The three-day meeting was organized by Tony Beugelsdijk, a chemist specializing in laboratory robotics at Los Alamos National Laboratories. Many microbiologists tend to consider robotics an all-or-nothing proposition, he said, when in reality reprogrammable, multi-use robots and forms of single-task automation can be used together to speed up the sequencing process.
"There's a lack of appreciation for what automation can do at this point," Beugelsdijk said after he conducted a cross-country search on the potential applications of robotics. "[Biologists] thought robots were very good at spray-painting cars." To those who were disappointed by what they saw at the workshop, he pointed out that the application of automation to molecular biology is still "a very new field."
"There's been an acceptance problem," he added, based on the scientists' fear of losing personal recognition for publishing data compiled by robots. "If we accomplished anything, we planted some seeds in people's minds about ...
