WHEN the lottery balls fall, anyone who’s bought a ticket can’t help willing the outcome to match their numbers. The reality is that the odds are heavily stacked against any particular combination coming up. In Britain’s Lotto, for example, players pick six numbers between 1 and 49, so the chance of any given ticket hitting the jackpot is about 1 in 14 million.
Chemistry has a lottery of its own: finding new medicines. Organic chemists in the pharmaceuticals industry synthesise vast numbers of new molecules in the hope that one of them will become a blockbuster drug. But the odds are stacked against them. Only one…
