In a remarkable demonstration of robotics, British researchers say they have created a "robot scientist" that is just as effective and much cheaper than a human - and does not stop work to sleep or eat cold pizza.
Computer expert Stephen Muggleton at Imperial College London and colleagues created the robot in an experiment to see how they could free up scientists from the routine analytical chores of genome research.
Their creation was programmed to figure out the functioning of a set of genes in brewer's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), one of the most intensely-studied organisms for its genetic makeup.
The robot was programmed to have background information about how genes work as well as a model of the type of experiment to be carried out, and was then linked up to handle standard lab equipment - the only role that humans played was to carry test dishes to and from an incubator.
Using two software packages, the robot was tasked with finding which set of genes controlled the breakdown of essential amino acids in the yeast.
It had to make comparisons between normal and mutant strains of the yeast, using different nutrients, and measuring the resultant growth.
The robot was 98 percent accurate, about the same as a graduate student doing the same experiments, but did not need to perform as many experiments because its "hypothesis generator" - a program to devise and test theories - found solutions more quickly. As a result, its costs were around two-thirds that of a human.
Muggleton's team says the next challenge will be to take a step into the void, and ask the system to uncover the functions of genes whose roles are currently unknown. If this works, the scientist could be used to explore pathways to devise new drugs, they believe.
"Automation was the driving force of much of 19th and 20th-century change, and this is likely to continue," according to their study, published in today's issue of Nature, the British science weekly.
They note how machines have taken out much of the drudgery of biotechnology, such as the sequencing of the human genome.
"We consider this trend to increased automation of science to be both inevitable and desirable. It is inevitable because it will be required to deal with the challenges of science in the 21st century," the authors said. "It is also desirable because it frees scientists to make the high-level creative leaps at which they excel."
© 2004 AFP
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