Robot Scientist Made to Aid Human Study

British researchers have created a “robot scientist” that can perform experiments, analyze the findings, then design a fresh round of experiments, all more efficiently than the average graduate student.

The robot, described Thursday in the journal Nature, was able to figure out the function of genes inside a yeast cell and could theoretically perform other types of tasks, the authors said.

Ross King, first author of the paper and a professor of computer science at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth, stressed that the team’s invention is not intended to supplant flesh-and-blood students. Instead, “we hope that our work will help free them from the more boring aspects of science,” he said.

A fleet of robot scientists, he said, could improve the efficiency of tasks involved in work such as the search for new pharmaceuticals. It could also help tackle the glut of data currently accruing from the various completed genome projects, which have mapped those of humans, chimpanzees, flies, rats, mice, honey bees and a host of microbes. The function of many genes in these humans and animals remains unknown.

The robot consists of software that scientifically reasons and interprets, a unit that squirts fluid and yeast cells into tiny dishes, and a scanner that tests whether the yeast cells are growing.

In the report, written by scientists at four British universities, the robot was given a variety of yeast cells to analyze, each of which had been engineered to lack a single gene. Armed with background information about the biochemistry of yeast, the robot was able to find the genes’ likely functions by testing which nutrients the various cells needed to grow. Then it set up new experiments to further pin down its hypotheses.

The team also compared the robot’s performance with that of a group of graduate students and university staffers, who conducted and interpreted the same experiments in a simulation.

There was no difference between the robot and the best human performers, the scientists found, and some people performed poorly.

King noted that some people have expressed concern that the robot scientist could potentially run amok, “doing mad experiments,” if left to its own devices for too long.

“At the moment, the system is completely supervised. It isn’t capable of making its own genetically modified organisms or anything like that,” he said.