0.000000000000001 seconds is really fast

A little (or a lot) of tap dancing percussion from Tilly and the Wall in Bad Education.

What do drugs and renewable energy have in common? 

Answer: a growing field of science called femtochemistry. As Philip Hunter details in his article 'Caught in the act' (EMBO reports (2013) 14, 36 - 38), understanding the details of chemical reactions - like those catalyzed by enzymes (potential drug targets) and photosynthetic proteins (solar energy) - requires measuring changes in nanometers (one billionth of a meter, which is ~3 feet for you Americans) on a timescale of one quadrillionth (one thousand billionth) of a second by highly caffeinated scientists using lasers and x-rays.

Ramesh Raskar: Femtophotography - Imaging at a trillion frames per second

That is incomprehensibly fast (hence the caffeine)  but is the level of detail necessary to determine the molecular changes that occur as a protein, or protein complex, efficiently modifies it's substrate. Enzymes allow reactions that would take hours or even years to proceed on their own, to happen in seconds or minutes, controlling most processes of living cells. Diseases can be caused by dysfunctions in human enzymes, or by bacteria/parasites with their own unique enzymes required for survival and infectiousness, making femtochemistry paramount for designing and optimizing drug candidates to target said enzymes.

Another awesome, and potentially world-changing application of this branch of chemistry is to understand the mechanisms of spl

itting water into oxygen and electrons (step 1 of photosynthesis) thus enabling the up-scaling and of this process to provide renewable energy from simply water and sunlight.

This is just the tip of the femto-iceberg, and it may seem like a snail's pace for industry to apply the science being discovered, but just remember that change is happening a billion times faster than the blink of an eye.