[Protostome]

There are 3 major flaws in this thesis:

1. The number of synthesizable, drug like molecules is enormous

2. To have a sufficiently powered experiment, you need to run it multiple times

3. Drugs don't work in a vacuum, it also interacts with the specific genetic/epigenetic/proteomic/microbiomic makeup of the organism. You can't really control for all of that.

[timy2shoes]

There's so much more missing that makes me think this is an engineer writing about how biological research should be in theory, without the understanding and experience the complicated nature of biological research. Well, suppose we want to give "every drug, at every dosage, every regiment, and in every combination to a mouse". Well, that's a combinatorially large search space and one reason drug companies focus on high throughput screening of drugs before applying them to mice. Then even for the promising ones you have other effects that will skew your results, like handler effects (e.g. https://www.nature.com/news/male-researchers-stress-out-rode...). If we want to apply the drugs to that many mice, are we only gonna use female mice because males tend to fight and kill each other when placed in the same cage? Then what do we do about the sex skew? Then there's the fact that 96 million years separate humans from mice, which is relatively short in a genetic perspective but not that much from an epigenetic perspective. How well will results translate?

This is just off the top of my head, and I'm not a biologist. I'm sure actual experienced biological researchers can come up with a whole bunch of other issues. Because more often than not biology is whole lot messier than we can imagine.

[stephc_int13]

Agreed, I don't know much about biology but I can see many limitations with this brute-force approach.

We live in a finite world, the infinite monkeys metaphor has no value.