‘The science labs of the future?’ Human scientists oversee robots : NPR
‘The science labs of the future?’ Human scientists oversee robots : NPR
https://www.npr.org/2026/06/05/nx-s1-5846973/ai-science-robots-risks-experiments-gingko-bioworks
Publish Date: 2026-06-05 05:00:00
Source Domain: www.npr.org
Reshma Shetty, co-founder and COO of Ginkgo Bioworks, walks through an autonomous lab where AI robots replace lab benches. Shetty says using AI has already fundamentally changed the way she practices science. “The really wild moment was the first time I saw a lab notebook entry written by the model,” she says.
Jodi Hilton for NPR
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Jodi Hilton for NPR
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.
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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.
The first step, they figured, was to speed that process up. So they started a company to replace those human lab workers with robots.
Early potential investors, Kelly recalls, were not excited.
“ We were living on ramen, buying equipment on eBay, and we could not raise venture capital,” he says of their early days running their startup.
Then came the artificial intelligence boom. In 2014, Kelly remembers reading a blog post from Sam Altman, roughly a year before he went on to found OpenAI. Kelly recalls that Atlman wrote about the potential to automate biotechnology…
