I imagine a lot of bench-bound chemists sat up and took notice when they read a paper in Science (324, 85–89; 2009) reporting a robot system that can make discoveries without human input at all. Derek Lowe wrote on In the Pipeline (http://bit.ly/chU2Y) that the robot, called Adam, was “set up to look for similarities in yeast genes whose function hadn't yet been assigned, and then [...] set up experiments to test the hypotheses thus generated”. Adam could then follow up on these results and discovered a new three-gene pathway. Lowe doesn't expect to be replaced as a medicinal chemist by a robot just yet, but can see a future where Adam's descendants can do a lot of the work. Many of the comments on the post have an air of scepticism, based on past experience of other advances that were going to render medicinal chemistry obsolete. As one person remarked “When the fever cools, we're still at work, but with a new tool.

Whether robots do take over the lab or not, Jean-Claude Bradley at Useful Chemistry (http://bit.ly/2JEWQD) thinks that machine-driven science will help to remove the human ego from science. He fears that researchers can “procrastinate doing certain experiments for fear of not liking the outcome” — a problem robots are unlikely to suffer from. Interestingly, he was led to discuss this after reading a book about Luca Turin, The Emperor of Scent, whose theory about the mechanism of the sense of smell was highly controversial. Turin suggested that the nose detects different vibrational modes and that isotopically enriched molecules should smell different from their normal counterparts — can you tell the difference between CHCl3 and CDCl3?

Finally, to celebrate ten years since the song 'Wear Sunscreen' hit the charts, David Bradley at Sciencebase (http://bit.ly/25uA3i) reminds us that “Everybody's free... to wear goggles” — advice certainly worth listening to.