"I really, really, really, really wanted a robot."

When he was chairman of the department of medicine at Duke University in North Carolina, Dr. Pascal Goldschmidt had a recurring wish.

“I really, really, really, really wanted a robot,” said Goldschmidt, now dean of the University of Miami’s medical school. “Now we have one. We’re the real deal.”

The 9,000 pound robot, the size and shape of a small cargo container with a flat screen monitor tacked to its side, is not as cute as Star Wars’ R2D2. And it goes by a clunky name: The Brooks Life Science Systems A3+ SmaRTStore.

But it can do things Artoo can’t. It can store 500,000 tiny vials stamped with bar codes and filled with DNA samples from genetic studies, sort them, and within minutes of a button’s push pluck out and deliver, say, those 79 samples gathered in Tennessee in 2007. Purpose: to compare the DNA of people with, say, Alzheimer’s disease, to the DNA of healthy people to find the genetic cause of the debilitating malady.

Read more at the Miami Herald.