A Machine With a Mind of Its Own

For a machine that's changing the world, the device on the lab bench in front of me doesn't look very impressive – it just goes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. A contraption about the size of a human hand moves from side to side along a track. At the far right end of its trajectory, a proboscis-like pipette pecks into a foil-covered plastic container and sucks up some liquid; the hand moves a foot or so to the left, and the pipette squirts out the liquid a few drops at a time onto a rectangular plastic platter covered with an array of 96 tiny depressions. Then it repeats the routine. Whirr, plunge, suck, whirr, plunge, squirt – a mechanical counterpoint to the cries of the seagulls outside the lab in this Welsh coastal town of Aberystwyth.