Nature robot chemist paper corrected, but some questions remain unanswered

The prominent scientific journal Nature has corrected a highly cited study about a robot designed to synthesize entirely new materials from scratch, but critics say their concerns haven’t been fully addressed.The Nature study, published in November 2023, attracted significant media attention because it claimed that an autonomous laboratory, dubbed the A-Lab, successfully synthesized 43 new materials in 17 days. At the time, concerned readers pushed back against the study, suggesting that the materials weren’t actually unique. Notably, a 2024 critique by University College London solid-state chemist Robert Palgrave and colleagues found that the materials created by A-Lab, which is housed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, already exist in the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database—contradicting the Nature study’s claims about novelty. Palgrave told C it did so on Jan. 19. A retraction may not be necessary now, Palgrave says. “They do clarify quite a few things in the correction,” such as fixing previous claims about the robot’s producing entirely new materials. The tweaked study says the materials are not necessarily new to science. Although the paper is now less interesting, Palgrave says, it isn’t so flawed that it needs to be withdrawn.But Palgrave contends that the study authors didn’t address concerns about the failure of their model to predict real-world random arrangements of particles. “They didn’t really engage with that point,” he says. “That’s a bit disappointing, because that’s