We believe the automation of experiment preparation has been neglected for way too long. The old world would have you think that incorporating manual tasks such as buffer and stock solution preparation into your research plans is a necessity – we respectfully disagree. We are about to enter a new world, one in which experiments in their entirety will be automated - starting with the preparation step!
The manual preparation of liquid solutions is already occupying a significant fraction of research time, but increasing automation of experiment conduction and analysis processes is bound to make matters worse. All this time is spent on setting up the experiment – providing no scientific information on its own – whereas it should be spend on actually designing and running experiments.