The automated lab

up firms say robotics and software that autonomously record every detail of an experiment can transform the efficiency and reliability of research. M ax Hodak has spent much of his academic career fixing the ways that scientists collect data. As a biomedi-cal engineering student at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, it frustrated him that his laboratory recorded its experiments in paper notebooks, leaving researchers to scour through the pages to find relevant data. So in 2008, he indexed all the notebook data on a computer and wrote a program to allow users to query it. " People were saying, 'Why are you wasting your time? That's not going to lead to publication , ' " he recalls. But a year-and-a-half later, he returned to the lab from a stint in Silicon Valley to find that many of those earlier sceptics were now using his system. To Hodak, it was a sign that he should pursue his quest for efficiency in the lab. " I was always more interested in finding ways to do analysis more efficiently than in doing the actual analysis, " he says. Today, a warehouse in California is the living embodiment of Hodak's dream to build an automated lab that conducts experiments and records the results, or what he calls a " biology data centre ". His company, Transcriptic, founded in 2012, is the first of a crop of start-ups of this ilk, all with a similar claim: that advances in software and robot-ics will help to free researchers from manual drudgery, make their data easier to store and query, and ultimately lead to cheaper, more