experimentation

Head Tilt Mouse

Ever since Mario Capecchi, Martin Evans, and Oliver Smithies created the first knockout mouse in 1989, genetically engineered animals have steadily increased in popularity for all kinds of biology research: simply pick a gene, turn it off in the mouse, and see what happens.

It's miserable enough to be under the weather in the comfort of your home, but imagine coming down with a bad cold when you're stuck inside a small crew module 200,000 miles from Earth. You're coughing on your fellow astronauts and that space food you ate half an hour ago is now floating around your zero-gravity spacecraft.

Luckily, mission control packed some antibiotics into your survival pack... but will they work in space?

I've always said that most of what I did as a biology research technician would someday be carried out by a robot or well-trained monkey. Most lab work involves tasks just begging for a robotic hand: repetitive, technical, and exceptionally boring. Some (very well-funded) labs have robots that can perform repetitive physical jobs, like screening gazillions of chemicals for ones that will be medically useful.

But this new robot can do the fun part of science, too -- the thinking. Meet Adam, the first robot that has independently brought a little nugget of experimental knowledge to the world. Adam thought up a hypothesis, tested in the real world, analyzed the data, and then, of course, did it all over again, many, many times.