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Science 3 April 2009:
Vol. 324. no. 5923, pp. 85 - 89
DOI: 10.1126/science.1165620
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Reports

The Automation of Science

Ross D. King,1* Jem Rowland,1 Stephen G. Oliver,2 Michael Young,3 Wayne Aubrey,1 Emma Byrne,1 Maria Liakata,1 Magdalena Markham,1 Pinar Pir,2 Larisa N. Soldatova,1 Andrew Sparkes,1 Kenneth E. Whelan,1 Amanda Clare1

The basis of science is the hypothetico-deductive method and the recording of experiments in sufficient detail to enable reproducibility. We report the development of Robot Scientist "Adam," which advances the automation of both. Adam has autonomously generated functional genomics hypotheses about the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and experimentally tested these hypotheses by using laboratory automation. We have confirmed Adam's conclusions through manual experiments. To describe Adam's research, we have developed an ontology and logical language. The resulting formalization involves over 10,000 different research units in a nested treelike structure, 10 levels deep, that relates the 6.6 million biomass measurements to their logical description. This formalization describes how a machine contributed to scientific knowledge.

1 Department of Computer Science, Aberystwyth University, SY23 3DB, UK.
2 Cambridge Systems Biology Centre, Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge, Sanger Building, 80 Tennis Court Road, Cambridge CB2 1GA, UK.
3 Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences, Aberystwyth University, SY23 3DD, UK.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: rdk{at}aber.ac.uk

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)