The explosions in combinatorial synthesis and high-throughput screening have brought the academic and industrial worlds closer together, both in methods and in mindset. New sources of chemical diversity and new technology platforms for biological screening now allow even modest academic laboratories to generate assay data at a rate comparable with some pharmaceutical or biotechnology projects. High-throughput biological assays, long a standard in the pharmaceutical industry, are now making significant progress in basic biological discovery. In the drive to publish results quickly, however, academic screeners risk pitfalls similar to those necessarily inherent to developing commercially viable drugs or lead molecules.