I think "design" is being used in a loose sense here. It's not designing an experiment the way that Rutherford designed experiments to probe the nature of an at

I think "design" is being used in a loose sense here. It's not designing an experiment the way that Rutherford designed experiments to probe the nature of an atom. What it's doing is more like selecting an independent variable gene X and a dependent variable enzyme Y, and selecting concentrations of X and reagent Z to mix together to maximize the expectation value of the statistical significance of the level of Y that is measured afterwards. That's using a combination of search algorithms and Bayesian learning to optimize the parameters within a well-defined framework. Then those parameters are hooked up to physical beakers to get more data for the next generation of data. Don't get me wrong, this is an impressive technical achievement, and I think it will do a hell of a lot to speed up the advancement of science in the field of microbiology. My hat is off to these researchers because this little guy they build is totally awesome. I'm just quibbling about what the word "design" does and does not mean in this context. I agree that biologists will still have a role in research labs, and I'm glad that they (or at least a well-funded subset of them) will be freed from the more monotonous details of their trade so that they can work on the more creative, abstract, and "science-y" parts of it[1]. [1] I do not know enough about biology to know what exactly those parts are. I assume they exist, even though I do tend to have the "stamp-collecting" bias against biology[2]. [2] Quote from Ernest Rutherford, mentioned above: "All science is either physics or stamp collecting." I.e., biology is heavy on cataloguing and light on abstractions.