Yeah, it's cynical, but understandable. In general, people do not understand the incredibly small scale of what happens at the cellular level or the difficulty of detecting and understanding what goes on at those levels. For example, say the work "protein" and what do you think? Just some generalized idea of some really small biological thing, right? Without the right training, it's hard to imagine that a protein is a family of thousands of differently shaped molecules, which act like lego blocks. Each protein is shaped differently, and can move, fold or bend differently when combined together. They can't be seen in a microscope. Their shapes historically have been worked out by x-ray crystallography and interactions figured out by indirect observation and logical induction.

What I found when I went and studied it was that the tools to see and represent what goes on at that scale of matter are even now fairly basic. To me, it's really amazing that we are as far along as we are. It's a credit to the power of the scientific method that the actions of many diseases and drugs are the result of simple observation of many thousands of many individual cases over time.