Challenges and Opportunities for Mass Spec cores in the Developing World!

This article isn't brand new, but I just stumbled across it and really appreciated the perspective on it. It's open and available here.

1) How do you get funding to set up and run a core outside of where most of them are?
2) What challenges would you face if you packed up and decided to go there? Yo...the 24 hours to pump down your Orbitrap after every brown out....that sounds like a blast, right?
3) And this is the absolute best part of the article -- the Opportunities!  -- yes, there is all sorts of great basic science that you can do with baker's yeast. But -- there are diseases the World Health Organization reference lists as serious people killers that I've never heard of, and I bet that almost no proteomics or metabolomics has ever been done on.  There is such an opportunity to do good and have an impact that we can't possibly ignore the development of biological mass spec in the developing world.

Yeah, you could argue that you could send more samples here, but have you gotten human samples from Africa before? I have and I wish I knew about this new technique that helps you tell how many freeze/thaws your samples have been through!  When your samples are coming thousands of miles there is a very good chance that some valuable data may be lost, particularly in molecules that might not be as structurally robust.