On the University of Glasgow campus, past a 17th-century entry gate, a grungy brick building houses the laboratory of the Regius professor of chemistry. Not much has changed since the first titleholder was appointed by King George III in 1818. Experiments are still conducted in glass flasks — although now by students in T-shirts and jeans.
Strolling through the building in a sporty tweed jacket and khakis, the current Regius professor proclaims that everything will soon be different. “In any physics or biology lab, there’s automation,” Lee Cronin tells me. “In chemistry, it’s all still done by hand.” Opening the door to an unoccupied room where chemical reactions are bubbling beneath a janky robotic scaffold, Cronin reveals that the automation of chemistry is already underway, with a goal set on far more than industry efficiency.
Cronin has devoted his career to repositioning chemistry as a 21st-century science. Since arriving at the university as a 29-year-old lecturer in 2002, he has built a 65-member research group, one of the largest in chemistry, funded with a budget close to $5 million per year. Roughly half of these resources have been funneled into the development of a “chemputer” — Cronin’s fanciful name for a computer-driven automated chemistry lab. Beyond the potential for his chemputer to custom-build specialized pharmaceuticals for personalized medicine, Cronin wants to chemputerize his field. He believes it’s the only way to successfully address two of the greatest outstanding challenges in science: to discover the origin of life, and to advance artificial intelligence by making a machine as intelligent as the human brain.
In his mind, these problems are related, because life and intelligence both emerged from prebiotic chemistry. Finding the chemical transitions that led from basic matter to Homo sapiens will require more experiments than what can realistically be achieved by a pair of hands pouring liquids into flasks. The scope of his work is compelling enough that the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) supports one of his projects. The Templeton Foundation also awarded a $2.9 million grant to Cronin and several colleagues to figure out how life began. And he’s shrewd enough to know how to supplement this money by simultaneously developing practical applications for his chemputer.
