Innovative machine could accelerate discoveries in structural biology, drug design

Alexander Barnes and his colleagues are in the midst of a protracted and laborious experiment whose goal to discover how one biological molecule interacts with another. They recently measured a distance of about 0.00000002 inch between two atoms in their target. Admittedly, that's a tiny distance but it took 918,000 scans and 42 days of instrument time to gauge it. What could possibly justify this kind of time?