Robotic lab assistant searches for useful combinations of chemical compounds

• For a machine that's changing the world, the device on the lab bench in front of me doesn't look very impressive - it just goes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
• Whirr, plunge, suck, whirr, plunge, squirt - a mechanical counterpoint to the cries of the seagulls outside the lab in this Welsh coastal town of Aberystwyth.
• Ross King, a professor of computer science at the University of Wales and the Dr. Frankenstein behind this most humdrum of monsters, watches me watching it with a wry amusement that might mask a touch of embarrassment.
• High-throughput screening - testing vast libraries of chemical compounds on various types of cells to see whether they interact in ways that might be useful - has become a routine function in modern bio labs, and at the high end machines that do it are positively telegenic.
• For instance, the Automation Partnership, based in Royston, England, offers one that bobs, weaves, shakes, and stirs like a possessed bartender.
• Its components - the tireless robot arm, an incubator in which cells cultured on the platter either wither or thrive, and a plate reader that examines the little depressions to see whether anything is growing there - are linked up to a much more exceptional brain.
• It's a quiet hive of computational biology that benefits from small departments and relative isolation, conditions in which like minds are bound to find each other.
• That information wouldn't just challenge the capacity of molecular biology to explain what was going on molecule by molecule; it would highlight the inadequacy of the molecule-by-molecule approach.