Traditionally research chemists carry out four experiments a day, mixing chemicals in bucketlike containers.

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Most research chemists are like generals playing molecular trench warfare, firing out thousands of new compounds in a grueling advance toward the elusive billion-dollar molecule.

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On its face, these cuts, by themselves, represent a departure from one of McKinnell's central ideas: that size matters in a big way, allowing Pfizer to drown out rivals with its sales force, to outbid rivals for research, and to develop more drugs than the competition by virtue of having more chemists.

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Some 34 of the world's leading biologists, physicists, chemists, Earth scientists and computer scientists, led by Stephen Emmott, of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Britain, have spent the past eight months trying to understand how future developments in computing science might influence science as a whole.

ECONOMIST: The scientific method

Zelmac, a chemical discovered in the 1980s by chemists at what is now Novartis, almost didn't make it to the FDA. Clinical research staff balked at large-scale trials, but the drug caught the eye of Novartis Chief Executive Dan Vasella .

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