We asked 2,172 researchers around the world what they thought of the announcement that Thermo Fisher Scientific is acquiring Life Technologies.  Less than 24 hours after the announcement roughly half of the participants (49%) were aware of the news.  The fact that this news has spread this quickly is a testament to the considerable impact this merger is likely to have on the life sciences research community.

When asked to rate their sentiments regarding their approval or disapproval of this proposed merger the largest portion (795 in total) were essentially neutral.  However, more indicated they disapprove of the merger to varying degrees than approved suggesting some skepticism about the continuing consolidation of the research supply industry (see figure to left)

To learn a bit more about this response we also asked the researchers if they believed key support and service attributes would improve or get worse as a result of the coming together of these megalithic suppliers.  In some cases, for categories such as shipping expenses, product selection and ease of ordering, those believing things would improve outpaced those that thought the opposite.  However,   in general researches were again more skeptical than optimistic in most other categories.  It is important to note that those believing there would be no change were most prominent in nine of ten categories rated (see figure below).

Finally, we asked researchers to indicate if this merger were likely to have a direct impact, either positive or negative, on their laboratory.  The largest group (627/2,172) believed there would be a slight negative impact on their lab (see figure at bottom of page).  To download the full report.