[polyfractal]

At my last wet-bench lab, I was responsible for dissecting and culturing cortical neurons. Sounds cool, right?

The dissection day protocol took 5 hours, start to finish. The largest gap was about 15 minutes as samples trypsonized in a water bath. I could sneak out to the bathroom or grab a snack during this period. The rest of the time was spent stacking, unstacking, pipetting, sloshing, scraping, mixing various liquids inside of sterile bio-safety cabinet.

Every wednesday I would perform this identical protocol and effectively space out for 5 hours at a time, listening to podcasts. Sometimes I would just dream about a robot doing my job. Much of my other duties during the week revolved around these little culture dishes. Neurons require a pretty obnoxious feeding schedule.

I was effectively being paid 30k a year to be a robot. A single purchase of 30k would have saved my lab a lot of money, since it would have replaced me as a tech.

I considered starting a business trying to sell robots to do just this, but decided I didnt have enough robotics knowledge to do it, or capital to start.

Best wishes to these guys!