Combinatorial chemistry and molecular diversity approaches to scientific inquiry andnovel product research and development (R&D) have exploded in the 1990s. For example,in the preparation of drug candidates, the automated, permutational, and combinatorialuse of chemical building blocks now allows the generation and screening of unprecedentednumbers of compounds. Drug discovery - better, faster, cheaper! Notably, more compoundshave been made and screened in the 1990s than in the last 100 years of pharmaceuticalresearch combined, and new drug candidates are possibly for the first time makingtheir way into clinical development pipelines in a more efficient way.