Sincerely,
Dr. Moreau

PC LOAD LETTER

But not for $200 plus shipping.

What ELSE can it be used for?

Even as far back as 2003, we couldn’t find buyers for ABI 377s that were much better and easier to use than this sequencer; we had around 15 of them and I don’t we would have been able to get more than $1,000 each or so. With ten years of progress after that, I’d expect 377s and the like are less than $200, especially since major sequencing projects in the late 90s and early 00s used huge numbers of them. 

It’s worth noting that some processes, like oligonucleotide synthesis and sequencing, are largely commoditized now if you’re not doing something incredibly unusual. It would almost certainly be much more expensive, in terms of both materials and time, to use an old sequencer instead of just outsourcing the sequencing to a sequencing company.

Basically: it’s dirt cheap,but that’s because it’s a good twenty years out of date, and probably no-one should buy it. I don’t even know whether someone buying it could get ahold of the radioactive nucleotides it would require (they’re actually very cheap, but they’re heavily regulated), the film might be hard to get these days and isn’t cheap, and the technology is decades out of date.I doubt it’s been used for at least a decade; indeed, I suspect the reason it’s being sold now is that it’s finally been officially ruled as decontaminated, probably because there have been a dozen or more S35 half-lifes since it was last officially commissioned for use.