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Comment by rabidsnail | Hacker News Reader

(Naive layperson here). Could the manual microsocpes-and-pipets work being done by lab biologists be mechanized, so that you're generating drug candidates in software, testing them in living cells, and using automatically-gathered observations to generate new candidates?

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It is already done to an extent (high-throuhput machines), however, there's still a lot of old timers in biology who spent too long pipetting and haven't invested yet.

It would be good even for not-old-timers. I know a couple of bioinformatics people and they're definitely experts on one topic: RSI.

Unfortunately not everything is done on a massive scale so not everything is automated.

While I agree with you that there is a ton of automation, it's a bit flippant to suggest the manual work in biology is because of old-timers. You can't exactly automate necropsy on a rat liver to see if the compound you just gave it caused liver failure. There are a ton of experiments that are not automatable with current robotics technologies. Plus, even when you can automate, biology can't be rushed. If you're waiting for a tumor to grow in a mouse model, you have to wait real wall clock time.

I'm in no position to argue about the mechanics of rat autopsy. But I do know how to get high throughput when you have high latency: shotgun parallelism. Try tons of things, the vast majority of which you assume will turn up with nothing, starting at the same time, in parallel.

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