Slashdot Mirror
Robot Makes Scientific Discovery (Mostly) On Its Own
Hugh Pickens writes "A science-savvy robot called Adam has successfully developed and tested its first scientific hypothesis, discovering that certain genes in baker's yeast code for specific enzymes which encourage biochemical reactions in yeast, then ran an experiment with its lab hardware to test its predictions, and analyzed the results, all without human intervention. Adam was equipped with a database on genes that are known to be present in bacteria, mice and people, so it knew roughly where it should search in the genetic material for the lysine gene in baker's yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Ross King, a computer scientist and biologist at Aberystwyth University, first created a computer that could generate hypotheses and perform experiments five years ago. 'This is one of the first systems to get [artificial intelligence] to try and control laboratory automation,' King says. '[Current robots] tend to do one thing or a sequence of things. The complexity of Adam is that it has cycles.' Adam has cost roughly $1 million to develop and the software that drives Adam's thought process sits on three computers, allowing Adam to investigate a thousand experiments a day and still keep track of all the results better than humans can. King's group has also created another robot scientist called Eve dedicated to screening chemical compounds for new pharmaceutical drugs that could combat diseases such as malaria.
You joke but really undergrads are cheaper than graduate students... At least from my experience working in a biology lab in college. It was/is common practice to recruit undergrads to do free work for the labs. The undergrad gets some experience in the field and the lab gets free labor in exchange for dealing with the inexperience of the average undergrad.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
In terms of R&D, certainly, the status quo is cheaper. In terms of actually doing the work, though, I wouldn't be so sure. Much of science involves quite repetitive manipulation of samples, numerous instances of the same thing, tweaked variants in parallel, or both. Huge amounts of labor that is reasonably easy to characterize; but needs to be done precisely and without error.
The case of electronics assembly is arguably analogous. Humans are cheap; but (quite expensive) pick and place machines are ubiquitous. Why? Because they are faster, more precise, and more consistent than humans.
It is already starting. This piece describes a massive robot setup for processing brain samples(cue: whatcouldpossiblygowrong). In high volume gene sequencing, automated equipment is common enough to essentially be a stock photo cliche by now.