Low-Hanging Fruit in Automating Biology

When I say engineering, I mean Engineering™: building fault tolerant systems that lay foundations of abstraction for the recursive building of more systems. In drug discovery and development we care about moving a system from one state to another. In an organism suffering from illness we would like interventions that push the system to health. Success is measured in our ability to do so and not in the intellectually stimulating addition of new nodes to our system. There are many ways of trying to discover and/or build interventions that achieve this, but because we lack exact knowledge of the system, we must test our proposed intervention on a system and attempt to measure the effect it has in moving the system state. We understand it so poorly that ethically we can't test on the desired system but on systems that maybe, fingers crossed, tell us about what the intervention will do. While there are new systems their ability to generalize to humans has been unimpressive, unknown, or a failure.