Rack to the future: robot labs are here

At high-end labs in the US and UK, anybody, anywhere, can conduct experiments by remote control cheaply and efficiently. Is the rise of the robot researcher now inevitable?

- Tom Ireland

It's 1am on the west coast of America, but the Emerald Cloud Lab, just south of San Francisco, is still busy. Here, more than 100 items of high-end bioscience equipment whirr away on workbenches largely unmanned, 24 hours a day and seven days a week, performing experiments for researchers from around the world. I'm "visiting" via the camera on a chest-high telepresence robot, being driven round the 1,400 sq metre lab by Emerald's CEO, Brian Frezza, who is also sitting at home. There are no actual scientists anywhere, just a few staff in blue coats quietly following instructions from screens on their trolleys, ensuring the instruments are loaded with reagents and samples.

Cloud labs mean anybody, anywhere, can conduct experiments by remote control, using nothing more than their web browser. Experiments are programmed through a subscription-based online interface, and software then coordinates robots and automated scientific instruments to perform the experiment and process the data. Friday night is Emerald's busiest time of the week, as scientists schedule experiments to run while they relax over the weekend.

There are still some things robots can't do, for example lifting giant carboys (containers for liquids) or unwrapping samples sent by mail, and there are a few instruments that just can't be automated. Hence the people in blue coats, who look a little like pickers in an Amazon warehouse. It turns out that they are, in fact, mostly former Amazon employees.

Emerald originally employed scientists and lab technicians, but they were creatively stifled with so little to do. Poaching Amazon employees is working out better. "We pay them twice what they were getting at Amazon to do something way more fulfilling than stuffing toilet paper into boxes," said Frezza.