In The Lab Of The Future, Robots Run Experiments While Scientists Sleep

Ben Miles may be one of the last scientists to handle a pipette. While completing a chemical biology Ph.D. in London two years ago, he read about a California-based company called Transcriptic that had a robotic cloud laboratory. So he signed up and wrote code to run synthetic biology experiments remotely from a coffee shop. He even traveled -- including a trip to Vienna -- while monitoring experiments on a laptop. "I would wake up the next morning and had my results," he says.