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TECH SIGHT
The 20th century saw the automated teller machine replace the teller at the bank, the vending machine take over from the person behind the snack counter, and electronic switchboard phase out the telephone operators of yesterday. Today, technological devices continue to assume tasks once carried out by humans because they offer major advantages in accuracy, speed, convenience, and cost. At the start of the 21st century, robotic automation is poised to revolutionize laboratory practices.
The development and patenting of the first industrial robot by Unimation, Inc. (1) initiated a technological revolution in robotics that, despite a few fits and starts, has largely paralleled advances in computing. This robot, called the Unimate, was first used for die-casting in 1961. Subsequent improvements in computer control and gradual reductions in the size of robots through industry and the U.S. space program developments during the 1960s and 1970s gave rise to robotic devices that were attractive for clinical laboratory applications.
Compact, microprocessor-controlled robot arms that were user-programmable were introduced in the early 1980s. The Zymark Corporation, founded in 1981, patented a robot arm with interchangeable hands that allowed development of robotic laboratory workstations capable of carrying out programmable multistep sample manipulations. The programmability of these devices allowed them to be adapted to numerous assays and sample-handling approaches. This new generation of robots was quickly applied to preanalytical sample preparation and to potency and stability testing in the pharmaceutical industry. Enterprising clinical laboratory scientists learned to program these systems to perform complex laboratory assays that are labor intensive when carried out manually, such as the estrogen receptor assay (2).
A laboratory formed in the early 1980s by Dr. Masahide Sasaki and his lab technologists at the Kochi Medical School in Japan provided a glimpse of the clinical laboratory of the future: robots carried test tube racks, and conveyor belts transported patient samples to various analytical workstations. Automated pipettors sipped serum from samples for the required assays. At some workstations, one-armed stationary robots performed pipetting and dispensing steps to accomplish preanalytical processing of higher complexity.
Sasaki had built his laboratory with government financial support. Starting with an empty room, he and a staff of 19 technologists designed and fabricated the mobile robot and the conveyor belt system, and...