Automation is Democratizing Experimental Science (axios.com) 52
New advances are taking automation to the highest end of human endeavors, offering scientists a shot at some of the most intractable problems that have confounded them -- and along the way tipping a global balance to give upstarts like China a more level playing field in the lab. From a report: A combination of artificial intelligence and nimble robots are allowing scientists to do more, and be faster, than they ever could with mere human hands and brains. "We're in the middle of a paradigm shift, a time when the choice of experiments and the execution of experiments are not really things that people do," says Bob Murphy, the head of the computational biology department at Carnegie Mellon University.
Automated science is "moving the role of the scientist higher and higher up the food chain," says Murphy. Researchers are focusing their efforts on big-picture problem-solving rather than the nitty-gritty of running experiments. He says it will also allow scientists to take on more problems at once -- and solve big, lingering ones that are too complex to tackle right now. Starting next year, Murphy's department will offer students a master's degree in automated science, the university announced last week.
Automated science is "moving the role of the scientist higher and higher up the food chain," says Murphy. Researchers are focusing their efforts on big-picture problem-solving rather than the nitty-gritty of running experiments. He says it will also allow scientists to take on more problems at once -- and solve big, lingering ones that are too complex to tackle right now. Starting next year, Murphy's department will offer students a master's degree in automated science, the university announced last week.
"upstarts like China"? (Score:2, Insightful)
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You guys are hilarious. China was doing science while Americans were still playing with bows and arrows.
So what happened?
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Both shut down the speech of everyone they don't like. Not much good when you're sitting in a gulag while your kids are being educated for free that far left principles are The Only Truth.
"We cast aside our three core ideas - Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism - and that was a mistake. We were taught Marxist revolutionary ideas from 1949 to 1978. We spent thirty years on what we now know was a disaster."
-- Zhu Zhongming, Shanghai accountant
Democractizing? (Score:1)
Democracy gives an equal voice to unequal people.
That's not what this is doing. Rather, people are capitalizing on automation. This Capitalism, not democracy.
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That happened with the bio-science PhD students doing genomics. Their thesis would be based on the analysis of a particular gene, protein, RNA strand. They would do investigations involving suspected possible interactions. For the majority, they could only prove there wasn't any interaction. If they were lucky, they could find some interaction and then explore what that involved and contribute that knowledge to the genomics project. Then after completing their PhD, they would join the ranks of other student
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: the absence of hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions or privileges
Not in this context [merriam-webster.com].
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Like, why would you do that?
Money.
You're avoiding one of the definitions of democratization wherein those things that were limited to the elite are now available to the unwashed.
The printing press equalized (democratized) the disparity between the literate and illiterate.
Efforts to stop that paradigm shift failed because the press makes a shitload of money.
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No.
It's both.
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These machines aren't cheap, either. A lot of robots for scientists start at tens of thousands of dollars. Shelling out $20k for a machine to do your pipetting for you only covers a small fraction of the duties of your typical grad student (who also costs $20k), too.
This only helps labs that are already well-funded - the opposite of democratizing access.
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Democracy gives an equal voice to unequal people.
No, it doesn't - it gives the majority power to silence the minority.
Remember the old saying? "Democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner."
"democratizing" science? (Score:3, Insightful)
Is that where we get to vote what the results should be?
Grad students (Score:5, Interesting)
What will grad students do if experiments are automated?
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What will grad students do if experiments are automated?
Coffee, dry-cleaning, correcting papers and tests, teaching, running interference from the dept. chair, banging my shrew wife/husband and keeping her/him off my back, licking my bunghole, etc ..... everything to let them pass into the shit life of endless writing of papers to stay in the factory piece work life of an academic - until that rare lottery winning (these days) of tenure.
Well, having the grad student kill a tenured professor for an opening is a possibility, I suggest not because it may start a tr
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The tens of billions that Pharma is spending annually on biology R&D should convince you otherwise.
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They will do experiments. Just not all anymore. Doing experiments manually is both an essential part of their education and necessary for prototyping experiments and for small runs. The article is mostly nonsense, as has gotten so customary when "AI" or "robots" are discussed these days.
Another solve: reproducibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Even the best human descriptions of processes to generate the desired outcome can leave out minute details (like holding the vial at an incline of 45 degrees!). However, if you have an automated lab setup then you can simply share the instructions that were given to the machine that generated the desired result. Great for chemists, less so for psychologists. :P
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Minute details might be important. If you just recreate the experiment with another machine setup exactly like the first one, you may end up missing a minute detail that made the experiment successful and start believing that one of the other big obvious details was it instead. That may keep you stuck in a rut with a misconception in your theory.
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It's soldiers ...
It's generals ...
How's the war on grammar going?
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... when you can't counter and actual argument.
English is your first language after, "Da Da giggy boo."
It's lame to dig up an excuse like that.
I am multilingual, being proficient in the following languages:
English, Pasquale, COBOL, FORTRAN, breeze shooting, African-American vernacular English, mathematics, love, physics, Cajun, and pig Latin.
Back on topic: Science is being democratized, using the same definition of that word that applies to the democratization of literature (advances in printing press technology), Photography has been democratized in
That's just fine except (Score:2)