A ME patient asked me a curious question today. She wanted to know how I spent 300K of research funding provided to me by BMBF for 3 years. She was curious as 300K is a lot of money. I realized that the public needs to learn the nuances of the funding system and scientific research. I told her that 300K in research funding in Germany means 100K per year. Out of this 100K per year fund, 20K goes to the university as overhead costs. This budget is for the university. To do full-time research, we need to hire students. The annual salary of PhD students in Germany is roughly 48K. After deducting another 2K for publications or conferences etc, we have approximately 30K left for research. This particular project requires a costly experimental approach (mass spectrometry) for which we have a dedicated expense of 15K per year that goes directly to the proteomic core facility. So, I am now left with 15K of funds for all other research activity, including consumables, which is roughly 1250 Eur per month. In a simplified term, I have less than 42 Eur per day of funds for daily lab research activities. I guess you don’t need a big imagination on how to spend 42 euros per day on medical research. It is very important to remember this number (42 eur per day of research fund) that we have for a breakthrough research.