The Automation of Science
SciencePublished 2 April 2009Open access
Ross D. King, Jem J. Rowland, Stephen G. Oliver, Michael J. Young, Wayne Aubrey, Emma Byrne
Citations638
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TL;DR
The development of Robot Scientist “Adam,” which has autonomously generated functional genomics hypotheses about the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and experimentally tested these hypotheses by using laboratory automation, is reported.
Abstract
The basis of science is the hypothetico-deductive method and the recording of experiments in sufficient detail to enable reproducibility. We report the development of Robot Scientist "Adam," which advances the automation of both. Adam has autonomously generated functional genomics hypotheses about the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and experimentally tested these hypotheses by using laboratory automation. We have confirmed Adam's conclusions through manual experiments. To describe Adam's research, we have developed an ontology and logical language. The resulting formalization involves over 10,000 different research units in a nested treelike structure, 10 levels deep, that relates the 6.6 million biomass measurements to their logical description. This formalization describes how a machine contributed to scientific knowledge.
Keywords
Computer ScienceBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
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