Science Can Take a Backseat to Labor
- More time is spent on manual labor than on all the intellectual aspects of science combined. Instead of high value hypothesis generation, experimental design, and data analysis, precious time is devoted to:
- Procuring supplies and instrument access
- Preparing standard solutions, buffers, and other required material
- Receiving and preparing samples
- Coordinating with other experimentalists
- Cleaning, disassembling, and otherwise restoring equipment
- Mastering new experimental techniques and unfamiliar instrumentation
- Debugging faulty equipment
- Aggregating, cleaning, and preparing data for analysis
- Innovative ideas often require a great deal of labor to execute, favoring well-funded teams over those with the most ambition
- The physical effort involved in lab work creates a barrier to scientific exploration because it is incredibly labor-intensive to pursue new research initiatives
- Training or capital investments often present too large of a barrier to incorporating new workflows
Science is in the Driver’s Seat
Focus on the science
- Scientists spend their time designing experiments, analyzing and interpreting experimental results, and focusing on new ideas
- Experiments are executed automatically on-demand and are controlled entirely using software — no physical labor involved
- Scientific talent can conceive of, remotely execute, and analyze data from more experiments (3x to 5x) than in a conventional setting
- Scientists working on ECL have historically processed over 50,000 samples per year per person
- Experiments run nonstop, even while you sleep and on the weekends; facility operates 24/7/365
- Organizations using cloud labs do more with the same, with documented productivity improvements in the 300% to 700% range
Increased throughput through automation
Greater interdisciplinary collaboration
- Break down barriers between disciplines by making all the instrumentation available to everyone on the system
- Methods transfer seamlessly between groups, protocols are repeated at the push of a button
- ECL stocks frequently used materials
- Easily place and track external orders anytime
Inventory and resources managed automatically
