Are there official-like guidelines regarding chemical discoveries (e.g., drugs) by rational thought, rather than by accident?

Some even very significant discoveries have been accidental, but if science is supposed to be rational, then accidents should be oddities for this if they cannot be quantified.


Are there generally accepted (or official-like) guidelines about what the role of "accidents" are or can be in professional chemistry?


What (for example, tests, procedures, standards, ...) must one fulfill additionally in order to have "accidents" progress into use?




Sticking with the specific example of drug discovery, in the United States, the FDA has two general requirements for approval of a new drug: 1) it must be relatively safe for the consumer and 2) it must be effective at treating something, ie outcomes are more favorable than for patients given a placebo. There is no evaluation of how the drug was identified as potentially useful as a treatment, nor is it even necessary to know how it works. (A well known example of this is lithium treatment for bipolar disorder. It's been used for decades, and there's still a lot of debate about how it works.)


For example, if a company is testing a drug as a potential treatment for high blood pressure, and they notice that all recipients of the drug experienced extra hair growth, they might change course and begin evaluating it as a cure for baldness. If another company developed a competing drug based on decades of study of hair follicle physiology, the two drugs would still face the same evaluation process.


So for the case of drug discovery, there is no additional requirement for the acceptance of "accidental" discoveries.


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Nature of matter is too complex to be fully predictable, so what is not predictable at current chemistry level is discovered accidentally, not being foreseen until encountered.


The first paragraph is incorrect, being rational and making accidental discoveries does not exclude each other. Ability to predict unknown phenomena is rather rare (like prediction of antimatter).


Ability to predict behavior of some molecule within the known is easier.


But all is very case dependent, there is hardly any general approach.




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In several last decades, applying advances of quantum chemistry, there have been developed a screening method of evaluation of various compounds before them being synthetized yet, eliminating the ones not being promising. One of the leading scientists on this field was the late prof. Rudolf Zahradník [Researchgate.net - scientific-contributions 1959-2013](https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/R-Zahradnik-14467505), a former head of the Czech Academy of Science.


In recent years, there are being developed AI powered screening computational methods, based on learn structural patterns of biological objects, organic molecules and their relations and interactions.


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