[schwabacher]

People did ask these things though. If you search pub med there are hundreds of papers on HDL, LDL, and their interactions with other molecules. The bet Pfizer made may not even have been a bad bet, just an unlucky one. And now we know a little bit more about HDL and it's effect on cholesterol.

Human biology is an extremely complex, chaotic system. Just because we don't know everything about it yet, that doesn't mean we will never understand it, or that we are not making progress.

You have a good point about finding ways to look at multiple causes and effects at the same time. There is some very cool work using machine learning techniques like clustering and SVMs on transcriptomic/proteomic data to try to understand relationships between genes. I would be very surprised if they don't have people doing this at Pfizer, but maybe having a few more could have helped them in this case.