technology & innovation

Technology in labs: where will IT take us?

The manufacturers of key laboratory equipment have forever
looked for new means to improve and differentiate their
equipment. A key means for achieving this has been, for
example, labour-saving technologies such as higher throughput
lab equipment and automated sample loading and unloading.
In clinical and industrial test labs where high volumes of
standard testing are the primary function, there already exists
very high degrees of automation and short cycle time testing.
The higher revenues in this sector have allowed equipment
manufacturers to invest heavily into product development to
create these customer benets. R&D labs have beneted from
these technology upgrades by a trickle-down effect.
The introduction of labour-saving automation and highthroughput technologies in labs is nowhere near complete but I
would suggest that we are not at some point where there will
be a sudden surge in new automation or increased throughput
equipment. The transition in labs away from manual labour
towards higher-throughput and automated equipment has been
and will remain a steady process.
An interesting transition that is going on right now is the
repurposing of newly available and now very cheap IT
technologies smartphone apps, wireless data connection to
equipment, cloud data storage and analysis, crowdsourcing and
others for application in the labs. In July 2014, for example, I
reviewed a number of new smartphone and web-based apps that
aim to radically improve lab productivity related to data capture
and analysis.
My view is that there will be a rush of newly available IT
products for lab use in the next decade. Critical to this trend is
the relatively low cost of developing these products; all that is
required is the re-engineering and re-purposing of existing IT
technologies, providing an attractive return on investment in
new product development.
The result of this uptake in IT technologies in the labs will
probably be fairly neutral to employment but it may be
accompanied by an increasing fraction of lab workers looking at
computer screens. Also I would note that some of these screenfacing employees may not be local to the lab, or even to
Australia.
After all, the point of many IT technologies is to remove
employment where possible, to increase productivity on labour,
and to disconnect the place of labour from a physical location
of high capital equipment investment (e.g. a lab). Whether or
not we agree that this results in good outcomes is hardly the
point this is a trend that seems virtually unstoppable.
On the larger issue of the outlook for employment in the
labs of Australia, ponder this press release (bit.ly/1HtbhBN): A
lack of skills in Science, Technology, Engineering and
Mathematics (STEM) in the current and emerging workforce is
holding back Australias economy. A recent survey by AIG

34 |

Chemistry in Australia

[bit.ly/1Qr3A12], which spoke to 300businesses across the

country, found nearly half were having difculty recruiting
technicians and trade workers with STEM skills.
I believe that STEM is a case of a false grouping. Theres IT
and there is the sciences (including mathematics in Australian
universities) and the non-IT engineering studies and these
should not be grouped together in the context of policy
development.
The real issue is that businesses are having trouble hiring IT
workers at reasonable cost because these graduates are in such
demand. If you subtract IT types from STEM and re-polled all
those businesses, they would likely answer we hardly need any
of them (science graduates and old-school engineers) and when
we do there is no issue nding them.
One result of pushing STEM education is that we have
graduates in the sciences who study for years and ultimately are
forced to seek employment outside of their elds of expertise.
We are already training way too many scientists and it makes
no sense to double down on this problem. Also, underemployment in the sciences puts downwards pressure on
salaries, which will likely lower the quality of candidates
entering undergraduate science.
We are in the digital age and the relative demand for
scientists will likely continue to decline over the next few
decades. On the other hand, we wont be able to train enough
IT graduates.
I am sure that tertiary educators know that a large
percentage of both undergraduates and postgraduates in the
sciences will not get jobs in their chosen eld and will end up
elsewhere. They may be able to justify this by assuming that
the rigour of training in the sciences will successfully enable
these graduates to retrain and succeed in many other career
paths.
However, I am not sure that graduates facing large HECS
debts would view the situation with the same indolence.
Surprisingly there is no readily available information on how
many graduates get jobs in their eld of training. The primary
source of information for people entering tertiary training, the
Graduates Careers website (www.graduatecareers.com.au), is
sadly lacking in readily available access to this critical
information. This urgently needs to be addressed.
I would suggest that the biggest impact on employment in
the labs of Australia will not be the introduction of new
technology. The overtraining of employees for this sector is a
more immediate issue.
Ian A. Maxwell (maxwell.comms@gmail.com) is a serial (and
sometimes parallel) entrepreneur, venture capitalist and Adjunct
Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at RMIT
University and Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Engineering and
Information Technology, UTS, who started out his career as a
physical polymer chemist.

February 2016