Success Stories

Seeding Labs has always had, at its center, a single core belief: scientists with abundant resources have a responsibility to share them with their colleagues in the developing world.


We began as a handful of PhD students at Harvard University who had worked in laboratories in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and wanted to make our peers aware of the material obstacles faced by researchers in resource-poor nations. We noticed that laboratory hallways were full of old but usable scientific equipment that had been placed there when researchers upgraded to new models or simply cleaned house. We knew that these tools and supplies could be a vital life-line for scientists abroad, who had talent but few tools. We gathered unwanted equipment from a few labs and sent our first shipment – around a dozen small boxes – to labs in Paraguay and Guatemala. Soon, teams of students began to scour the halls of Harvard for salvageable equipment, and word got out among students and faculty that their used equipment could help support a colleague in the developing world.


Seeding Labs connects talented individuals to the tools they need to help themselves and their communities. Here are some of our proudest accomplishments

Rebuilding after the fire

Chile, Dr. Maite Castro Gallestegui

• Cellular research focused on helping cure neurodegenerative diseases
• Following a major fire that devastated the lab, Seeding Labs worked with Castro’s team and colleagues to rebuild and restock the lab so they could continue their research

From nothing to big discovery in Tuberculosis

Argentina, Dr. Hector Ricardo Morbidoni

• Seeding Labs helped launch this lab in 2004 when Morbidoni returned to Argentina after completing a post-doctoral fellowship at the prestigious Albert Einstein College of Medicine. At the time, the country was in financial crisis and there was no funding available at all for his research. With our help, his determination and continual innovation, the lab is now thriving and receives funding from agencies around the world.
• Best of all, he reports: “We have implemented a method for rapid determination of drug resistance in tuberculosis. The method shortens from 45 days to 4 days the time required and will be added to our public health service that provides coverage to a population of 1,000,000 people.”

Rising star first to attack prion diseases in Chile

Chile, Dr. Claudio Hetz

• Hetz, an award winning young scientist, started his lab in 2007 at the University of Chile to study prion diseases (Mad Cow, Creutzfeldt-Jakob). In Chile, the incidence of these diseases is double the rate in the rest of the world.
• Only two years after he received equipment from Seeding Labs, Dr. Hetz’ lab was already booming: training 22 scientists—including 4 post-docs, 8 graduate students and 3 undergraduate students.

Helping build new doctors in the Congo

Democratic Republic of Congo, Dr. Samuel Mampunza

• In a country four times the size of Texas, there are fewer than 5,000 accredited doctors. After a new medical school was built, Seeding Labs helped provide the equipment that supported practical lessons in Biology, Chemistry and Physics.
• According to Mampunza, more than 200 students have benefited from the additional training and education capability and half of the students were women.

How light and sleep impact health

Argentina, Dr. Diego Golombek

• Studying circadian rhythms and how light and sleep patterns impact quality of life and incidence of illness
• Equipment from Seeding Labs helped his productive team of 11 researchers and students, enabling them to continue experiments and make more rapid discoveries.