Higher prices on imports in the United States affect the world trade in laboratory supplies.Credit: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty
The radical prices of the Trump administration on imports in the United States – which vary from 10% on the products of certain countries to 54% on goods from China – increase the costs of laborious software and specialized scientific instruments in the country. Price increases have come while research budgets for American laboratories are stretched by Unprecedented cancellations of subsidies And Cups with university funding Presented since the start of Donald Trump’s second presidency in January.
“We are already making quotes today which are 20% more than yesterday,” explains Drew Kevorkian, Managing Director of Ares Scientific in Miami Florida, who provides research equipment to scientific laboratories, including a large number of universities. “I think almost everyone will see an increase in prices.”
The latest series of prices – the first of which comes into force on April 5 for all countries, followed by stronger increases for some on April 9 – represent “systemic changes to the cost structure of science – and they land at a time when research institutions are already under acute financial stress”, said Tinglong Dai, who research on the world supply channels and Healthcare John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. “It is not only a question of tightening the belt. It could be the last straw – and risks causing lasting damage.”
Source: Tendency
The United States imports billions of dollars into laboratory equipment and reagents every year, explains DAI (see “World Trade in reagents”). Many of these products come from countries about to be struck by pricing increases, notably China, Switzerland, Japan, the United Kingdom and the EU countries; Others come from Mexico and Canada, on which the Trump administration has imposed prices earlier this year.
Announcing the prices on April 2, Trump said that it would save the United States from a “national emergency”, stimulate a manufacturing base dug and reduce the country’s dependence on “foreign opponents”. The announcement has caused global financial turmoil: actions have dropped and the International Monetary Fund warns against a significant risk for the global economy.
Microscopes, glassware, DNA sequencers
The researchers said Nature that the prices of many scientific products could be affected.
China provides basic laboratory equipment, such as glass tubes and reagents as well as advanced electronic equipment such as computer flea, LCD screens and incubators in the United States, they say. Germany (whose imports will be affected by a tariff of 20%) and Japan (24%) provides high-end laboratory instruments such as microscopes or analytical precision devices, while Switzerland (31%) and the United Kingdom (10%) are major exporters of diagnostic tools, antibodies and special chemicals. Mexico provides plastic-waar and Canada provides specialized equipment such as DNA sequencers and cell meters. The sterilizers, centrifuges and laboratory glassware rings used in American laboratories often come from Europe.
“Has anyone?
“These are not luxury items,” says Dai. “They are the central infrastructure of modern science.”
Mikhail Kats, physicist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, says that it is not clear how the prices will apply to the articles already budgetized by a subsidy. “Do we budget the price or the price with the price?” he asks.
Kevorkian says that around 60% of the products that his business provide in the United States, while 40% are imported. But even the products manufactured in the United States depend on imported components, say that researchers, “a DNA sequencer built in California could still depend on the optics of Germany and semiconductors of China,” explains DAI.
The transition to American suppliers does not always reduce costs, explains Kevorkian. “Believe it or not, some of the products we buy abroad, even when you put the prices there, they are always cheaper than bought in the United States.”