The drug industry problem that DARPA wishes to address is very similar to the challenge I set for myself, and which I articulated in a 2011 TED talk on 3D printing for drugs (1). The problem is analogous to books going out of print in the publishing industry. Prior to the digitization of publishing, you would print a book by setting up a printing press and doing a printing run, but once the stock of printed copies sold out, the book would no longer be available. Similarly, drug manufacture requires constructing a complex and expensive production facility, but the know-how and infrastructure for making the drug is easily lost if, for example, the facility were to be adapted for a different product. This is because the facility is often bespoke. In the laboratory, the fact that some discoveries are done under bespoke conditions often means that it can be hard to understand how to reproduce them. This is part of the reproducibility crisis in chemistry – it is not often discussed , but it can be very hard for laboratories to reproduce each other’s work. This issue of reproducibility, not just in chemistry but in all of science is now actively being discussed. It is a frustrating problem, but then I realized that “digitizing” chemistry could help not only solve the problem, but aid collaboration and further discoveries. This is because the process of digitizing chemistry combines knowledge of both the chemical instructions, the hardware for doing the reaction, and the precise way of executing the instructions complete with analytical data and observation, such that the entire process can be replicated without fail time and time again. I then realized that digitization meant that you wouldn’t need to be a chemist to synthesize chemicals; and then I realized that you wouldn’t even need a human present – the process could be fully automated as long as the system had the required software, hardware and wetware.