Automation

Researchers: Emma Frow, Robert Smith, Chris Wood and Annie Hammang

Over the past decade, significant effort has been invested in developing tools to facilitate automation in design, construction, and testing of genetic constructs. How are synthetic biology laboratories being (re)configured in response to such developments? How do the new possibilities afforded by automation (including, for example, speed and scale-up) change the nature of what an ‘experiment’ is, what kinds of questions might productively be asked, and what counts as a valuable contribution to the practice of synthetic biology?

Events

Workshop on Mapping Synthetic Biology Workflows, 4 November 2016, Arizona State University

Additional Funding

Emma Frow and Annie Hammang received seed funding from the Institute for Social Science Research at Arizona State University in May 2018 for a project entitled 'Automating the Biological: The Future of Life and Work in Bioengineering.'