Goodfellow's unit has so miniaturized the mass screening of such compounds that machines now replicate the countless experiments in pinhead-size droplets--1, 536 tiny wells on envelope-size plates--a process that formerly took humans untold man-hours.
In 2009 and 2010 it failed to find a single deserving candidate, and in 2011 it did so only by venturing offshore to award it to Pedro Pires, the outgoing president of the pinhead-size islands of Cape Verde.