This story appeared in the September/October 2020 of Discover magazine as "Robot Scientists Are Coming." We hope you’ll subscribe to Discover and help support science journalism at a time when it’s needed the most.
In the beginning there was Adam. We’re not talking about the first human, but rather the first machine to fully automate the scientific process and make a discovery on its own.
Adam looks nothing like a human. It resembles a big box, about the size of an office cubicle. It’s equipped with robotic arms, incubators, a freezer, cameras and other parts to help it do work. Everything it needs to conduct its research is there, including the brain to do it.
The man behind the machine is Ross King, a professor of machine intelligence at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. He started building Adam in 2004 to study enzymes in yeast, and later created a second robot — aptly named Eve — to search for potential malaria drugs.
