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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.

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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.

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.

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