Friday, April 21, 2006

More precious than Gold???

I often will tell Jori that our lab regularly purchases items that are more costly than gold on a per weight basis. That may seem hard to believe as the current price of gold is $624.5 per ounce, but it is true. For instance, the other day I placed an order for 100 ug of stem-cell factor (let me qualify that I am not doing research on embryonic stem cells, but need this for the bone marrow stem cells I am working with). Just so you know, 100ug is one thousandth of a gram (there are roughly 22 grams in one ounce). If this were gold, the price would work out to be about 2.2 cents. As it was, this item cost a mere $750. Some quick math reveals that this item is about 34,000 times more expensive than gold. Unfortunately, my item doesn't retain its value like gold does. With gold, one could conceivably purchase an ounce at $624.5 and then sell it a day later at the same price give or take a dollar or two. Again, I wasn't so fortunate. You see, I made a colossal blunder. I purchased the wrong $750 stem-cell factor, and in fact needed a different $750 stem-cell factor (I work with mice not humans and I ordered the human stem-cell factor--yup, pretty dumb mistake). The moment I realized this I was sick to my stomach and overcome with guilt for miss-spending valuable lab dollars in such an idiotic way. Ah, but maybe I could return the stem-cell factor you say? There was that hope inside me as well. Somewhat fortunately they allowed a return of the product, but at a 25% restocking fee. The kicker was that I still needed the mouse version of stem-cell factor that I meant to order in the first place. So, with the additional 25% restocking fee, in the end the mouse stem-cell factor that I need for an experiment will cost 42,500 times more money than its equivalent weight in gold.
Psalm 119:75 says "The law from your mouth is more precious to me than thousands of pieces of silver and gold". Maybe if I were writing a modern day Bible like "The Message" that was geared toward scientists I would have to reword this to read "more precious to me than a kilogram of stem-cell factor." Just in case you are curious as to how much that would equate to, it would be 7.5 billion dollars. Yikes!

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