Advanced instrument the key to productivity?

Last week is the first time I was introduced to FlashGel. In case you didn't know, FlashGel is a gel electrophoresis set that is extremely fast and EtBr free. It has been out for awhile now but I didn't notice it until the sales representative gave me a brochure. My first reaction is "Hey, I saw this on a blog yesterday. They are teaching school kids in US how to use it."

Imagine if I don't have to prepare agarose gel (~30 min), run DNA for an hour, strain and destrain gel (~20 min) and capture gel photo using a imager (~10 min). I could save 2 hour each day assuming I only need to run a gel per day. While it's true that the lastest instrument can really speed things up, we usually don't buy them due to pratical use. My colleague recently visited a renowned research institute and was shocked to find that some facilities are under-utilized.

After that, I had a conversion with my other colleague discussing the productivity in our lab compared to the labs in well-established institutes. While students here have to do everything from A-Z, over there technicians are employed to perform basic tasks such as filling the tips, running PCR and running gel. That explains how a thesis is completed in a short time. But as a student, I would rather do all the work myself.

Not every problem can be solved with the current technology. Given a situation like this: you need to extract DNA from 4000 samples, run 96 well plate PCR and do fragment analysis. Even with 96 well tissue lyser, you need to perform DNA extraction for 40 times! Plus, you must have a really sharp memory and make no mistake. The best solution in this case is still REDUCE SAMPLES!