GoKawiilThe robot scientist Eve was built at the University of Manchester, UK, before being moved to Sweden.Credit: Courtesy of Ross D. King
Measuring 5 metres square by 3 metres high, Eve takes up at least half of the floor space in the laboratory it now calls home.
The robotic platform at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, is the brainchild of autonomous-lab pioneer Ross King. It is powered by artificial intelligence, self-driving and “fairly quiet”, King says. But it’s also fast. Working at full speed, Eve’s robotic arm can move a few metres per second, with a positional accuracy of a fraction of a millimetre. The team usually runs Eve slower than that — otherwise, King says, “it’s too scary”.
Eve automates the process of early-stage drug design. One of Eve’s early achievements came in 2018, around three years after it was created, when it identified that the common antimicrobial compound triclosan can target an enzyme that is crucial to the survival of Plasmodium malaria parasites during their dormant phase in the liver1. To do this, Eve independently screened some 1,600 chemicals and modelled how their structure related to their activity to predict which ones were worth testing. King and his group armed the robot with background knowledge and a machine-learning framework for developing hypotheses. Eve then used those elements to design experiments to test these hypotheses and, crucially, performed them itself. The finding gave researchers a potential route to fighting treatment-resistant malaria. “It’s trying to make the scientific method in a machine,” says King.
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In 2009, King used Eve’s predecessor to probe some of the 10–15% of yeast genes with unknown functions2. He named the system Adam — a reference to both the biblical character and the eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith, who was a strong proponent of industrial mechanization. King sees parallels in the future of science.
“A lot of biology is done like craft work,” King says: a lab with a principal investigator, postdocs and students operates much like an artisan works with their apprentices. Self-driving labs, by contrast, are more similar to a production line. As a result, “science will be done differently, like in a factory”, he adds.
The technology is still in its infancy, and most of the advances so far have been incremental. But as the field encroaches on parts of the scientific process that are typically done by people — absorbing the literature, planning experiments, analysing data and deciding what hypothesis to test next — researchers will have to grapple with what the developments mean for the future of the lab.
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Many sectors, from agriculture to surgery, are starting to embrace the promise of AI-powered robotics. Korean car manufacturer Hyundai, for example, announced in January that it will deploy tens of thousands of autonomous humanoid robots in its manufacturing plants, and that they will be completing complex car-assembly work by 2030.
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