New Delhi, March 10 -- PATRICK SCHWAB is not your normal pharmaceutical researcher and his workplace is not your normal pharmaceutical laboratory. It has neither benches nor bubbling liquids. White lab coats are absent, too. Instead, Dr Schwab is dressed entirely in black. But that is fitting attire for one whose workplace is in King's Cross, an area that was once railway yards and industrial buildings but has now, after a makeover, become one of London's most achingly trendy districts.

Dr Schwab works for GSK, a drug company. His job is to reimagine the future of drugmaking using that similarly trendy branch of computer science, artificial intelligence (AI). He is applying this to transferring as much of the load as possible from glassw...