double83

I guess I should just come clean. I'm infatuated with the idea of being a modern day Darwin/Indiana Jones. My degrees are in Zoology and Computational Biology, but I have little desire to do traditional research for the rest of my life. I am trying to find out if there is a need for someone to organize research expeditions for sample collection in fields such as environmental genomics, epidemiology, drug discovery (natural compound libraries), etc. I know Craig Venter just finished his Global Ocean Sampling Expedition and, from what I can tell, it was a huge success. Any thoughts?

Do you have experience in this area? Are there companies that specialize in setting up expeditions?

I am curious to know how scientists/organizations go about organizing a research expedition in order to collect environmental samples. ex: samples for natural compound libraries or metagenomics. Specifically, I am interested to know if it is done in house, outsourced, and how difficult it is.