Fascinating stuff you are doing. Your first sentence "living organisms are nature's machines" is a dramatic one that caught my interest right off the bat. I am writing a paper to give a better answer to Erwin Schrodinger's question What Is Life? Like you, I came to the conclusion that living organisms are machines. They are not just like machines, they are machines. That is what life is.
Hi Alex, great article. A couple things I should mention. First, it’s “ginkgo bioworks” . I believe you misspelled it throughout. Pacific Northwest National lab recurved one of their RAC systems for anaerobic microbial phenotypic as part of a move toward laboratory automation. I agree with the need for automation to validate designed proteins. That is the hard and time consuming part. The last thing, why depend on X-ray crystallography for solving structures? Cryo EM has come a long way and can solve many structures in a single sample. Love that you stressed trust. I’m on a panel next week discussing the intersection of AI and autonomy in biology and that is definitely a theme!
David, thank you for your kind words and identification of that typo - oops!
I read about PNNL's acquisition of Ginkgo's RACs - that is SO exciting! I'd tried to kickstart automated lab work at Sandia, but didn't get LDRDs and eventually moved on to advise the NIH Office of the Director. Autobio tech is so valuable for the broader market, as well as the national labs. I believe in autobio so strongly I'm currently building a biotech company on lab automation. I think this is the future and the right mix of commercial, policy, academic, and federal contractor developments could leverage this technology to dramatically improve US strategic competitiveness in biotech and pharmaceutical production.
I hope we get to chat sometime about this and related technology. Good luck on your panel - you're going to kick butt - and cool to hear about Cryo EM advancements!
What intrigues me here is the possibility that automation won’t just accelerate biology—it might quietly reshape what kinds of questions get asked at all.
If autonomous labs excel at exploring vast, well-defined experimental spaces, do we risk drifting toward problems that are easy to formalize while neglecting the messy, conceptual leaps that historically drove the biggest breakthroughs? In other words, could the very tools that expand our reach also narrow our imagination?
I’m curious whether you see autonomy as ultimately amplifying scientific creativity, or subtly selecting for a different style of science altogether.
This piece really made me think about the profound insights in treating living organisms as nature's machine, thank you for sharing your perspective. How far do you believe this paradigm can truly take us in understanding life itself?
It’s a useful analogy. It may help other people intuit what they learn about how living systems work and it may help biologists find relevant fields of mathematics (e.g. control theory for systems biology). I never hold the reigns too tightly on any analogy, but still love exploring with them so long as I remain open to the true nature of life that may even defy words (until we make new ones to capture it)
Hamnet has some lessons to help ground these expressions of telos that you simultaneously inspire and deride.
Watch it, and watch it well.
The groan of birth, the gift of mud...there are things in the moss of life that defy automation and are spontaneous to the point, at the point and beyond the point of Wonder.
Fascinating stuff you are doing. Your first sentence "living organisms are nature's machines" is a dramatic one that caught my interest right off the bat. I am writing a paper to give a better answer to Erwin Schrodinger's question What Is Life? Like you, I came to the conclusion that living organisms are machines. They are not just like machines, they are machines. That is what life is.
Hi Alex, great article. A couple things I should mention. First, it’s “ginkgo bioworks” . I believe you misspelled it throughout. Pacific Northwest National lab recurved one of their RAC systems for anaerobic microbial phenotypic as part of a move toward laboratory automation. I agree with the need for automation to validate designed proteins. That is the hard and time consuming part. The last thing, why depend on X-ray crystallography for solving structures? Cryo EM has come a long way and can solve many structures in a single sample. Love that you stressed trust. I’m on a panel next week discussing the intersection of AI and autonomy in biology and that is definitely a theme!
David, thank you for your kind words and identification of that typo - oops!
I read about PNNL's acquisition of Ginkgo's RACs - that is SO exciting! I'd tried to kickstart automated lab work at Sandia, but didn't get LDRDs and eventually moved on to advise the NIH Office of the Director. Autobio tech is so valuable for the broader market, as well as the national labs. I believe in autobio so strongly I'm currently building a biotech company on lab automation. I think this is the future and the right mix of commercial, policy, academic, and federal contractor developments could leverage this technology to dramatically improve US strategic competitiveness in biotech and pharmaceutical production.
I hope we get to chat sometime about this and related technology. Good luck on your panel - you're going to kick butt - and cool to hear about Cryo EM advancements!
What intrigues me here is the possibility that automation won’t just accelerate biology—it might quietly reshape what kinds of questions get asked at all.
If autonomous labs excel at exploring vast, well-defined experimental spaces, do we risk drifting toward problems that are easy to formalize while neglecting the messy, conceptual leaps that historically drove the biggest breakthroughs? In other words, could the very tools that expand our reach also narrow our imagination?
I’m curious whether you see autonomy as ultimately amplifying scientific creativity, or subtly selecting for a different style of science altogether.
Good read. Ginko just released this post regarding their collab with OpenAI. Fascinating... https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-lowers-protein-synthesis-cost/
Here's the full paper from OpenAI: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/5a12a3bc-96b7-4e07-9386-db6ee5bb2ed9/using-a-gpt-5-driven-autonomous-lab-to-optimize-the-cost-and-titer-of-cell-free-protein-synthesis.pdf
This piece really made me think about the profound insights in treating living organisms as nature's machine, thank you for sharing your perspective. How far do you believe this paradigm can truly take us in understanding life itself?
It’s a useful analogy. It may help other people intuit what they learn about how living systems work and it may help biologists find relevant fields of mathematics (e.g. control theory for systems biology). I never hold the reigns too tightly on any analogy, but still love exploring with them so long as I remain open to the true nature of life that may even defy words (until we make new ones to capture it)
Extremely cool
Alex, do you agree that there is an overlap in the Biostrategic Domain here as per
Will Douglas Heaven's article?
https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/01/12/1129782/ai-large-language-models-biology-alien-autopsy/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=tr_social&utm_campaign=NL-WhatsNext&utm_content=01.27.26
Exploring where your work here fits in the emerging tech profile of concerns.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7412815459139391488?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28activity%3A7412815459139391488%2C7422066348165378050%29&dashCommentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_comment%3A%287422066348165378050%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7412815459139391488%29
Great to hear your Mum is well.
Hamnet has some lessons to help ground these expressions of telos that you simultaneously inspire and deride.
Watch it, and watch it well.
The groan of birth, the gift of mud...there are things in the moss of life that defy automation and are spontaneous to the point, at the point and beyond the point of Wonder.