Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
like feel of the space is enhanced by a pervasive silence—work is
mostly carried out individually. Rarely are the workers looking
over one another's shoulders or chatting about the details of their
work. Some people enter or leave the room: sometimes a wet-lab
worker will come in to ask a question or, more occasionally, to
spend some time doing his or her own computer work. Without
engaging in the work itself, there is very little else a visitor can
observe beyond the fl ux of text and images on computer screens.
Scene 2—Robo-room : We enter the spacious and plush foyer of
an institute devoted to biology. Our host swipes his access card
and we ascend to the third fl oor of the lab. Winding our way
amid carpeted offi ces and shiny-white laboratories, we come at
last to a different kind of space: a small doorway leads into a
cavernous room with a bare concrete fl oor. Although there is a
mass of equipment scattered about and perhaps as many as ten
people in the room, its sheer scale makes it feel almost empty. In
the center of the room, fi xed to the fl oor, is a large yellow robot
arm, about 1.5 meters high. Around it, arranged in a circle, stand
a collection of large pieces of equipment: they are, our host in-
forms us, freezers, incubators, and various other apparatus for
adding reagents, mixing, stirring, heating, and growing biologi-
cal samples. The attention of the workers is devoted to this mass
of equipment—some are busy with repairs, bolting or unbolting
various pieces to the fl oor; others are working at laptops and
terminal screens connected via fat cables to the robot arm and
the equipment circumscribing it. When their work is complete,
the humans will be absent from the room altogether: the robot
arm will be trained to extract plates of biological samples from
the freezers and perform high-throughput experiments by mov-
ing these samples between the various pieces of equipment in a
carefully prescribed order. The results of the experiments will
be electronically communicated to networked hard drives else-
where in the building where, in turn, they will be accessible to
other biologists for analysis. For now, however, the task is to set
up the robot and train it to perform its repetitive tasks smoothly
and fl awlessly.
Scene 3—Production line : This time the building, tucked away
in an industrial zone, looks more like a medium-sized factory
that a biology institute or academic department. We enter
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