyalty, sincerity, and productivity sacrificed today for the furtherment of drunken escapades by transient douchebags?

How about two 24" LCD linked together as PC monitor. it's quite standard at my work place. By the way, I'm working at CDC field office.

The day of an RIF, some manager came down to an admin to request a new 24 inch flat screen monitor so he could look at large spreadsheets better.... Not the most wasteful, but pretty egregious timing.

that girl!

there could be an entire thread dedicated to meeting metrics to get bonuses! most Pharma companies pipelines are stuffed full of rubbish because of bonus culture.

Production of a $200.000 GMP batch of an inhaled corticosteroid API when the management at Pfe SW knew it was not going in to the clinic, just to meet delivery targets for bonus.

It was the same at Pfe when I was there.
It's probably a world wide thing when a company gets too big...not just pharma.

What about the monthly consumables budget? At one stage in AZ, our team had an £8K monthly budget. Towards the end of each month, the Team Leader would come round telling us to spend up to the limit – whether we needed any consumables or not – because if we didn’t spend it the budget would be reduced in the future. I assume this was going on in every team throughout the company. What a monumental waste of money – why weren’t we just allowed to buy what we actually needed (up to a sensible ceiling)? Company run by bean counters I guess!

And of course, while we were buying stuff we didn’t need we were being told that we couldn’t buy small pieces of equipment (capital items) that would have actually improved the workflow.

Bio-Rad's purchase of Ciphergen!

Lars H hired big spenders like himself with no clue as to what the industry is all about!

Especially that effeminate douchebag CEO Lars H. Always expostulating himself as some tough guy, but hides behind some dyke whenever the BOD confronts him. What a pussy.

Silly or just wasteful? Both criteria are satisfied by exorbitant expenses incurred by Dako Sr. Mgt. all the while admonishing those bringing in the $ to tighten their belts. This Mgt. team is not productive, but is very productive in amassing self indulgent overhead.

In no particular order: Proteoptics for Proteon, Biotest, Diamed, Ciphergen/SELDI, Virtek, MJ Research. Biorad has a very poor company acquisition record. Not many $ were paid, as is the Biorad way, but many $ still wasted.
Jury is still out on Quantalife.

Siemens sending all its staff on a 3 day courses on how to charm customer, self discovery amateur psychology, consultants wallet fattening bollocks waste of money. Management self indulgence.

Fact - its not the staff's personal skills losing the customers. Its crap products, crap prices, great competitors. Spend the goddamn money on that!!!!!!!!!!

Bayer and Dade!

And probably cocaine for himself

A VP at BD would go on a business trip to Brazil the third week of Dec every year to buy his wife jewelry for Christmas.

InCell 2000

Exubera, A.K.A. the insulin bong. The failed bet that diabetics might be afraid of needles. Needles are nothing, good glycemic control is everything. The pump rules.

Another manager to an already stuffed facility....

Brea Headquarters, Beckman :-)

P-CAC

How about including Danaher purchase of Beckman Coulter do you think they have any regrets?

How about Elliott Sigal and his minions using the Bristol-Myers corporate jet to fly to Paris for a meeting. Many of these people were bench scientists and not executives.

I purchased a whole hotel for a week just for my wife and I on the company card. Needed the tax write off :)

A 400+ per night hotel room for no reason at all!!
I made Sunday reservations for myself and the other person getting the booth ready for a conference in Boston. . I had reservation for this VP and the rest of the management team to come in on Monday. Last min. he is all pissed that I didn’t have one for him on Sunday night. . He had no meeting schedule no reason what so ever to be there on Sunday he was in 2 hr. driving range of the meeting. Feeling so self-important. He needed to come for and take his wife out in Boston for the evening. He made us cancel his Monday night conference rate reservation for a $400.00/ night reservation. Ahh the joy of start-ups!

eBioscience!

Jonathan Rothberg'slutty boat.

agree with you 100%
This lab swag is revolting

I think it was hybridon, in Cambridge MA, they bought a "show" building right on memorial drive, spent 2 years stripping hte building down to the steel and rebuilding it, 2,000 dollar custom leather conf chairs, etc
Soon after the building is finished, Hybridon has a restructuring...those 2,000 chairs picked up for a song

and lets not forget the palace built by Malcom Gefter for Praecis in Waltham MA; Praecis got its first and only drug approved by the FDA with a black box warning, hired a sales force, and in the first year they reported sales to the astonishing amount of 1,000,000.00 US$

Except Pharmingen....

Siemens DX UK on Frimley, wayyyy too expensive, no parking, miserable souless corporate zombie farm of a place. But then it was handy when the merge with Healthcare happened... hmm I wonder if that was planned all along? LOL!!!!

Bayer diagnostics still tops the list at almost $6 billion plus the havoc caused whilst in charge probably costing more than $15 billion in total....wow what a great company errrr NOT

Hahahahahahahahha! ... no really this killed me, so true. Bayer have just dragged th party down. Siemens should have just bought DPC and Dade, integrated them directly into healthcare from the start, invested in developing their fresher systems and built up gradually.