The Emerald Cloud Lab is busy even though I am on the west coast of America. More than 100 items of high-end bioscience equipment whirr away on workbenches for 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, performing experiments for researchers from around the world. Brian Frezza is the CEO of Emerald and he is also sitting at home. A few staff in blue coats quietly follow instructions from screens on their trolleys to make sure the instruments are loaded with reagents and samples.
Anyone can conduct experiments by remote control using their web browser in a cloud lab. Experiments are performed using a subscription-based online interface that coordinates robot and scientific instruments to perform the experiment and process the data. Scientists schedule experiments to run while they relax with their families over the weekend, which is Friday night in Emerald.
Lifting giant carboys, unwrapping samples sent by mail, and a few instruments that just can't be automated are some of the things that can't be done by a robot. The people in blue coats look like pickers. Most of the people are former Amazon employees.
Plugging an experiment into a browser forces researchers to translate the exact details of every step into unambiguous code
Scientists and lab technicians were brought in to help run the facility, but they were stifled with so little to do. The Poaching of Amazon employees has improved. Frezza says that they pay them twice what they were getting at Amazon. You're keeping someone's drug-discovery experiment going fast.
There are two more cloud labs in the Bay Area. There are many life science instruments in the workcells. The setup is much more futuristic than at Emerald. Here, reagents and samples whizz to the correct workcell on hi-tech magnetic conveyor belts and are gently loaded into place. The executive director of operations at Strateos says that researchers' experiments are "delocalised".
In fields such as molecular biology, where much of the experimental work involves the laborious and repetitive transfer of tiny quantities of liquid, automation is nothing new. A number of specialist facilities developed ways to operate their equipment remotely because of the Pandemic. The beams of the UK's Diamond Light Source can now be used by anyone in the world. It is not new for elements of the experiment to be outsourcing.
The world's first laboratories that allow anyone with a laptop and credit card to "pay and play" are called Emerald and Strateos. When many researchers were unable to visit their own labs in person, the appeal of this approach became obvious.
Researchers can conduct several experiments at once and queue them up to run overnight or while they are doing other things. Frezza says that their pro- users will work in a traditional lab. The numbers will be ridiculous.
Setting up and tearing down equipment, cleaning up, maintaining and fixing instruments is not something that can be done in a day or two. Arctoris, a remote-operated drug discovery lab in Oxford, says it has completed projects for pharmaceutical companies in a single day. Researchers can spend more time thinking and reading instead of pipetting.
One researcher was able to recreate years of his PhD experimentation in a matter of weeks at the Emerald Cloud Lab, so the company was asked to build another one just for the scientists.
With a year of access to a cloud lab often costing less than the price of a single piece of high-end lab equipment, the dean says the model could be transformational. I don't want to just change science at Carnegie Mellon. She wants to change the process of science around the world. Some colleagues in under-resourced places can't do science because they don't have enough money This is a game-changer because of the internet connection and the cloud lab.
Variation and human error can be removed from experimental work. Half a dozen technicians will help the place run 24 hours a day at the new 1,500 sq metres site. People are still going to wet labs and making mistakes. I don't believe that everything is possible in science. Once you learn it, you don't need to do it over and over again.
Scientists such as Doerge believe the precision of remote-operated labs could help fix what has become known as science's " reproducibility crisis" - the worrying revelation that the results of troves of published research can't be replicated when different groups of scientists follow the same methods Researchers have to translate the details of every step into unambiguous code if they want the experiment to work. What used to be described in a scientific paper as "mix the samples" becomes detailed computer instructions for a certain machine to mix at a certain number of rotation. The ambient temperature at the time is captured in the data.
Even though we must remember most people come from a good place, there are some pretty crazy people out there too
Not all of her colleagues have been supportive of her efforts to encourage more and more research at Carnegie Mellon. The sights and sounds of experimentation are what many scientists think help generate exciting ideas. Some people have doubts about the quality of data produced in labs. Some of the senior faculty members have said that if you don't see it with your own eyes it doesn't exist. It's a mindset shift.
It's believed that making access to sophisticated labs easy is a potential bio terrorism threat. Small groups or individuals with no research experience could use a cloud lab to perform their research. According to Dr Filippa Lentzos, an expert in biological risk and biosecurity at King's College London, the labs want to open their market. Most people come from a good place, but there are some crazy people out there. If you want to harm someone, barriers are coming down.
Cloud labs have systems in place to flag or reject illegal or dangerous experiments. They say that the complete digitisation of everything happening in the lab makes it easier to record and monitor what people are doing.
A robotic platform that was able to conduct more than 1,000 Covid tests a day early in the Pandemic was developed by the UK Innovation and Knowledge Centre for Synthetic Biology. He isn't sure if remote-operated labs are mature enough to replicate what is available to scientists. I believe this is the way science is going to go. It would work if we had all the necessary protocols, but I don't think that's currently available to the level of complexity and detail that one needs.
Scientists don't really understand or engage with the software and hardware that generate their data, which is a concern for Freemont. The next generation of scientists need to have some hands-on experience to understand how to build infrastructure. I don't think it would be a good idea for a few labs to monopolise that understanding.
The appetite for cloud science is increasing despite the concerns. Emerald is adding capacity to keep up with demand from pharma and startup companies. The company is licensing its software to other institutions so that they can convert their facilities to use it.
In the future, cloud labs may be able to make their own decisions. Machine-learning tools are able to spit out answers to questions that would take a long time to answer with physical inquiry, thanks to the recent discovery of the DeepMind platform. These tools are being used to find new drugs. The data generated through cloud labs will make the tools more powerful. One day, systems will be able to develop theories and test them without human input.
Some Emerald Cloud Lab users have developed their own data analysis methods that can be used to adjust the parameters of the next experiment. Frezza says it is very futuristic.
Scientists are asking what the move towards automation and artificial intelligence means for the future One day, could more traditional research scientists lose their jobs? We will always need people to answer certain questions and develop new ways to do so. The days of sitting on a bench in a white coat and gloves next to a Bunsen burner are over.
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