At the time they announced the full genome sequence I was an intern in molecular biology. We had a thermocycler in the lab and I had to book my slot on a paper agenda. I remember this portrait of him in front of multiple racks each plenty of thermocyclers. He taught me something about scale and he proved that sometimes it's worth looking at what you have and ask what if I could 200x this. In software this might seem obvious with GPU arrays etc.. but when you are trained in a wet lab and the instrument paper agenda, I wonder if we could have more breakthroughs in life sciences if we could use some bruteforce now and then. RIP
I'm a statistician. My wife does basic (biological) science. Almost every time she asks my advice on an experiment I want to tell her to 10x the sample size. But the academic community has certain ideas about how big sample sizes should be, and trying to use radically larger samples runs into all sorts of barriers ranging from ethics concerns (for animal experiments) to funding.
At the end of the day there's only so much you can learn from a sample size of 12. I'm not sure it's more ethical to have a bunch of wasted experiments with 12 mice each where you don't learn anything than to use 100 mice and actually have statistical power to identify something other than the hugest effect sizes.