Or: "If I call A 5, B 4, and C 3, then what do I call D?"

As a scientist (working on cancer, no less), more than just churning through terabytes of data, it strikes me that THESE sorts of questions are the ones you'll need to be able to answer. There's also a lot of "reading between the lines" you'll need to do, and a lot of "small pattern extrapolation". For example, the drug candidate I'm working on is one of a family of about let's say, 16 known compounds. All of them kill cancer cells, fourteen are cardiotoxic. The two that are not, lack a single oxygen atom. Maybe that oxygen atom lets the molecule block the mitochondrion (sort of important for heart cells)? Why? Because the molecule family looks sort of like Coenzyme Q10 - if you use your imagination and remember some of your chemical reactivity rules from Grad-level Ochem - and supplementation of Q10 alleviated the cardiotoxicity in one study on rats for one of the molecules.

Ultimately, my previous boss was bold enough to latch onto that and give it a shot - can we take this molecule that is the most potent of the group (but unfortunately cardiotoxic), delete the homologous oxygen atom and make something that still works and is less cardiotoxic?