Down the food chain

important role in developing new treatments for fungal diseases such as athlete’s foot. “Fungi have a different mechanism from that of animals to produce lysine,” the reporter explained, “so if a drug can be developed that can disable the gene, it should be possible to treat people for fungal diseases without affecting their ability to make lysine”. The writer was presumably unaware that lysine is one of the nine essential amino acids, so named because the human body cannot make them. The Independent’s headline was one of several that skirted around scientific and philosophical caveats by announcing: “Robot scientists can think for themselves.” Adam was able, the story ran, to formulate theories and discover scientific knowledge on his own, marking a major advance in the field of artificial intelligence. “Such robo-scientists could be put to work unravelling complex biological systems, designing new drugs, modelling the world’s climate or understanding the cosmos.” Science itself was rather cool in introducing the paper and another in which a Cornell University group revealed “an algorithm that substitutes a combination of brute force and mathematical strategies to solve a problem that challenges Boost: Adam got more profile as Honda’s ASIMO robot was on show in the UK at the time. (Photo: Jae C. Hong/AP/PA Photos.) human reasoning”. It began with one question mark (“Intelligent Machines?”) and continued with another: “How can we make sense out of the enormous volume of scientific data that is now being generated, and would a robot be able to replace a research assistant, postdoc or even the principal investigator in a biological laboratory?” Without any way minimising the achievement, the Financial Times, under the heading “Robot achieves scientific first”, was the only newspaper to hint at the variety and depth of assistance Adam received from his/its human collaborators. “The researchers endowed Adam with a huge database of yeast biology, automated hardware to carry out experiments, supplies of yeast cells and lab chemicals and powerful artificial intelligence software,” Clive Cookson wrote. “Although they did not intervene directly in Adam’s experiments, they did stand by to fix technical glitches, add chemicals and remove waste.” The outcome was a series of “simple but useful” discoveries, confirmed by scientists, about genes for certain yeast enzymes. Unsurprisingly, none of the reports explained that Adam had to be fed with a comprehensive logical model encoding knowledge of yeast metabolism, a bioinformatic database of genes and proteins, software to adduce hypotheses about genes for orphan enzymes, software to deduce experiments to test the observational consequences of the hypotheses, software to design and plan experiments, laboratory automation software to execute the experiments and record the data, software to analyse the data and metadata, and software to relate the analysed data to the hypotheses, including statistical methods to decide on significance. BBC News Channel website added an important rider, a comment from an independent expert that Adam was “more like a junior lab assistant than a scientist”. But it also pointed out that King and his team are now developing a more advanced robot, Eve, to help in drug discovery. Will she prove to possess genuine intuition?