for National Geographic News
It looks nothing like C-3PO of Star Wars fame, but a team of British scientists have created a "robot" that can formulate hypotheses, design experiments, and interpret results on par with the best of their human counterparts.
Called the "robot scientist," the technological marvel proved its intellectual prowess by correctly determining the function of specific genes within yeast.
"There was no difference between the robot and the best humans on this task," said computer biologists Ross King at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth and Stephen Oliver at the University of Manchester in an e-mail interview.
King and Oliver describe the apparatus as rather boring in appearancea liquid-handling machine networked to several computersbut packed with sophisticated robotics and advanced artificial intelligence (AI) software.
Together with colleagues at the University of Wales, University of Manchester, Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, and Imperial College in London, the researchers report on the robot in the January 15 issue of the science journal Nature.
According to the paper, the robot provides important insight to the scientific process, a process in which automation is both inevitable and desirable.
"It is inevitable because it will be required to deal with the challenges of science in the 21st century. It is also desirable because it frees scientists to make the high-level creative leaps at which they excel," the researchers conclude in Nature.
James Collins, a biomechanical engineer at Boston University in Massachusetts, said he would be surprised if the robot scientist replaced humans, but that it would certainly be useful in sorting through the mountains of data in areas such as gene research.
"It's a great demonstration of how data analysis and experimental techniques can be automated and integrated to address large-scale exploratory science projects," he said. "But we are a long ways away from using these types of approaches to replace scientists."
The robot scientist was tasked to figure out the function of different genes in baker's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) using so-called "knockout" strains of the yeast that have one gene removed.
By observing how the knockout strains grow, or don't grow, it is possible to devise various theories for the function of the knocked-out gene. The researchers liken the process to trying to figure out how different parts of a car work by removing them one at a time.
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