I love the stories of how various artificial sweeteners were discovered. Every single one was found by someone accidentally (or intentionally...) tasting some r

I love the stories of how various artificial sweeteners were discovered. Every single one was found by someone accidentally (or intentionally...) tasting some random chemical from a lab. This leads to some interesting questions: How many random chemicals did scientists accidentally ingest for every artificial sweetener discovered? It must be quite a lot, and many of those must have been quite dangerous. Would we have artificial sweeteners at all if people practiced decent lab safety? Could we massively speed up the discovery of future sweeteners and similar things, by intentionally exposing people to as may random chemicals as possible? Ideally after verifying they are at least probably safe in a very small quantity for tasting. I'm guessing that wouldn't be legal.