Question: Have you ever invented any kind of robot?

Enda O'Connell answered on 27 Apr 2020:

I work with robots every day but haven’t had to invent one yet. You can see a picture of my lab robot called ‘Janus’ in my bio (/green-zone/profile/endaoconnell/). It probably doesn’t look like you’d image but it is really useful for the type of work I do with other scientists.

We take thousands of human cells (e.g. cancer cells, stem cells) and add them to little dishes called plates that have 96 or 384 separate compartments called wells. Each well gets about 10,000 cells and a different chemical (e.g. an existing medicine, a toxin, an environmental extract from different species of animals or plants). We can do this for tens of thousands of chemicals at once, each one with its own well and cell population.

Then we look at what happens, either using a microscope or a colour changing dye. If we get an interesting result from a particular chemical (e.g. we kill the caner cell or change the stem cell) then we look at the chemical in more detail and it could become a new medicine or a new use for an existing medicine.

This kind of work can be done by hand, but when looking at lots of chemicals, it can often work out much cheaper, faster and more precise if you automate it with a robot.