[Muanet] Robot upstages graduate students

[Dion Giles]

This report is in the latest Scientific American.  The full  article is 
reserved for subscribers but the following introduction appears at 
http://click.exacttarget.com/?fe87107973670c7b71-fe231670736701787d1378

It is not clear whether this is good about the robots or bad about the 
graduate students!

Dion Giles
-------------------------------------

Robot Scientist As Effective As Humans At Lab Work

Grad students often feel like drones, doing grunt laboratory work for a 
pittance. Findings published today in the journal Nature probably won't 
make them feel much better about their jobs. Scientists report that they 
have developed a robot that can formulate hypotheses, design experiments to 
test them and analyze the results. What is more, it performs just as well 
as real grad students and spends less money.

Ross D. King from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and his colleagues 
designed their Robot Scientist using existing technology and two new 
software programs that they wrote. The team then assigned the robot the 
task of determining the function of specific genes in the well-understood 
yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae (commonly known as brewer's yeast). Robot 
Scientist, armed with preloaded information about yeast biochemistry and 
biological pathways, first generated hypotheses regarding possible 
functions and then ran a variety of experiments. When the real scientists 
compared the results obtained by their robot student to those achieved by 
actual graduate students, they didn't see any significant differences. And 
because Robot Scientist ran fewer experiments, its overall costs were lower 
than those of its human counterparts.