Jim Metherall, associate professor of genetics at the University of Utah, got his first robot in the mid-1990s while buried by a project on cholesterol homeostasis. "We were trying to clone a gene by complementing a mutation in mammalian cells, and we couldn't do it with an entire cDNA library, because the signal-to-noise was too low," Metherall explains. So he broke the library into small pools, isolated DNA, and then tested each pool for activity.












