For those with the most money – the drug companies – the impulse to feed these problems into the latest and fastest technologies is irresistible. As one report puts it: ‘Automation, systematisation and process measurement have worked in other industries. Why let a team of chemists and biologists go on a trial and error-based search of indeterminable duration, when one could quickly and efficiently screen millions of leads against a genomics-derived target, and then simply repeat the same industrial process for the next target, and the next?’
