A supply house, in Sacramento, since 1982

Niles Biological, Inc. supplies preserved and living biological specimens, dissection instruments and laboratory materials to teaching laboratories, and assembles dissection instrument sets and specimen kits under NAICS 339112, Surgical and Medical Instrument Manufacturing.

We have been doing it from Sacramento since 1982. The business is run by Theodore R Niles, and the telephone is answered by somebody who knows what is on the shelf.

The customers are schools, community colleges, universities, and the field and research programmes that need a live culture on a particular Tuesday. What they have in common is that they are not browsing. A teacher planning a dissection unit in September for November has a lesson, a class size, a budget line and a week, and the job of a supplier is to turn those four things into the right material arriving at the right time.

Why the site is built as a key

Most of what goes wrong with a specimen order goes wrong on the requisition. A purchase order that says “12 frogs” has named one field out of five, and the other four then get decided by whoever picks it — reasonably, but not necessarily the way the lesson needed.

A catalogue arranged as a grid of categories does not help with that, because it assumes you already know which heading your specimen lives under and which grade you need. A key asks instead. Four or five questions about the lesson, each one removing an ambiguity that would otherwise be resolved without you, and the answer is a line with a price on it.

It is also just how this trade already thinks. Anyone who has taught an invertebrate survey has used a dichotomous key, and the two colours it is printed in here are the two dyes a double-injected specimen is filled with. Borrowing that grammar seemed more honest than borrowing one from a retail site.

What we do not do

We do not sell to the public for use outside education and research. We do not supply pathogenic organisms; the bacterial cultures in the catalogue are non-pathogenic teaching strains. We do not supply medical devices, surgical instruments for clinical use, diagnostic products or veterinary products, and nothing on this site may be used as one.

We do not ship internationally. Live organisms and preserved animal material cross borders under permit regimes that vary by country and species, and saying no is better than promising something that gets held at a border.

And we do not substitute without asking. If an item is short you get a telephone call before the order ships, not a surprise in the box — see substitutions.

Claims this page refuses to make

There is no count of schools served on this site, no number of orders shipped, no satisfaction percentage, no award, no rating from an unnamed source and no logo wall. Not because they were forgotten — because you have no way to check any of them.

What is on this page instead is checkable: a legal name you can look up, an address in Sacramento you can drive to, a telephone number a person answers during working hours, a founding year, published unit prices with a review date, a returns window stated in days, and a shipping constraint stated in days of the week. Those are specific enough to hold us to, which is the only kind of claim worth printing.

For anything else — references from other departments, a W-9, current safety data sheets, tax-exemption paperwork, or a price for something this site does not list — telephone us and we will send it.