Kelly, Ginkgo Bioworks' CEO, is making the case for "lights out" autonomous labs, using an analogy between subways (fully automated, totally inflexible) and cars (manual, endlessly variable). His claim is that the money in pharma R&D is in the manual bench, not the robot cell, and that automating it would price experiments at the cost of reagents. Ginkgo announced the same day that it is building autonomous labs for MIT, Caltech, Northwestern and Maryland.
Or not, though. Like you could control that too, but like, sure, it could, right? Okay. Now, here's the other thing, though. Miles traveled, cars and trucks versus subways. Any guess in the United States what the split is?
I'm sure it's probably like five and 95%.
99% cars and trucks. 99, 99 in human miles travel. Not because we don't know about trains, okay? But because we need variability, like we need it. Okay. All right. So now let us go to the lab. All right. Same graph, low variability, high amount of automation. We actually have subways in the lab. We call them automation work cells. And if you've ever seen, like if you're at a pharma company somewhere in a basement somewhere guarded by a bunch of automation people is an arm and it's moving plates through your high throughput screening system to hit a bunch of chemicals against cancer cells and see if you could pull a needle out of a haystack to discover a new drug. All right. Or if you've been to a diagnostic facility, you might have seen automated systems doing clinical diagnostics over and over again. Same test. It is great. It is fully automated. It can run overnight. No people, no mistakes, okay, that people make at the bench, but you got to want to do the same experiment that you did yesterday. It is totally inflexible. Low amount of automation, high amount of variability over here, the car. We have that. It's called the lab bench and the manual lab. And it is PhD scientists…
Yeah. No, I would, I did pharma RD. I was at JNJ and GSK at a huge laboratory and there was like five of us. We had pretty much like a whole building and there was like 20 humans in there and there's so much space. There was very big laboratory equipment like the LCMS and things like that took up…
Okay. So what we're, when I say autonomous lab, I'm not trying to replace the work cells, the subways at all. I think they're fine. Go buy them thermal cells and high-res sells them, bioServe, these like automation companies. Go buy them from wherever you buy them from. I'm trying to replace the…
So what is your car then? Are they robotic arms or are they actual pieces of equipment? And I have seen videos, so I'm just doing this for our listeners.