Ginkgo Bioworks Automates Biology Lab With AI and Robots, Raising Biosecurity Concerns

Ginkgo Bioworks operates an autonomous laboratory in a building overlooking Boston harbor where robots perform experiments on pharmaceutical, agricultural and government contracts. Four graduate students from MIT founded the company approximately 19 years before 2026 to replace human lab workers with robots after concluding that programming cells would be more important than programming computers, Jason Kelly said.

Early potential investors showed little interest.

Kelly and his co-founders lived on ramen and bought equipment on eBay while trying to raise venture capital. In 2014 Kelly read a blog post by Sam Altman about automating biotechnology and later spoke with him about the difficulty of securing funding after five years of operation. Robots at the facility resemble one-armed machines encased in glass.

A large screen displays a color-coded schedule of experiments and each robot's daily tasks. A track resembling an oversized toy train set moves equipment between stations while scientists use AI to convert experimental designs into robot instructions. Current projects include engineering microbes for improved fertilizer and creating proteins that produce snow or ice.

Kelly said the company conducts a significant amount of pharmaceutical research and pointed to a petri dish containing live cells being transported between robots. Reshma Shetty, another founder, collaborated with OpenAI to test whether ChatGPT could design a protein. The model produced a synthesis recipe that a robot then executed.

The project achieved a 40 percent reduction in costs compared with human work and completed more than 30,000 experiments in six months, Shetty said. Ginkgo Bioworks published the results, though the paper has not been peer reviewed. Shetty said the change has altered how she designs experiments.