Human Transcribed
Melissa Wu:
I see the work of Seeding Labs as taking a step towards establishing a more sustainable global community. A sense where we can work together, a sense of prioritization of everyone's needs, and a movement away from trying to just advocate for yourself. Instead of advocate for your community, advocate for the wellbeing of everyone.
Chai Nussbaumer:
When it comes to scientific research, a few wealthy countries take the lion's share of funding, equipment, and training.
Micah Schweizer:
But what happens when access to these resources is democratized?
Chai Nussbaumer:
In this episode, we're introducing the work of a nonprofit, whose equipment donations program has already made a profound difference around the world.
Micah Schweizer:
We'll also share some impact stories from the institutions that have used their new tech to level up their local communities.
Chai Nussbaumer:
I'm Chai Nussbaumer.
Micah Schweizer:
And I'm Micah Schweizer. Welcome to season three of Balancing the Future from METTLER TOLEDO.
Chai Nussbaumer:
On this show, we delve into the world of science and technology and explore the solutions that are transforming our lives.
Melissa Wu:
So, I'm Melissa Wu. I'm the CEO of Seeding Labs. What we do is we try and support and strengthen the research and science ecosystem in developing countries, so that they can address the challenges that they encounter in their daily lives.
Micah Schweizer:
Now, one of the questions that I have more broadly is around access to lab equipment. There's a disparity globally between where the lab equipment is and where it isn't. What are the negative consequences that follow from having unequal access to lab equipment at research institutions?
Melissa Wu:
First, let me try and give you a scale of the disparity. I would say about 80% of resources for science, so the institutions, the funding, the equipment, are concentrated in just 10 countries of the world, where 80% of our global population lives outside of those countries.
So, you can see already that there's a huge disparity and that causes, first of all, a disparity in whose issues are being prioritized by science. Where the resources are is going to be where they're driving attention. The scientific communities even created jargon for that disparity. So, one example is neglected tropical diseases.
So, it sounds like maybe like rare diseases, ultra-rare diseases, there's a handful of people who suffer from those. Neglected tropical diseases, it's not the same kind of thing. One in eight people in the world suffer or will be impacted by neglected tropical diseases. That is three times the population of the US. That is a lot of people.
They call it neglected tropical diseases. Only a tiny pittance of the overall resources towards scientific research is applied towards understanding these diseases, which is why they're called neglected. That's one of the impacts. But scientific infrastructure is tied into so many aspects of our society.
There's the innovation side, there's the education side. You need strong scientific infrastructure for so many careers; doctors, nurses, engineers. The kinds of critical thinking that learning, training in the sciences gives you is important for your country's leadership. When you don't have adequate infrastructure, then you don't have adequate workforce.
And then you have the perception of people living in the under-resourced countries, where let me just give you one concrete example. We had a partner in Benin who had sent one of his students to a European country to get trained. And she had never had the opportunity to work with laboratory equipment.
And so when she got there, she didn't know how to run a centrifuge. And because she didn't know how to run a centrifuge, the people at that institution really looked down upon her. And it was such a confidence killing attitude to have that discrimination just because you're lacking opportunity. It had nothing to do with her qualifications of her intellect, her ability to be a scientist.
Micah Schweizer:
So, in all of what you're saying, it sounds like there are ripple effects across society from this disparity and even in individual lives.
Melissa Wu:
Absolutely. You couldn't say it any better.
Chai Nussbaumer:
So, can you give us a sense of how the process actually looks? Because there must be so many parts and pieces to getting these donations to the actual receivers.
Melissa Wu:
So, the first part of it that we do is one, finding the right institutions to work with. Unlike many organizations, we started off supporting individual labs, but now the way we work, it's largely supporting whole departments. And so when you're supporting a whole department, it's really building a relationship with the institution, a university, a research lab.
And so we have in our application process, it's an open application process, but we need to look at a couple different things, like the technical capacity of the particular department that we might be working with, the infrastructure, do they have adequate access to electricity? Do they have actual space?
And the institutional support, the administrative support, because this for many of the institutions that we work with is a project that needs to be budgeted and supported for on an institutional level. So, that's one part.
Another part that we do simultaneously is working with companies, with universities, hospitals, basically any organization in the US that has access to surplus laboratory equipment. It might be because you're a running research lab and you've closed down your laboratory or shifting your techniques. It could be equipment manufacturers and equipment distributors who have access to discontinued items, demo items, scratch and dents.
So, we work with, at this point, hundreds of companies and build partnerships with them to encourage them to donate equipment to us. Then there's just the very sexy logistics process of matching the equipment. We make all of our inventory available to each partner, so they can choose exactly the equipment and supplies that meet their specific needs. It's typically 100 to 200 items.
And then we work with them to do the import process to their country, which involves getting waivers, going through all the different regulations and then working with them, supporting the institution once they receive the equipment with any ad hoc opportunities we might find. And also evaluating the impact because we want to know that what we're doing is actually making a difference.
Chai Nussbaumer:
So, do the recipients own the instruments and devices outright?
Melissa Wu:
Yes. And that's a real critical part of how we work. We are not, as an organization, experts in what the priorities and what the science is that our partners are working on. We really see ourselves as a bridge to the resources, a connector. We're based in the US. What the heck do we know about every country in the world and what it is that is most important to them?
It's the people who are living in the right context, living in the communities, and we're just trying to make it easier for them. Lower the barriers and open up potential and capacity for them to pursue whatever they deem most important to pursue.
Chai Nussbaumer:
Yes. There's so many impact stories in the donation program, but can you tell us a little bit about the Malawi University of Science and Technology's public health program specifically?
Melissa Wu:
Let me give you a little bit of a history of the Malawi University of Science and Technology. So, they are the fourth public university to be established in Malawi and it's a very young institution. They opened, or they received their charter open in 2012. And when they opened, they had funding to build the university, but the building, for various reasons, wasn't built to support scientific labs.
So, they had to bring in additional funding to retrofit the buildings, leaving them with no resources for equipping the labs. This was really critical for them because they had a couple critical mandates for this university. One was to train students in new disciplines that Malawi was lacking, such as medical microbiology, immunology.
Another was the public health service. Malawi has an incredibly high burden of infectious diseases, like cervical cancer, HIV. And with a very low educated population, there isn't a lot of ongoing research or institutions even to support the care and therapy for these kinds of patients.
So, they applied to us for equipment to support their biology department, so that they could engage in both training these students and doing research that can serve the Malawian population. We accepted them into the instrumental access program, went through the process, sent them a shipment of laboratory equipment.
About a month after they opened the new labs doors, Malawi was one of three countries that was hit with cyclone Idai. And that ended up leaving most of Southern Malawi flooded with different kinds of water sources mixing with each other, debris getting into those water sources, and so cholera and other types of diseases became a major concern.
UNESTO came in wanting to surveil the water, figure out where the hotspots of a disease were, figure out where clean water was, and needed an implementing partner. They went around Malawi and when they came to MUST and saw that they had the capacity due to the lab equipment that we sent, they started working with MUST. And within a week, MUST was surveilling hundreds of sites.
Chai Nussbaumer:
That must have been very heartwarming to know that the timing was absolutely perfect.
Melissa Wu:
Yeah.
Micah Schweizer:
Hey, Chai.
Chai Nussbaumer:
Hey, Micah.
Micah Schweizer:
So, did you know that the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Colombia used Seeding Lab's support to open the country's first nanotechnology research department?
Chai Nussbaumer:
No.
Micah Schweizer:
Scientists used 450 pieces of lab equipment to develop sustainable energy storage solutions and help address the national energy crisis.
Chai Nussbaumer:
Wow. So, what kind of solutions did they come up with?
Micah Schweizer:
Well, they used treated waste fibers from coffee bag production to store and transport energy. It's pretty amazing.
Chai Nussbaumer:
Yeah, it is. And it makes me wonder about the wider sustainability implications of Seeding Labs' work.
Micah Schweizer:
If you have any stories of science and sustainability impact you'd like for us to explore, leave us a review or a comment to let us know.
Melissa Wu:
I was thinking about the concept of sustainability, and people throw around the word sustainability and they mean a lot of things. Similarly, we can think about sustainability for Seeding Labs in a lot of different ways. One, we are activating surplus equipment that might be slated to go into trash, might be slated to go into recycling, and there's certainly a level of environmental sustainability brought to our work by us extending the life of these instruments.
But at another level is the sustainability for the institutions that we support. By investing in the capacity, we have seen that institutions are able to grow. Among, I think 71 of the universities have reported back that having the equipment helps them bring in additional 17 million US in funding, because now they could demonstrate that they had the capacity to do the research that they were proposing. There's also an increase in funding from being able to attract more students.
When you can establish that you have a higher quality of training, then you'll bring in more students and that'll bring in more tuition, and that helps the sustainability. Beyond that, the reputation of the institution is a piece of their sustainability. Because how well you can connect your work into the community, how well you can work together with local government to help establish policy, provide services, that impacts your sustainability.
I see the work of Seeding Labs as taking a step towards establishing a more sustainable global community. A sense where we can work together, a sense of prioritization of everyone's needs, and a movement away from trying to just advocate for yourself. Instead of advocate for your community, advocate for the wellbeing of everyone and everything that lives on this earth, and we can lean into that.
Chai Nussbaumer:
We know you had the most shipments ever in Q1 of 2026, so congratulations for that.
Melissa Wu:
Thank you.
Chai Nussbaumer:
It was about nine shipments. How does Seeding Labs plan to scale up or continue this work?
Melissa Wu:
So, I think one thing to understand, and thank you for highlighting that we had the most shipments this quarter. We've in our history, actually have made 180 shipments over the past about 20 years. We're a team of seven people, so there's a lot of opportunity for us to increase our impact.
One is we're only capturing a small piece of the surplus equipment that exists in the world. I have my eye on the European Union, where we could potentially double the supply of equipment for our partners and that could double the number of institutions that we work with. We want to change or add new programming, serve different institutions, projects than we can currently serve. Which is limited by the kinds of equipment that we get and the kinds of equipment that can be donated. And is also limited by the structure of our programming and the scale at which we work.
We're a nonprofit. We don't have a lot of people. Our resourcing is just enough for us to run the instrumental access program very well. I think anyone who's been in a situation of under-resourcing knows it's very difficult to adapt to change when you're spending all of your existing resources on just keeping what you're doing going.
And so we want to be able to support new kinds of labs. We work in biology and chemistry. What about the engineering disciplines? What about material science? There's all kinds of different disciplines that we could be going into, but we have to develop new programming, develop new relationships to be able to do that, and that's hard to do with our limited staffing.
There's new kinds of resources. We've focused on laboratory equipment, but there's expertise. Connecting into the global scientific community is an important resource, and our community is still very isolated. Without funding to travel with institutions that are geographically far from each other, it's hard to connect in.
So, there's a lot that we want to do and there's a lot that we can do with additional resourcing.
Micah Schweizer:
And so very briefly, is there something you would like to say to potential donors or potential recipients? A message you'd like to share with them?
Melissa Wu:
Yes. Every listener can support our work. One of our biggest challenges is we're not well known enough. So, if you can share that Seeding Labs exists, help raise awareness of our organization in the first place, that helps us get in front of funders, that helps us get in front of potential equipment donors.
Many of you are at companies that do have philanthropic funds. Sometimes it's a grant program, sometimes they have employee sponsored grants, where you can say, "Hey, I know of this organization that is doing great work, and I would like our company to sponsor a grant for them." And it has to come from the employee.
So, you could be that champion that pushes your company into supporting this global work. As individuals, as I said, we're a very small organization. There's these challenges, but one of the opportunities is as a donor, we have a very small operating budget of about 1.5 million, and every dollar that someone donates to us is a big contribution to our work.
And you can get more news from us. You can go to our website. We do share a newsletter, share updates through that and you can learn about other ways that you might be able to help this effort grow.
Micah Schweizer:
Great. Thank you so much.
Chai Nussbaumer:
Thank you. It was such a pleasure to talk with you.
Melissa Wu:
Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for giving us the opportunity.
Chai Nussbaumer:
You've been listening to Balancing the Future from METTLER TOLEDO.
Micah Schweizer:
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Chai Nussbaumer:
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