Why We Must Democratize Self-Driving Labs

In the 1990s, the world began talking about the “Digital Divide.” It was a simple, stark reality: those with access to the internet, digital news, and global communication tools moved ahead, while those without were left behind.

Today, we are standing on the precipice of a new, perhaps even more consequential gap: The Self-Driving Lab (SDL) Divide.

Self-driving labs, facilities where AI and robotics work in a closed loop to design, execute, and analyze experiments, are the future of discovery. They promise (and are already doing) to accelerate science discoveries by 10x, 100x, or even 1,000x.

But there is a catch.

Currently, these systems are expensive, proprietary, and incredibly complex. We risk a future where only a handful of elite institutions and massive corporations can “digitalize” their research. The rest of the scientific world? They are left to work manually, at a pace that cannot keep up with the urgent crises of our time.

In fact, we are currently facing a series of “grand challenges” that affect every person on Earth. For example, Clean Energy: Developing the next generation of batteries and carbon-capture materials. Food Security: Creating resilient crops and safe, sustainable food systems. Climate Action: Reversing the damage to our atmosphere and oceans.

If you didn’t recognize them, these are the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and they are essentially a race against time. If only 1% of the world’s laboratories have the tools to work at high speed on these problems, we all lose. We cannot afford to have a million “small islands” of research, each locked away behind closed hardware and proprietary software, unable to talk to one another.

Time and effort are our most precious resources. We cannot waste them on reinventing the wheel in silos.

The mission of our lab over the coming years is to break down these silos. Democratization isn’t just about making things “cheaper”, it’s about a fundamental shift in how scientific tools are built and used.

We are advocating for:

Open Hardware: Robotics and systems that are affordable, openly modifiable, easy to repair, and easy to use.

Open Source Software: A shared digital language for science so that a lab in Tokyo can “send” a physical experiment to a lab in Nairobi via a shared script. This goes hand in hand with the:

Standardization: Moving away from proprietary “black box” systems toward interoperable modules that any labs can use.

We’ve Done It Before

We know this approach works because we’ve lived it. Years ago, we set out to democratize the microfluidic bench. We wanted to make everything, from fabrication to syringe pumps to the microscopes themselves, accessible to everyone.

It wasn’t easy. The “gatekeepers” of traditional science were skeptical. My cornerstone paper on this approach was rejected 7 times. My grant applications were repeatedly turned down.

But we persisted. Today, that “rejected” work has over 350 citations, a Field Weighted Citation Impact of 11 (meaning it has been cited 1000% more times than similar papers), 10.000 views on the instructional YouTube video, and is used worldwide. More importantly, it has empowered researchers who previously couldn’t afford or access these tools to conduct high-level science.

We expect resistance. When you try to move from a “closed, high-profit” model to an “open, accessible” model, you encounter friction from both internal and external.

But we will persist again. Because this isn’t just about technology; it’s about the right to discover. It’s about ensuring that the tools to save our planet are in the hands of as many brilliant minds as possible, regardless of their budget or location.

Open science is the only way forward.

The question is: Are you coming along for this fight? Or Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?

A good review on “cheap” SDL is here

A recent open Flow Chemistry SDL is here

And our review perspective on turning 3D printers into lab robots is here