Scientists in 'autonomous laboratories' are starting to outsource work to robots

Nearly two decades ago, four graduate students from MIT united around a shared idea. "We believed that programming cells would ultimately be more important than programming computers," says Jason Kelly. It felt like an outlandish bet at the time. Things like gene editing or testing new molecules typically demanded many hours in the laboratory — carefully mixing hundreds of chemical cocktails by hand and pipetting them into petri dishes, tasks that required an enormous amount of human labor. Early potential investors, Kelly recalls, were not excited. "We were living on ramen, buying equipment on eBay, and we could not raise...