In 2002, the american National Institute of Health (NIH) awarded a significant grant to Harvard University to establish a laboratory for chemical genetics (as part of what is now known as the Initiative for Chemical Genetics). Under the direction of the chemical biology professor Stuart Schreiber, the laboratory aims at screening large libraries of small molecules against all proteins in the genome, with the aim of identifying their biological properties. They also develop synthetic strategies for making complex, diverse and natural-product-like small molecules. ChemBank is a side-product of this initiative. It is a large (possibly the largest) collection of chemical structures and biological activity data for small molecules, available freely on the internet. Their structure database contains currently more than 900,000 compounds.