Research Expeditions?

[double83]

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.

[ecoli]

It depends how far your going. If your doing local research, you might not even need university/ lab permission or money to collect samples. If you're going to Antarctica, you need to go through government channels.

[double83]

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

[Skye]

Most sample collection is done by universities or by government research organisations. Commercial organisations, such as pharmaceuticals, normally buy rights to libraries (or go into agreements for their use).

[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?

[Skye]

Indiana Jones is a fictional character. Darwin had to pay his way. They aren't good career models.

 

The organisation side of things would would be admin work. Avoid.

 

You may be best off getting qualifications in areas not specifically science related but necessary to expeditions, such as driving a ship, which most researchers don't have.

[CharonY]

Ahem, Craig Venter's journeys were anything but a success. At least from the viewpoint of environmental (micro-) biologists. Most thing that the produced a data dump hardly useful for anything.

There are however similar approaches that were more successful (and took more care during the sampling procedure). How to do that? Fairly simple. Just go and take samples, record all relevant data of the sampling point, think about proper storage procedures, got to the lab and analyze it. This is, actually traditional research in the biological sense. The only tricky thing as always is funding. But the procedure is absolutely the same as with other research, write a grant, apply for travel money etc.

If you are not as rich as Venter and want to apply for the money for an own research ship, you are outta luck, though. Few companies (as stated above) would actually finance a research expedition, unless you happen to have longer (research) bonds with them and have a very specific proposal. Just going out and taking samples doesn't give you any grants. Regardless from which sources.

[Rev Blair]

You might try getting some field experience by working with other, more established scientists. I know the guys who work in Canada's north often take on people to build skills etc. It won't all be science though...there's a lot of cooking and back-breaking labour involved, and they generally use students who will work for little or no money.