In our year-long series on the influence of discovery science on the world’s pandemic response, author Susan Reslewic Keatley explores how high-throughput technologies have sped up science in transformative ways. Stepwise tasks once done only by the deft hands of scientists, such as pipetting liquids from one test tube to another, have in recent history been transformed by high-throughput technologies. Now, in the time it takes a researcher to perform one precise action, these technologies can do the same hundreds if not thousands of times. When time is of the essence, as it is during a pandemic, high-throughput technologies unlock a level of speed and scale that was previously unimaginable.